Company Profile / Private Markets
The Firm That Built a Resale Market for Private Equity
Jeremy Coller spent 36 years arguing that private equity needed a second-hand market. Now that the market is worth trillions, EQT is paying up to $3.7 billion to own the firm that started it.
There is a problem in private equity that almost nobody in the industry likes to say out loud. Getting money in is easy. Getting it back out - on your own schedule rather than the fund's - is not. A pension fund that commits to a 10-year buyout fund is, in practice, married to it for a decade. Coller Capital was built on that discomfort. For 36 years, the London firm has offered investors a way out: it buys their existing stakes in private equity and private credit funds, gives them cash today, and takes the long wait itself.
That trade has a name now - "secondaries" - and it is one of the fastest-growing corners of finance. In January 2026, the Swedish investment group EQT agreed to acquire Coller Capital for up to $3.7 billion, using the deal as its entry into a market Coller helped invent. For a business that once operated at the quiet edges of finance, it was a striking valuation of an unglamorous idea: that second-hand fund stakes are worth buying, pricing and trading like anything else.
What the firm actually does
A market for the exits nobody planned
Private equity funds are designed to be illiquid. Investors - called limited partners - hand over capital and wait years for the fund's managers to buy companies, improve them and sell them. The system works, but life does not always cooperate with a 10-year horizon. Investors rebalance portfolios, need cash, change strategy, or simply want out of a fund that is dragging. Fund managers, meanwhile, sometimes want to hold a strong company longer than the fund's clock allows.
Coller Capital sits in the middle of both situations. It runs so-called LP-led deals, buying stakes from investors who want liquidity, and GP-led deals, where a fund manager moves an asset into a new vehicle and needs a buyer to finance the move. The firm has extended the same logic from private equity into private credit, buying interests in direct-lending and credit funds and providing financing facilities to private equity funds. The through-line is always the same: someone holds an illiquid private-market asset and would rather hold cash.
The origin
A pivot forced by a war
Coller Capital exists in roughly its current form because of Saddam Hussein. Jeremy Coller, who had spent five years running private equity investment for the ICI pension plan and before that led research at Fidelity in London, set out in 1990 to build a private equity fund-of-funds. Then Iraq invaded Kuwait, international markets seized up, and fundraising stalled. Rather than wait, Coller turned to a corner of the market almost no one was working in: buying existing fund stakes off investors who wanted out. What began as a workaround became the whole company.
The strategy earned its founder a nickname the industry still uses - the "godfather of secondaries." In 2023, Secondary Link went further and called him the market's "GOAT." The labels are marketing, but the underlying claim is largely fair: Coller was making a market in second-hand fund stakes before most institutions believed such a market could exist.
"Coller Credit Opportunities II is a milestone fundraise that reaffirms the significant evolution and maturation of the private credit secondaries market." Jeremy Coller, Founder, CIO & Managing Partner
A turning point came in 1998, when Coller acquired a $265 million private equity portfolio from the Shell pension fund - at the time the largest secondaries transaction on record. It signalled that a serious institution would sell a serious portfolio into the secondary market, and that a buyer stood ready to price it. Deals that once looked like fire sales started to look like ordinary portfolio management.
Scale
From niche to megafund
The clearest measure of how far the idea has traveled is fund size. Coller's flagship secondaries series, Coller International Partners, has climbed from single-digit billions to a scale that would have seemed absurd in the 1990s. In 2026, its ninth fund closed at $17 billion - the largest the firm has ever raised. The credit side is following the same curve: Coller Credit Opportunities II closed in 2025 at a record $6.8 billion, in a market that barely existed a few years earlier.
Behind those headline numbers sits one of the more diversified windows into private markets anywhere. Through its funds, Coller holds interests in roughly 850 private equity funds and some 8,000 underlying companies. That breadth is both the product - investors buy diversification and earlier liquidity than a primary fund offers - and a kind of radar. A firm holding pieces of thousands of companies gets an unusually wide read on where private-market value is drifting.
Who buys it
Pensions, insurers, and now the merely wealthy
For most of its history, Coller's customers were large institutions: public and corporate pension funds, insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds, endowments, foundations and family offices - the investors who can lock up capital for years and want the diversification secondaries offer. More recently the firm has pushed into private wealth, the tier of investors wealthy enough to want private markets but historically shut out of them.
