Private markets' fastest-growing structure lets a manager hold its best company while handing investors their cash back. In 2025 it crossed $100 billion for the first time. MENA's maturing funds are next in line.
Every fund has an expiry date. A typical private fund runs 8 to 10 years, and when the clock runs out, the manager has to return capital to investors, even if its best company is still compounding. Selling that winner early, into a soft market, leaves money on the table. The continuation fund solves exactly this.
Choose for themselves: take cash now and crystallise the gain, or roll their stake into the new vehicle and stay invested in the winner.
Secondary buyers provide the fresh capital that funds the cash-out, taking a position in a proven, de-risked asset they already understand.
Keeps running the company it knows best, with more time and follow-on capital to compound the winner rather than selling it under a deadline.
Because the manager sits on both sides of the trade (seller from the old fund, buyer into the new one), these deals are priced against third-party bids with an independent fairness opinion, and require sign-off from the fund's investor advisory committee. Done right, a continuation fund is not a way to offload a problem. It is a way to refuse to sell a winner.
For years the continuation fund was treated as a niche manoeuvre. No longer. In 2025, GP-led secondaries (the category continuation funds sit in) reached $115 billion, up 53% in a single year, and now make up roughly half of the entire $240 billion secondary market. Continuation-vehicle volume alone crossed $100 billion for the first time.
The simplest driver is that investors stopped getting their money back. Private-equity distributions fell to roughly 11% of NAV in 2024, the lowest in more than a decade (down from nearly 30% in the mid-2010s, per Bain). With capital trapped in aging funds, the pressure for liquidity became acute, and continuation funds are the cleanest way to create it without dumping good assets.
The traditional exits stayed shut. The IPO channel accounted for only about 6% of private-equity exit value in 2024, and while 2025's headline exit figures recovered, the gains were concentrated in a handful of mega-deals. For the typical manager holding a strong but mid-sized company, there was no clean way out. The continuation fund became the release valve.
Everything that made continuation funds the default tool in developed markets is now forming in MENA. The region has deployed serious capital, that capital is aging into the years where liquidity is needed, and the exit door is as narrow here as anywhere. The difference is that no dedicated regional player has stepped in yet.
For a regional GP sitting on a category-leading company in a fund that is running out of time, the choices today are bad ones: sell early into a thin market, or ask LPs for patience they may not have. A continuation vehicle offers a third path, returning cash to the investors who want it, while keeping the winner in trusted hands. It is the bridge between a maturing first wave of funds and a public-market exit that may still be years away.
This is the structural mechanism behind the broader case for the region. For why secondaries are the best risk-adjusted way into private markets, see why global capital is moving to secondaries; for the regional opportunity in full, see Why MENA, why now?