Cole Van Nice

What does the "new era" of private equity look like? This week at PEI NEXUS, Bain & Company's Chairman of Global Private Equity Practice Hugh MacArthur recapped the firm's latest Global Private Equity Report. Hugh noted that firms will need to focus on what they do well in a “new era” for private equity. These sentiments echoed much of what Private Wealth Forum speakers, including Arax Investment Partners Founder and CEO Haig Ariyan, Laird Norton Wetherby CIO Ron Albahary, CFA, Ardian Managing Director, US Private Wealth Solutions Ava Mallin, and Citi Wealth Head of Private Equity and Real Estate Jeffrey Locke, shared on stage at PEI. This week's AGM Alts Weekly dives into what a "new era" in private equity might look like, connecting dots and data points from Bain & Company and McKinsey & Company's 2026 reports on the state of the private equity industry. Some key themes defined the takeaways from both reports: ➡️ Returns will not be a dime a dozen: Bain's punchline? "12 is the new 5." ➡️ Megadeals, big questions: 2025 witnessed an increase in global buyout deal value. However, just 13 deals of $10B or more contributed 69% of the growth in 2025, accounting for $274B of the global gain. ➡️ A K-shaped industry: Private equity appears to turning into a K-shaped industry, with “a subset of elite funds [being] on the upswing while everyone else muddles through.” ➡️ No fun in fundraising: McKinsey noted that core, closed-end fundraising has “become more competitive, selective, and time consuming.” ➡️ Continuation nation: There’s been a marked rise in continuation vehicle activity, but only represents less than 10% of exit value. ➡️ Mid-sized deals not so mid: Megadeal activity grabbed the headlines. But deal sizes $1-5B deals grew 29%. Growth in the $1-5B deal size segment could be encouraging for specialist buyout funds. There are some key questions for allocators to grapple with as they think about what private equity might look like in the future. 1️⃣ Do allocators believe public markets will continue to outperform private markets? 2️⃣ Will fundraising bounce back? 3️⃣ Can firms kick value creation into motion? 4️⃣ Are both GPs and LPs ready to handle how investors might look to exit evergreen vehicles? 5️⃣ For LPs, are they finding managers that have an edge? Read on for more👇 This week's Alt Goes Mainstream's AGM Alts Weekly, brought to you by DealsPlus, covers: 🗂️ AGM Index, an index that tracks the leading publicly traded alternative asset managers. 💻 Who is hiring: Senior-level positions from companies Blackstone, KKR, Apollo Global Management, Inc., Ares Management, EQT Group, Blue Owl Capital, Franklin Templeton, Fortress Investment Group, iCapital, Goldman Sachs, Ultimus Fund Solutions, Krilogy, MSCI Inc. Subscribe👇 to see the latest trends & navigate this rapidly changing landscape as alts go mainstream. https://lnkd.in/eRKN25jy

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🦄 $150M to improve tutoring and education globally. Preply just announced a new round, putting the company on a clear trajectory to become an iconic global marketplace. In a world obsessed with fast wins and volatile growth, some companies quietly beat their goals year after year — for more than 6 years in this case (as long as we’ve at Acurio Ventures been partners). A few learnings from this journey, relevant for founders and investors: Pick a growing market with an unsolved problem. 2 out of 8 billion people globally are learning a second language. Despite many options, outcomes are still poor. Our original thesis was simple: if you build the reference platform, everyone who wants to learn will eventually come to you. Category leadership matters. When we backed Kirill Bigai and Dmytro Voloshyn back in 2019 (together with Rob Kniaz), there were dozens of similar startups. Small details showed Preply had already built a superior tutor base and a scalable growth engine. Build a product customers love. Speaking a language and teaching it are very different things. Preply transformed the learning experience by combining a motivated base of +100,000 tutors with tools that actually drive outcomes. Never stop experimenting. Few companies maintain a strong experimentation culture as they scale. Preply’s DNA reminded me of Booking.com — enabling them to execute 10x better than most marketplaces. Great companies turn every change into an opportunity. From riding the post-COVID shift to online learning, to betting early and heavily on AI as Dmytro Voloshyn has excelled at. What once sounded like sci-fi is now reality. Great companies become talent magnets A company maturity can't be addressed only by looking at the revenue, profit or product. I like to see how much better they become at attracting talent and retaining it. Proud that Acurio Ventures made this possible and the WestCap team saw things as bullish as we do and are now supporting the next phase of Preply’s journey. Huge congratulations to the entire Preply team!!

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Big milestone for Firmable. We’ve raised $14m Series A led by Airtree. Sales has moved through a few big waves: intuition-led, CRM-led, data-led. We’re now entering the next one – intelligence-led sales. The opportunity isn’t just better data. It’s turning that data into clear direction and action, without adding more work for sales teams. That’s what we’re building at Firmable: a foundation of trusted external data, layered with intelligence that helps sellers know who to focus on and when. Led by Airtree, this round supports our expansion across Asia and into the US – and accelerates the build-out of AI agents that take the admin work off sales teams so they can focus on what they do best. Proud of the team, grateful to our customers and investors. We’re just getting started. Read the exclusive in the AFR. https://lnkd.in/gr66uknb Leigh Jasper | Tara Salmon | Karthik Venkatasubramanian| Chester Thompson| Chath Widanapathirana

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Sustained ~252–291 GiB/s of HBM memory throughput on H100s under decode load — essentially hitting the hardware roofline. This matters because HBM throughput, not FLOPs, is the real bottleneck in LLM inference. By keeping memory nearly fully saturated, I’ve unlocked far higher efficiency and throughput than standard engines. The result: 0.9–1.36M tokens/sec with ~0.1 ms first-token latency  #AI #LLM #GPURouter #H100 #Inference #CostEfficiency #Innovation #DeepLearning #AIInfrastructure #HighPerformanceComputing NVIDIA AMD OpenAI Google Shilpa Kolhatkar Keith Strier a16z speedrun

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Two weeks ago on Swimming with Allocators, we sat down with David Clark, CIO at VenCap, to talk about what decades of venture data can teach allocators. One takeaway that stood out: discounts don’t matter as much as people think in venture secondaries. Because venture is such a power-law asset class, outcomes are driven by exposure to a few massive winners. Whether a stake is bought at a small discount, or even a premium, often matters far less than the quality of the underlying company and its upside. Great conversation on venture returns, manager selection, and the nuances of how allocators should think about secondary investments. 👇 Link in the comments.

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