That expansion runs through a dedicated business, Private Wealth Secondaries Solutions, which has raised more than $5 billion across private equity and credit strategies. Its flagship evergreen vehicle, the Coller Secondaries Private Equity Opportunities Fund - C-SPEF - passed $1 billion in assets within 18 months of launch. A companion Luxembourg-domiciled credit fund, CollerCredit, opened the private credit strategy to eligible wealth investors outside the United States. Evergreen structures matter here: unlike a traditional 10-year fund, they let investors subscribe and, within limits, redeem - a softer version of the liquidity Coller has always sold.
Getting into private equity is a marketing problem. Getting out is an engineering problem. Coller Capital sells the engineering.
Business model
How the money is made
The economics are the standard shape of alternative asset management, applied to an unusual asset. Coller earns management fees on the capital it oversees and performance fees - carried interest - on the returns it generates. Its edge is on the buy side: acquiring existing fund interests at negotiated prices, often at a discount to their stated value, then aiming to deliver risk-adjusted returns as those assets mature. Because it buys into funds that are already partly invested, capital tends to be put to work faster and returned sooner than in a primary fund, which is much of the appeal for investors.
Estimated annual revenue sits around $330 million. The firm employs roughly 316 people, including 31 partners, and operates from 11 offices - London as headquarters, plus New York, Luxembourg, Hong Kong, Beijing, Seoul, Singapore, Tokyo and Melbourne among them. It is a specialist, partnership-led operation rather than a sprawling financial conglomerate, and that focus is part of what EQT is buying.
The competition
Not alone, but early
Coller no longer has the field to itself. Secondaries is now contested by heavyweights including Ardian, Blackstone's Strategic Partners, Lexington Partners, Goldman Sachs' Vintage Funds, HarbourVest, Pantheon, LGT Capital Partners and StepStone. Several command comparable or larger pools of capital. What distinguishes Coller is less size than lineage: it is one of the few large players built around secondaries from the start, rather than a division bolted onto a bigger firm. That specialist identity, and its early move into credit secondaries, are the differentiators it leans on.
The endgame
Two suitors in one winter
The clearest signal that secondaries has arrived came in the space of two months. In November 2025, State Street took a minority stake in Coller Capital. Then in January 2026, EQT agreed to buy the whole firm: a base of $3.2 billion in new EQT shares plus an earn-out of up to $500 million in cash tied to performance, valuing the deal at up to $3.7 billion. The business is expected to operate as Coller EQT, with Jeremy Coller continuing to lead it and the team keeping independence over investment decisions. When the giants start buying the pioneer, the category has stopped being niche.
Jeremy Coller launches the firm in London and pivots toward institutionalising secondaries.
Coller acquires a $265M private equity portfolio, then the largest secondaries transaction ever.
The model extends from private equity into private credit with a $1.4B strategy.
C-SPEF and the CollerCredit SICAV open secondaries to wealth investors.
CIP IX closes at $17B and EQT buys the firm for up to $3.7B; it will run as Coller EQT.
The other empire
A buyout founder who fights factory farming
There is a second story running alongside the investment firm. Jeremy Coller uses his fortune to campaign against intensive animal agriculture. In 2015 he founded the FAIRR Initiative - Farm Animal Investment Risk and Return - an investor network focused on environmental and social risk in the global food system. It has grown into one of the fastest-expanding ESG networks in finance, with more than 400 members representing over $90 trillion in combined assets. At Coller Capital itself, responsibility is organised into three pillars - Responsible Investment, Responsible Business and Responsible Leadership - and in 2025 the firm signed on to Promote Giving, pledging 5% of performance fees to charity. It is an unusual pairing: a private equity titan whose side project is the welfare of farmed animals.
The through-line across both empires is patience. Secondaries reward the investor willing to buy what others are tired of holding and wait; a campaign to reshape the food system rewards a similar tolerance for long horizons. Coller has spent three and a half decades betting that time is on the side of whoever is willing to wait longer than everyone else. The $3.7 billion price tag suggests the bet paid off.