‘Seconds, please’, says EQT

Seconds, please, says EQT, and not because the first course wasn’t filling enough. The firm is making a decisive move into private equity secondaries by combining with Coller Capital, one of the market’s original specialists, as it continues its steady march toward a full-stack private markets platform. The transaction brings around $50bn of secondaries AUM into the EQT orbit, while keeping Coller operationally independent and entrepreneurially run, a familiar EQT playbook. Strategically, the logic is straightforward: secondaries provide liquidity, portfolio management tools and capital recycling at a moment when LPs are increasingly impatient and exit paths remain uneven. EQT frames the deal as the “next step” in its evolution, noting that secondaries have become “an increasingly important tool for clients in managing liquidity and portfolio construction, and in supporting long-term ownership of high-quality assets” but the subtext is clearer still: in modern private markets, offering only primaries is starting to look like skipping a course.