Andrew DiGeronimo is a managing director and co-head of partnership solutions at Warburg Pincus, joining the firm in 2025.  Andrew is among the speakers joining the Private Equity Forum US in Austin this October.

Q: What does your decision to move to Warburg Pincus say about the maturation of GP-led secondaries?

A: Ten years ago, GP-leds were an immaterial component of private equity exits, housed within the broader secondaries complex. Since then, the market has evolved into a much more meaningful and institutional part of private market exit activity. At the same time, IPO exits have dwindled, and fundraising markets have been challenged, so there has been a structural element supporting the need for this type of capital. Over the last two to three years, the GP-led market has become its own asset class. During this period, traditional secondary firms have seen their portfolio mix move from 80%-90% LP secondaries and 10%-20% GP-led secondaries to more like 50-50, or even 40-60. LP secondary returns were in structural decline as more capital came into the market and broader diversified private equity returns – or private equity beta – decreased after 15 years of structural support from near-zero interest rates. On the other hand, GP-led exposure, which had increasingly become the alpha or return enhancement component to these portfolios, was necessary to maintain overall portfolio returns at acceptable levels.

Q: So, traditional secondaries firms need to adjust to a new reality?

A: From my vantage point, traditional secondaries firms have developed a false sense of security around their asset selection capabilities. The secondary industry benefited greatly from diversification because private equity beta had been strong for the better part of its existence. In that context, the tools that traditional secondaries firms relied on to buy LP stakes and build diversified portfolios – anchored in manager assessment and data triangulation across their many GP portfolios – appeared to work. By and large, if you were buying into high-quality managers in a rising market, you were rewarded. Diversification amplified that reward, as these portfolios demonstrated credit-like loss ratios. Great outcomes, wrong attribution.

Today’s investment environment is meaningfully different from what most of us operating in the industry have experienced, including higher interest rates, AI-driven disruption to business models across many sectors, geopolitical tension, and tariffs. For many, this has led to a challenging private equity market; within the secondaries industry specifically, focus has increasingly shifted toward GP-led transactions. As I saw during my time at a more traditional secondaries firm, the industry was anchored in this old toolkit but was taking a much different set of risks. Manager selection is not the same as asset selection, and while alignment and manager capabilities matter, GP-led investing is ultimately an asset-first investment strategy. Therefore, I felt a platform that could combine deep industry and asset expertise with broad sector coverage would be very well positioned to capitalize on the growing and durable opportunity that has become the GP-led market.

Q: You’re primarily targeting single-asset and concentrated multi-asset continuation vehicles. Why is that?

A: There are some hard structural elements. Within the broader private equity industry, there is USD 4tn-USD 5tn of private equity inventory, around 35,000 unsold companies, and a weighted average holding period of 6-7 years. The current investment environment no longer looks like what the private equity industry was originally built around; while inventory has tripled, liquidity has remained relatively flat. Moreover, there is a succession issue bubbling beneath the surface across private markets asset classes in what remains largely a founder-led industry. Across private equity, there is a whole class of partners who want greater ownership, often through a GP-led transaction involving an asset they know well. Lastly, there are companies and management teams that simply want to stay private for longer. All those factors create a need for more stable private-company ownership. The GP-led market is really the tip of the spear in catalyzing how companies stay private longer, how shareholders move in and out of private companies, and how economics transfer within ownership structures.

Q: How is Warburg Pincus approaching this opportunity?

A: Warburg has leveraged secondaries technology in the past. In fact, it was one of the first blue-chip sponsors to use the secondaries market back in 2017. As a result, we have a first-hand perspective on how the market works and where there are opportunities. Warburg has around 300 investment professionals and we track more than 20,000 companies. Our flagship fund invests in 60-70 companies through a fund cycle, which means we diligence hundreds and hundreds more. The other important element is governance. Warburg operates a one-firm model with a single carry pool. As a result, the partnership solutions team benefits from the full resources and attention of the firm on every investment. Any high conviction opportunity that surfaces becomes a joint effort between us and the relevant sector team.

Q: What does your target investment profile look like?

A: The starting point for us is simple: is this a company we want to own? Does it operate in a subsector we’ve been studying, investing in, or trying to buy into? For portfolio construction purposes, we generally skew toward the middle market – which we define as USD 25-USD 150m of EBITDA – because we want strong exit optionality and liquidity. The key sectors within partnership solutions are aligned with the broader firm’s four core focus areas: industrials, financial services, healthcare and technology.

Q: It has been argued that the market is becoming increasingly segmented by deal size. Do you agree?

A: I think I’d divide the world a little differently. There are investors building what we’d describe as GP-led beta portfolios, where they participate in broadly syndicated, well-known processes across the market. To a certain extent, larger CV processes are easier for these investors because they can deploy substantial amounts of capital simply by saying yes. Then there are transactions that require a much higher degree of conviction, speed and business model understanding, regardless of size. These processes are more akin to M&A than traditional secondaries because the buyer is underwriting the underlying business directly and often taking a meaningful portion of the equity without a syndicate behind it. As a result, I see two markets emerging: an M&A-style market and a syndication or co-investment-style market.

Q: Some investors are looking to speak for increasingly larger portions of the equity in CVs they anchor, which can mean reduced syndicate sizes. Are you looking to avoid syndication in your deals?

A: We’re looking to be a really good partner. At the end of the day, sponsors want certainty, execution and conviction – the same things we value. Because we have an integrated approach in which we underwrite alongside our sector teams and value creation resources, we’re able to speak as a peer with sponsors about what they’re looking to accomplish in the transaction process, where we believe the business should be heading, and how to get there. On that front, if a sponsor wants us to take on the entire transaction, we can develop a plan with a highly attractive set of co-investors. But if a sponsor prefers to leave capital available for other investors, we can also tailor our approach to that.

We are seeing increasing interest among sponsors in how they can tap into our value creation resources and broad network, which we believe few traditional secondaries firms can provide today. Because these transactions are so important to the issuing sponsors – often representing one of their largest single investments – the ability to be a true value-add partner is becoming increasingly compelling. To me, that’s where the market is heading. The question is not simply whether you can provide capital; it’s whether you can be a catalyst for shareholder transition and a resource to sponsors and management teams as they take businesses into the next phase of growth.

Q: This sounds like convergence with the sort of strategies more associated with the buyout side. How do you see the market evolving from here?

A: Yes, broadly speaking, I think secondaries and buyouts are becoming one. There is significant overlap across both the required skillsets to invest in each asset class as well as the ultimate targeted returns. The opportunity set is massive because of this convergence. The market is getting bigger, but where does the capital come from? I think there will be a rotation of capital, a rotation in LPs’ secondaries allocation – moving away from LP secondaries given the compression of returns and toward specialist GP-led providers who can still offer broad market access, but with the right toolkit for asset selection. We may also see this rotation in private equity allocations, where LPs can leverage the GP-led market to access high-quality middle market companies across managers, sectors and geographies.

Hear more from Andrew DiGeronimo at Private Equity Forum US on 20–21 October 2026 at the Four Seasons Hotel Austin. He will join a panel exploring how GP-led secondaries are evolving, where opportunities are emerging and whether continuation vehicles are becoming a long-term solution for liquidity and value creation.

Find out more and register here.