The global private markets landscape is being reshaped by a convergence of forces, including heightened GP consolidation, the rise of private wealth channels and the rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI).

For Jonathan Tétrault, CEO of Sagard Private Equity Solutions (SPES), these three trends represent structural shifts that will redefine the industry over time. “You can debate the speed and the strength, but they are there and will happen,” he told Mergermarket.

Sagard has aligned its strategy squarely behind these trends. Established in 2016 with just USD 400m in capital, the Montreal-headquartered firm has since grown into a multi-strategy platform with USD 46bn in assets under management (AUM). Its operations span private equity, private credit, venture capital and real estate, with over 540 people across 15 offices in North America and Europe.

This evolution has notably been shaped by an expansive M&A strategy.

The PE solutions business that Tétrault oversees is a case in point. The unit – rebranded as SPES last year – houses three separate firms: Greenwich, Connecticut-based Performance Equity Management (PEM), acquired in 2024; French secondaries investor BEX Capital, brought on in 2025; and the private equity operations of Swiss firm Unigestion, purchased this year.

With more than USD 23bn in combined AUM and tentacles across primaries, secondaries, co-investments and VC, the division illustrates Sagard’s approach to building both scale and product breadth as it seeks to develop a leading global private equity solutions platform focused on the mid-market.

“That’s our sweet spot,” said Tétrault, defining the universe as funds ranging from USD 500m to USD 3bn-USD 4bn. “We believe it offers better alpha potential and less performance compression compared to large buyouts.”

All you can eat 

With the Unigestion deal having closed last month, the Geneva-based firm’s PE operations are now being integrated into SPES alongside PEM and BEX.

Sagard’s PE solutions division operates as an integrated platform with a single executive team, while its individual strategies retain a degree of autonomy, maintaining their own teams and investment committees. The component firms benefit from being part of a broader platform, with shared resources around areas such as compliance and IT, as well as Sagard’s global network and fundraising muscle.

The latter was a key selling point for PEM, which had around USD 9bn in AUM, when it sold a stake to Sagard in December 2023. “We could have remained a USD 10bn boutique or be part of a much broader global organization with multiple strategies,” said Jeffrey Reals, a managing director at SPES and a co-founder of PEM.

PEM, which had been running VC and PE strategies for over 20 years through both commingled funds and separately managed accounts for institutional clients and wealth management platforms, had received multiple approaches. However, it was looking for a partner that would provide not only scale but also preserve its operations.

“Some of them didn’t want venture, while a lot were thinking we can improve margins by getting rid of the entire back office,” added Reals. “That helped us to synthesize things.”

For Sagard, the investment in PEM delivered a fund-of-funds, secondaries and co-investment platform. The deal for Nice-headquartered BEX Capital, meanwhile, added specialist expertise in fund-of-fund secondaries. The combination with Unigestion brings scale, both in terms of AUM – to the tune of USD 12.5bn – and geographically, with a European footprint across four core areas: secondaries, directs, emerging managers and climate impact.

Still, for all the added scale, areas of client overlap are limited.

Tétrault noted that prior to the Unigestion combination, the firm had analyzed the top 200 GPs both the Swiss firm and PEM worked with. Just four names appeared on both lists.

“Overnight you give your LPs 2x access in terms of GPs, to do primaries, to do co-invest, to get information and to do secondaries,” he said.

Across SPES, integration is ongoing and expected to be complete by the end of the year, according to Reals. The combined set-up is designed to foster collaboration. For instance, some teams are working out of Sagard’s office in mid-town Manhattan.

The ultimate goal is what Reals described as a “buffet model”, whereby insights and expertise are shared to provide a wide range of solutions to SPES’s GP partners – from co-investments and secondaries to financing options through Sagard’s private credit arm.

“I’m trying to partner with you and offer you capital solutions,” he summarized.

