I’m an equity investment partner based in London. Today, I will provide you with an update on the Coller platform, walk through CollerEquity highlights, and lastly, cover the secondaries market outlook. Let me kick off with the platform.
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Coller Capital now has $54 billion of assets under management, across our private equity at $45 billion and private credit at $9 billion.
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With currently 326 employees, 75 of those investment professionals across 12 offices, drawing on a 35-year history exclusively focused on the secondaries market. We have made seven partner and seven managing director promotions across our investment and operations teams.
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As you will have heard previously, our combination with EQT remains on track to close in Q3.
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Importantly, nothing will change in terms of Coller’s investment approach following the merger, with the same investment team and investment committee. Coller will become the dedicated secondaries vertical on the EQT platform.
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Turning to CollerEquity, we are really pleased with the performance to date.
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Class IAA USD returned 3.1% in Q1 2026, and 16% over the trailing 12 months, bringing cumulative since inception performance to 33%, equivalent to 18.2% on an annualised basis.
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For those of you within our Canadian or Australian feeder funds, please refer to your relevant fact sheet for your specific share class performance.
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We deployed over $230 million across two new deals in Q1, bringing the fund to over 50 deals completed since inception, and total AUM for the master fund of $1.8 billion. CollerEquity’s portfolio construction is shaping up as expected.
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The fund is highly diversified and now indirectly holds interests in over1,400 portfolio companies across over 140 funds and 76 sponsors.
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Our expected underwritten value creation is split 87% NAV growth and 13% discount capture, with the goal of achieving sustainable long-term returns.
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So, let’s take a closer look at the CollerEquity portfolio as of March 31st, 2026. At the top left of the screen, you can see CollerEquity is invested in many blue-chip GPs, including TPG, KKR, Silver Lake, CVC, Advent, and Blackstone.
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This is intentional.
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Over our long history, we have built deep relationships with many top-tier GPs, and that access pays off.
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At the bottom of the screen, you can see the diversification of the portfolio, which is in line with our investment strategy.
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The portfolio is predominantly allocated to North America and Europe at 62% and 26% respectively, with the remainder in the UK just shy of 10%.
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By strategy, 67% of the fund is invested in LP-led secondaries and 30% in GP-led, with a balance split between co-investments at 3% and 1% of primaries.
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This split blends asset growth with continuous liquidity, well-suited to an evergreen structure. This slide illustrates how we are assessing AI risk across the portfolio.
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AI technology has rapidly advanced, heightening concerns around disruption to software in particular. It is too early to call winners and losers, but we are taking both the risks and the opportunities seriously.
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We have developed an AI assessment framework to understand risk and identify opportunity. It considers five criteria.
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In dimension one, it’s how mission-critical the product is. In dimension two, how deeply embedded it is in customer workflows. Three, the degree of regulatory exposure. Four, switching costs. And five, whether AI is likely to expand or compress the addressable market.
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We have also tested our work against two independently prepared analyses, one of which was undertaken by the team at EQT.
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The output is the AI red, amber, green rating.
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Green means well-positioned, resilient core business, practical AI monetisation, or non- infrastructure replicable data.
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And Amber flags greater execution risk or margin compression, and we call out companies expected to benefit directly.
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The overall conclusion is that the portfolio has a resilient core, but we will continue to monitor developments closely as the technology evolves.
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So, looking at those ten largest company exposures in the fund at March 31st and what is driving our performance.
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Again, our portfolio is highly diversified. Our top ten companies make up less than 20% of the total portfolio.
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The fund’s largest company holding is Cloud Software Group at 3% of FMV, held through Project Hubble, the enterprise tech powerhouse combining Citrix and Tibco. It rates green on our AI framework.
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The products are mission-critical, deeply embedded in enterprise IT stacks, and switching costs are high.
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Alongside it, also at 3%, is Action, the leading non-food discount retailer in Europe, and a name well-known to Coller from previous transactions.
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Also green, given its limited direct AI exposure.
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Next, at 2% of FMV, is Heartland Dental, the leading dental support organisation in the US, held as a co-investment. Green on our AI framework, reflecting a healthcare services model with high regulatory barriers and limited AI substitution risk.
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Beyond those, our next largest exposures include Endeavor, the global sports and entertainment leader behind UFC and WWE, Xplor, a global SaaS and payments platform, and Identity Digital, a leading internet domains provider, each around 2% of FMV.
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In summary, we are pleased with the AI-resilient performance of our top company holdings, which reflects Coller’s careful and selective approach to investing and to portfolio construction.
