About Pantheon

• Founded: 1982

• Headquarters: London, United Kingdom

• AUM: $90bn as of 2024

• Strategy: Secondaries across buyout, growth, infrastructure, and real assets

• Leadership: Paul Keating, Andrew Lebus (co-heads of global secondaries)

Pantheon co-led an €811m multi-asset continuation vehicle for BU Bregal Unternehmerkapital, a German mid-market firm. The vehicle provides funding for two portfolio companies — Safety21, a European GovTech platform focused on road safety and smart mobility, and Onlineprinters, a commercial printing technology company. The structure allowed existing LPs to exit while bringing in new capital alongside Pantheon to support the companies' next growth phase.

Multi-asset continuation vehicles are becoming the preferred structure for GP-led secondaries in Europe, particularly where sponsors want to retain multiple high-conviction positions rather than running single-asset processes. Pantheon's involvement signals LP appetite for these transactions remains strong even as the secondaries market has shifted from primarily LP portfolio sales to GP-led structures — continuation vehicles now represent roughly 60% of secondaries volume globally, up from 20% five years ago. The €811m size places this transaction in the mid-tier for European GP-leds; comparable recent deals include Ardian's €1.2bn continuation vehicle for three Nordic healthcare assets in mid-2024 and HarbourVest's €650m vehicle for a German software portfolio in late 2023.

The structure creates a specific tension worth watching: whether new LPs entering at the continuation vehicle stage will accept the valuation marks set in the transaction, or push for preferential economics to compensate for reduced information asymmetry compared to the original fund investors. Pantheon's track record in secondaries gives it pricing power, but the shift toward multi-asset vehicles introduces portfolio construction risk — if one of the two companies underperforms, the blended return may not justify the premium continuation vehicle investors typically pay over NAV.

Source: AltAssets