HarbourVest has cut its teeth as a secondaries investor for most of the past two decades. Now, it is building on that track record with a debut fund focused primarily on single-asset continuation vehicles (CVs).

HarbourVest, a Boston-based private assets manager reached a final close of USD 1.1bn last week for its Private Equity Continuation Solutions (PECS) fund. The decision to stand up a dedicated strategy devoted to underwriting single-asset CVs was made in response to the growing opportunity as well as demand from LPs for more dedicated exposure to this asset class, said Valérie Handal, a managing director at HarbourVest based in London.

“We felt that the market reached a stage where there was enough demand from an LP perspective for a dedicated strategy, which would complement an existing private equity portfolio,” Handal told Mergermarket in an interview.

From the perspective of LPs, single-asset CVs may offer reduced risk relative to co-investments or traditional buyouts, given the absence of “new deal” risk taken on these deals, together with the potential for buyout-type returns, said Handal. Combined with the prospect of faster deployment and potentially quicker liquidity, she said that the strategy offers a “very compelling risk-adjusted return” for investors.

HarbourVest has long executed single-asset transactions out of its flagship Dover Street funds and semi-evergreen 40 Act vehicles. Last year saw the sponsor back several single-asset deals pursued by well-known GPs, including New Mountain-backed Azuria Water Solutions and QHP Capital-backed Azurity, as previously reported.

This push into single-asset CV investing comes on the heels of robust growth in secondaries dealmaking. Last year, single-asset deal volume reached USD 52bn, up from USD 32bn in 2024, according to a report by Evercore. Against this backdrop, HarbourVest joins an increasingly crowded space of traditional and emerging secondaries players that have crafted their own single-asset focused strategies to tap this opportunity set.

Handal said HarbourVest’s aim is not only to invest in individual CVs, but to provide a full suite of “flexible capital” to support how a GP continues to support an asset, including traditional cross-fund transfers and other mid-life solutions.

“The PECS Fund is offering us the possibility of adding more scale to the capital solutions that we offer GPs,” she explained. “That’s why we call it a continuation solution fund, which is effectively providing capital for GPs to continue the journey with their strongest performing assets.”

Selectivity remains central, when it comes to choosing individual CV deals. HarbourVest reviewed over USD 75bn worth of deals across more than 160 potential opportunities but invested only USD 2.8bn. Handal declined to disclose an exact deal size PECS would target.

This selectiveness is informed by HarbourVest’s experience investing in private equity funds, structuring GP-leds and co-investing alongside sponsors, which informs its own diligence efforts. This collection of knowledge and experiences feeds into HarbourVest’s conviction, or lack of, in a given sponsor’s CV plans. “We have turned down deals, not for the asset itself, but for the fit between the GP and the asset and the alignment that we ultimately did not think was there,” explained Handal.

The middle market – where much of the adoption of new single-asset CVs is taking place and where HarbourVest has many GP relations –  is the firm’s primary hunting ground. About half of all single-asset CVs completed in 2025 were USD 500m or less, according to Campbell Lutyens.

Although smaller than the Dover Street fund, PECS has the capacity to participate in larger deals by co-investing with fund LPs and tapping HarbourVest’s broader secondaries capital pools, including evergreen and flagship funds.

Together, this scale enables the fund to secure a larger allocation for itself that allows it to better influence transaction terms and secure preferential economics from a lead position.

“We think it’s powerful because that enables PECS to punch above its weight,” said Handal. “You have all these other pools of capital investing in the transaction, and it enables us to come in at scale and lead deals.”