2024 saw a slight improvement in private equity exits – especially for larger deals. According to our Intelligence Report: Mega Fund Exit Trends 2025, there was a 14 percent increase in exits of PE-backed companies with enterprise values over $1 billion from 2023 to 2024. 

However, PE firms are still making record use of non-exit liquidity events to return capital to LPs for assets that can’t find a traditional suitor.

Secondaries saw a steep rise in popularity, with the asset class raising a record-breaking $91 billion, according to Preqin. According to Victoria Chernykh, an assistant vice president of research insights at Preqin, this included a rise in continuation vehicles. 

“Continuation funds happen to develop now because a challenge in exits remains, in spite of some signs of improvement during 2024, and a consistent revival of the exit environment still remains to be seen,” explained Chernykh.

She continued: “GPs like continuation funds because if they have difficulty exiting, they'd rather continue to manage their investee company until they find a satisfactory exit route and price, stay invested till then and they'll give this latter opportunity to an investor. And investors equally want them to continue to allocate assets rather than taking a small profit and then reallocate their capital.”

It’s tempting to assume that all assets that couldn’t be exited and had to be rolled into a secondaries vehicle weren’t “exitable” in the traditional sense due to underperformance in value creation. However, according to Chernykh, that’s not the case.

“I wouldn't say [exits in 2024] were [only] the best-performing companies. I think these were the ones that could negotiate the price satisfactory for their managers,” she said.

Nevertheless, plenty of GPs did use continuation funds to hide their less-than-stellar assets. And, according to Chernykh, exactly which companies those are may soon be brought to light.

“GPs, they want to have that possibility to stay within the continuation funds,” she explained. “But you cannot continue like this forever. Sometimes you need to report the profit or take the hit.”

And the cracks may already be starting to show. According to our Mega Funds Exit Trends 2025 report, assets that were held the longest – a period of, on average, six years – were more likely to be sold in a sponsor-to-sponsor transaction and at a lower valuation multiple than their peers.

“We saw a lot of mega fund exits in 2024 that weren’t wild success stories,” says Cooper Smith, managing director of Privitas. “PE firms typically like to see the enterprise value of portfolio companies double over the holding period. However, out of the 143 $1B+ exits last year, 51 companies reported less than double growth to their enterprise value over the holding period, with six companies actually reporting a decline.” 

The report is the fourth research report from Privitas, a business intelligence firm for private equity operations, using its proprietary platform. Subscribers can read the full report here. Future reports will tackle portfolio company benchmarks using our proprietary Portco IQ index, as well as sector-specific and cross-industry trends.