Private debt has enjoyed a so-called "golden age" over the past few years. Significant capital has flowed into this investment strategy on the back of attractive income generation and stable returns. As of year-end 2025, credit represents 51.2% of AUM for the Big Seven listed asset managers focused on private capital, as detailed in our Q4 2025 US Public PE and GP Deal Roundup.

However, recent headlines have not been kind to the strategy.

In recent months, negative news intensified, focusing on credit funds' exposure to software industry loans that are at risk from AI disruption.

Of equal importance and concern has been the flow of articles around retail investors' exposure to private credit. Retail capital requires a liquidity escape valve, which vehicles such as BDCs intend to provide in limited quantity.

But market stress can lead to further liquidity limits and stoppages in these structures. Even if liquidity terms are clear, investor psychology can create a negative feedback loop: Concerns about portfolio quality trigger redemptions, which in turn fuel fears of additional liquidity restrictions, leading to even more redemption requests.

In contrast to all this negativity, fundraising statistics for the closed-end drawdown fund world finished 2025 on a strong note.

 

Capital raised for private debt was $234.1 billion in 2025. As we await further data from late-reporting funds, 2025 is likely to be a year of growth, exceeding 2024’s $241.3 billion total. Each of the 15 largest funds raised in 2025 exceeded $3 billion, with the top three exceeding $12 billion, indicative of fund managers’ confidence in aiming for sizable vehicles. Notably, private debt made inroads in secondaries during 2025. Debt secondaries accounted for 13.4% of capital raised, up from 2.1% in 2024, signaling appetite for vehicles that group secondary private credit fund stakes.

Looking ahead to 2026 and beyond, it will be interesting to see if the negative sentiment currently unfolding in the retail channel spills over to institutional investors. Patient capital allocators generally can navigate short-term turbulence. Therefore, we believe that the long-term investment horizon of institutional capital supports a continued stable fundraising environment in private credit drawdown funds.

Read more on this in our 2025 Annual Global Private Market Fundraising report.

Healthcare IT PE activity remained resilient in 2025, with rising transaction value and steady deal flow.

Our H2 2025 Healthcare IT PE Update shows total healthcare IT PE deal value up 23.9% year-over-year, reaching the second-highest annual total on record behind the 2021 peak.

Deal count increased 2.1% year-over-year, while H2 deal activity rose 15.9% compared with the same period in 2024, reflecting continued investor demand for scalable healthcare technology platforms.

AI remained a central theme in healthcare IT investing, though the nature of deal activity shifted during the back half of the year. Rather than pure-play AI startups, PE firms increasingly targeted established healthcare IT platforms integrating automation and AI capabilities into operational workflows.

The largest second-half transaction was the $2.6 billion leveraged buyout of Premier by an affiliate of Patient Square Capital, followed by Blackstone's $1.1 billion acquisition of AGS Health, an end-to-end revenue cycle management (RCM) vendor, at 18.3x 2025 EV/EBITDA.

At the same time, emerging AI-native competitors are beginning to reshape expectations for the RCM market.

A notable example came when CommonSpirit Health paid Tenet Healthcare $1.9 billion to exit its RCM contract with Conifer Health Solutions, opting to transition its revenue cycle operations to Midstream Health, an AI-native RCM platform backed by CommonSpirit and Andreessen Horowitz. The move highlights growing interest in automation-driven RCM models and raises questions about the long-term durability of traditional vendor pricing structures.

Earlier in the year, the most prominent AI-focused transaction was Clearlake Capital's $5.3 billion acquisition of ModMed from Warburg Pincus, widely viewed as one of the defining healthcare IT deals of 2025. The specialty electronic health records platform is a Rule of 40 company trending toward Rule of 50 performance and offers an integrated suite spanning practice management, RCM, analytics, patient engagement and payments.

 

Across subsectors, analytics and value-based care technologies led healthcare IT deal growth in 2025, with deal counts rising 109.1%, driven by strong activity in population health analytics, clinical decision support tools, and social determinants of health platforms. Provider operations deal activity slowed in H2, though the segment still recorded 12.5% growth in deal value for the full year due to strong activity earlier in 2025.

Looking ahead, investor sentiment suggests continued momentum. A poll conducted at the McDermott Will & Schulte Healthcare Private Equity Conference in Miami found that 47% of respondents expect healthcare IT and AI-enabled services to lead PE deal activity in 2026, with revenue cycle and administrative automation technologies identified as the most likely investment targets over the next 12 to 24 months. However, increasing competition from AI-native entrants and broader SaaS valuation pressures may lead investors to more closely scrutinize margin durability across healthcare IT platforms.