Generational opportunity

As SPES takes shape, it is eyeing the secondaries market as a key vector of growth, especially as GP adoption spreads further down-market in its mid-cap sweet spot.

In particular, VC secondaries are a key focus. “We believe there is a decade of growth and attractive returns going beyond the trophy assets that everyone’s talking about,” said Tétrault.

The opportunity set is inextricably linked to the rampant acceleration of AI and re-rating of valuations within venture portfolios. Amid the dislocation, there are many institutionalized, enterprise-grade businesses with strong fundamentals in the VC space whose investors are tapping the secondary market to take liquidity while retaining upside.

“It’s one of those generational investment opportunities,” he said of the AI-driven disruption.

Via PEM, SPES has a historic foothold in the VC space and relationships with some of the marquee managers such as Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, Creandum and Redpoint. For VC secondaries, it typically targets a roughly 50/50 mix between LP-led and GP-led deals, with a slight preference for the latter, according to Reals.

Tétrault noted that further growth is on the horizon. “It’s an area where you will probably see us growing in the next few years, either through internal development or M&A,” he said.

He added that the firm expects to launch a vehicle to target VC secondaries by the end of the year.

Mid-market acceleration

Beyond VC, the firm has a broader secondaries program, notably through Unigestion, which closed its sixth secondaries vehicle last November – USEC VI – at a EUR 1.7bn hard cap. The fund had already made 22 investments at the time of closing.

Tétrault said that SPES expects further growth from this “traditional” LP-led and GP-led secondaries strategy, with the deployment focus fixed on the European, US and Asian mid-market.

Within the mid-market, independent sponsors represent one growing opportunity as more deal-by-deal specialists turn to CVs. “Secondaries can help them clean up their balance sheet, support the next phase of growth, and position themselves for institutional fundraising,” explained Reals.

The third component of the platform comes from BEX and is focused on fund-of-funds transactions, which Tétrault described as “niche” secondaries. BEX is currently deploying its fifth flagship fund, which closed on USD 785m in 2024.

Elsewhere, co-investment is a key focus. Reals pointed to strong deal flow in areas such as IT-enabled services and healthcare, noting that SPES takes an opportunistic rather than a strictly thematic approach, though it pays attention to long-term trends. Last year, PEM closed its fifth direct co-investment fund on USD 383m. The vehicle is focused primarily on making direct co-investments in small and mid-market buyouts and growth equity.

Meanwhile, Tétrault said that Sagard is also eyeing the opportunity to partner with emerging managers, providing an attractive risk-return symmetry that he expects to grow significantly in the next five years. SPES aims to provide both seed capital and co-investment.

“We’re getting very early calls from new firms who are launching new platforms or in the early days of development,” he added.

Evergreen expansion

Another mega-trend highlighted by Tétrault – the rise and rise of private wealth – is a further strategic focus. “Wealth is one of our top priorities,” he said.

The firm’s evergreen program kicked off in September 2024, with the launch of the Sagard Private Credit Fund (SPCF), designed for Canadian accredited investors. A Canadian PE product, Sagard Private Equity Strategies Fund (SPESF) followed in January 2025. The vehicle’s first close included CAD 50m in invested capital. It is targeting long-term annual net returns of 14%-18%, investing across secondaries, co-investments and primaries, according to a press release.

Launching a similar product in the US is one of the firm’s priorities for 2026-2027, Tétrault said.

Within private wealth, the firm is also partnering with retirement services provider Empower – which administers over USD 2tn in assets – as part of a program to open private markets investments to defined contribution retirements plans. This will see Sagard strategies being made available to plan participants via collective investment trusts, according to a press release.

As Mergermarket has reported, there are concerns in some quarters that the industry’s private wealth push could upend the GP/LP dynamics that have underpinned private equity for decades. In this context, any manager that is looking to grow their wealth channel must remain mindful to balance related products with the needs of their core institutional investor clients, Tétrault argued

“I think the players that can do that will win in the long run,” he added.