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| A message from Apollo Global Management |
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The private credit market is a $40+ trillion universe. 95% of that market is investment grade, financing the next generation of energy, infrastructure, and manufacturing. The future of economic growth is private.
Learn More |
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| Different maps, same terrain |
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Q1 2026 was a stress test for global private markets. Tariff uncertainty, geopolitical disruption, and AI's accelerating dominance continued to reshape how capital moves globally, and the patterns emerging across US and European PE and VC tell a surprisingly consistent story.
The liquidity problem is the one the market has yet to fully solve. Traditional exit routes that have been counted on in the past remained either closed or unreliable. Investors on both continents are improvising in accordance, but the backlog of aging portfolio companies keeps growing. Secondaries and semi-liquid funds continue to build in the background, but they aren’t able to fully alleviate the liquidity issue.
These pressures have factored into poor fundraising figures globally, and dry powder stores have finally begun to see a meaningful drawdown. How long these pressures can build before fundamentally changing deployment behavior is the question hanging over the rest of 2026.
AI has stopped being a bet and started being the baseline. It's now the primary driver of deal value in both US and European venture, and it's beginning to influence PE deal selection and valuation logic, too. But the capital isn't spreading evenly. Rather, it's concentrating, and the gap between who's benefiting and who isn't is widening on both sides of the Atlantic.
What's striking is that despite real headwinds, conviction hasn't collapsed. Dealmakers are being selective but are not absent. And there's a growing sense that clarity on macro conditions could unlock meaningful activity quickly, whenever that arrives. The question for the rest of the year isn't whether the opportunity is there for private markets. It's whether the environment will cooperate long enough to reclaim its past strength.
These themes underpin our latest US and Europe PE and VC reports. Download them below to explore deeper analysis:
• Q1 2026 European PE Breakdown
• Q1 2026 US PE Breakdown
• Q1 2026 PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor
• Q1 2026 European Venture Report
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| The 401(k) private markets push has a problem |
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The Department of Labor made waves in March, releasing a proposal that could reshape what American workers see in their 401(k) investment menus. But the framework may not deliver on its central promise: shielding employers from the lawsuits that have long kept retirement plan options conservative and limited.
The proposed rules, which followed a 2025 executive order from President Donald Trump aimed at "democratizing access to alternative assets," establish six factors that employers must evaluate when selecting investment options for retirement plans: performance, fees, liquidity, valuation, benchmarking and complexity.
But as our analysis makes clear, satisfying those six factors may be far harder than the Labor Department anticipates.
The central dilemma is who, exactly, is equipped to do this work. Most employers rely on HR staff or finance committees to oversee their 401(k) plans, people whose expertise rarely extends to evaluating private equity, interval funds or semi-liquid private credit vehicles. The Labor Department rules explicitly acknowledge that plan sponsors may need outside help, but they stop short of requiring it, and final responsibility remains squarely with the employer.
On the subject of performance, the rules ask fiduciaries to assess "risk-adjusted expected returns," a challenge even for seasoned investment professionals.
On fees, the rules suggest higher costs may be justified if returns warrant it, but predicting future returns is a guessing game at best.
And on the subject of liquidity, the paper notes that 401(k) plans holding illiquid assets have simply never had to contend with mass redemptions because the idea is too new. Fiduciaries are being asked to evaluate a scenario that so far only exists in theory.
Perhaps most striking is the valuation problem. Private market assets are notoriously tricky to price, and funds holding them alongside publicly traded securities typically only update those valuations quarterly. In a plan where employees contribute every two weeks and can rebalance at will, that gap could mean workers are buying or selling at prices that don't reflect market reality, heightening the risk of litigation related to the purchase or sale of illiquid assets.
Motivated by the prospect of tapping trillions in retirement savings, many asset managers, recordkeepers and retirement plan advisers are already building the documentation frameworks designed to help employers satisfy the new standards.
But whether the rules will accomplish their central promise—shielding employers from lawsuits—is far from certain. The proposed safe harbors may make suits easier to defend, but will not stop them from being filed. For many plan sponsors, the fear of litigation may continue to be the loudest voice in the room.
The 60-day public comment period is now underway.
In How safe is the 401(k) safe harbor?, we raise pointed questions about each of the six evaluation criteria outlined above. Click here to download the report. |
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The State of Sustainable Investing in the Private Markets
Despite a charged political environment and the proliferation of greenhushing, sustainable investing is proving far more durable in the private markets than public discourse might suggest.
Rather than retreating, many fund managers are simply adapting—using less polarizing language and tailoring their messaging to different audiences, with a particular emphasis on financially material initiatives. |
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Meanwhile, private climate-investing fund AUM reached a new high of $1.5 trillion in 2025, driven primarily by energy transition infrastructure fundraising, with projections pointing to more than $2 trillion by decade's end.
AI is emerging as a meaningful tool for sustainability-related data collection and analysis, lowering barriers for smaller managers and helping sustainability teams do more with leaner budgets. Plus, there are opportunities to reduce AI's environmental impact via datacenter hardware and the architecture of the AI models themselves.
Download the report |
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April 27: PitchBook is a partner of the CLO Industry Conference in New York. Glen Fest, our senior editor covering the CLO market, will moderate a panel on the future of SRTs, CFOs and other structured credit products. Register here.
April 28: At DealMax 2026 in Las Vegas, Hilary Wiek, our principal analyst for fund strategies, will give a talk on the rise of evergreen funds. Register here.
April 28: Join us at ILPA Forum EMEA in London, where Juan Mier, our lead analyst for fund strategies, will give a presentation on the rise of retail capital in private markets. Register here.
May 4: In this webinar, experts from PitchBook, NVCA, J.P. Morgan, Dentons, and EisnerAmper will share insights from the Q1 2026 PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor—from AI's impact on investment and liquidity to the extreme concentration defining the market. Register here |
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