• Perella’s private funds advisory group will focus primarily on GP-led deals
• Will advise on deals across private markets asset classes
• Credit secondaries, Europe seen as growth opportunities

The rapid growth of secondaries has fueled advisory consolidation, as investment banks seek acquisitions of specialist boutiques to keep pace with accelerating client demand.

In the latest example, Perella Weinberg acquired GP-led secondaries advisory boutique Devon Park Advisors last year. The deal, which closed in October, created a platform for the New York-based investment bank to enter a market it had long eyed and made strategic sense. “We thought that with our brand, coverage and relationships, we should also be in the secondary market,” Perella CEO Andrew Bednar told Mergermarket.

In a market where clients are increasingly looking for joined-up advisory services, the plan is to marry Devon Park’s secondaries expertise with Perella’s coverage across seven sectors. “We routinely worked with banks that brought certain skills and expertise to bear,” said Jonathan Costello, the founder of Devon Park and now a partner at Perella. “I think that clients sometimes go that route, but they would prefer to have it delivered by one organization.”

The acquisition has transformed Devon Park’s team of 15 advisors into what is now Perella’s private funds advisory group. Led by Costello, the group will advise on both LP-led and GP-led deals, with the latter the primary focus.

Perella sees ample opportunity to deepen the team’s footprint within GP-led secondaries, with the plan to cover the full range of private markets asset classes. Prior to the merger, Devon Park –which was founded in 2021—was also advising on secondaries deals in real estate, infrastructure and private credit, which are all areas where Perella’s roster of 75 partners have existing relationships. “We’re very excited about the product capability which, a couple of months ago, we didn’t have,” Bednar said on the firm’s 3Q25 earnings call, adding that a year earlier the firm had “zero revenue” in this area.

For the first 9 months of 2025, Perella reported revenues of USD 532m, a 18% decrease from a record USD 652.4m for the same period in 2024. It attributed this to “fewer closings in M&A partially offset by increased contribution from restructuring and liability management.”

The Devon Park acquisition will help expand Perella’s coverage of alternative asset managers across multiple asset classes, Bednar also said on the call. On its 2Q25 earnings call, meanwhile, Bednar said that financial sponsors were “historically underrepresented” in Perella’s client base, adding that the Devon Park acquisition would improve that mix.

Looking forward, credit is seen as one key growth area. “When a quality opportunity exists, we see more people coming into the market,” Costello told Mergermarket. “We have a great practice that’s active in that market, so we’re leveraging that team and their relationships and expertise in this space.”

Geographically, the bulk of Perella’s private funds advisory work will be with North American clients, though the firm also sees an opportunity in Europe, which is underserviced by CV advisors relative to North America, according to Bednar. Perella already has an on-the-ground presence in the United Kingdom, France and Germany.

More broadly, Perella’s strategic push into GP-led secondaries comes on the heels of continued market momentum, with transactional activity globally estimated to have surpassed USD 200bn last year. Even as M&A exits pick up steam, the large backlog of unrealized assets held by GPs, and the continued clamor for distributions from LPs, point to sustained growth in GP-led secondaries, with more managers turning to CVs, as Mergermarket has reported.

Perella has been watching the market for several years. The roots of the firm’s tieup with Devon Park date back to the period following the COVID19 pandemic, when sponsors increasingly embraced GP-led secondaries. By 2023, Bednar noted that the strategy was here to stay.

“We started noticing that really high-quality sponsors with really high-quality assets were tapping the CV market and we were seeing the size of that market expand,” he said.