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Onto quarterly performance drivers of CollerEquity’s Class IAA USD, which returned 3.1% in Q1 2026. This quarter’s performance was driven by value creation within the existing portfolio, particularly within the fund’s GP-led investments, as well as attractive entry discounts on the new LP-led investment, Project Ignition, which closed in the quarter.
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Olios, a European consumer healthcare company held in Project Golden Eye, continued to perform well across all key geographies, posting around an €11 million of organic EBITDA growth since entry.
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And on realisations, one of the benefits of the CollerEquity secondary strategy is its ability to generate liquidity.
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Over the course of Q1, the portfolio delivered $48 million in partial realisations.
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The majority of these came from the fund’s LP-led portfolio, with the largest contributors being Project Cobalt, Project Leonardo, and Project Spring. The portfolio’s annualised distribution pace for the 12 months ending 31st March 2026 stood at 11%.
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Let me now talk about some of the largest new investments we made in Q1, totalling $234 million across two transactions.
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The larger investment for the quarter was Project Ignition, a $221 million LP-led acquisition of a diversified portfolio of 29 fund positions across 12 high-quality private equity firms.
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Ignition gives Coller Equity exposure to over 670 underlying companies in a seasoned 2019 vintage portfolio that has been growing revenue at 14% and EBITDA at15%.
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We acquired the book at a high single-digit roll-forward discount of around 8%. Crucially, this was not an off-the-shelf book.
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We tailored the portfolio from a much larger opportunity set to focus on funds and GPs well known to Coller, and we are an existing investor in funds representing roughly 60% of the portfolio by exposure, which gives us great conviction in this investment.
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Turning to the PE market environment, our 2026 key themes set the backdrop.
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Market confidence has been shaken by the combination of AI disruption and geopolitical uncertainty, and we see multiple contraction as a likely feature of 2026 across certain sectors.
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The broader macroeconomic environment, however, remains broadly supportive, with resilient but moderating growth.
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Both public and private markets came into the year at or near record valuation highs and have continued to move up since, though public markets have been considerably more volatile, with private valuations rising by materially less.
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As we touched on earlier, one of the most visible valuation stories this year has been in software.
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Public market software multiples have compressed meaningfully year to date, driven largely by fears around AI disruption to business models.
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Our view is that while this concern is real, risk is being mispriced in many cases, and that creates potential investment opportunities for a buyer like Coller, who can underwrite assets with granularity.
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As a result, we anticipate some markdowns in Q1 from GPs
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managing software assets. Multiple GPs have already signalled they expect markdowns, though the magnitude remains uncertain.
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The key point to note is that the impact will be highly uneven across portfolios, given GPs applying and assets face very different degrees of actual AI disintermediation risk.
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Some will see a limited impact. Others may see more meaningful adjustments.
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So how does Coller think about this?
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Our approach differs depending on whether we are looking at LP-led transactions, where we are acquiring diversified fund portfolios, or GP-led transactions, where we have greater selectivity.
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In LP-led deals, software exposure is a normal feature of private equity fund portfolios, and our job is to price it appropriately at the point of acquisition.
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That pricing is built bottom up.
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We run fundamentals-driven analysis on underlying assets rather than applying a blanket sector view.
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We believe the current situation arising in the software sector could, in fact, be an opportunity for a disciplined secondaries buyer if it allows us to acquire high-quality GPs who are affected by general sentiment, but are not as exposed as the market assumes, often at a steeper discount inside a portfolio than we could achieve standalone.
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In our GP-led portfolio, we have more latitude.
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We add software exposure only where we are properly compensated and the entry point is genuinely compelling.
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Where AI risk is overstated by the market, that is an opportunity, not a deterrent. The broader theme here is straightforward.
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Valuation uncertainty widens the range of outcomes, but it also sharpens the importance of selectivity and disciplined entry pricing, which sits at the heart of our secondaries approach.
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With this, I am concluding our Q1 2026 quarterly update recording. In summary, let me reiterate my three key takeaways from the beginning.
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We remain very pleased with CollerEquity’s performance.
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The portfolio is broadly diversified and well-positioned for current market conditions, and we continue to see a strong opportunity set, which allows us to remain selective in the investments we make.
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I hope you have found today’s webinar informative, and I hope to see you next quarter.
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In the meantime, should you have any questions, please feel free to email us at cc.privatewealth@Collercapital.com, and a member of our team will be in touch. Thank you.
