>
00:00:16 – 00:00:25
Today, I will provide you with an update on the Coller platform, walk through C-SPEF highlights, and lastly, cover the secondaries market outlook.
00:00:26 – 00:00:53
Let me kick off with the platform. Coller Capital now has $54 billion of assets under management across our private equity at $45 billion and private credit at $9 billion, with currently 326 employees, 75 of those investment professionals across 12 offices, drawing on a35-year history exclusively focused on the secondaries market.
00:00:53 – 00:01:06
On personnel, we’re pleased to announce a number of changes as the platform continues to grow. We have made seven partner and seven managing director promotions across our investment and operations teams.
00:01:06 – 00:01:19
As you will have heard previously, our combination with EQT remains on track to close in Q3. Importantly, nothing will change in terms of Coller’s investment approach following the merger.
00:01:20 – 00:01:29
With the same investment team and investment committee, Coller will become the dedicated secondaries vertical on the EQT platform. Now let’s turn to C-SPEF.
00:01:30 – 00:01:47
We are really pleased with the performance of this fund to date. Class I returned 4% in Q1 2026 and17.5% over the trailing 12 months, bringing cumulative since inception performance to 36.6%.
00:01:47 – 00:02:01
Class S returned 3.75% in the quarter, 26.5% since inception, and Class D returned 3.9%, 21% since inception.
00:02:01 – 00:02:19
We deployed $254 million across three new deals in Q1, bringing the fund to 50 investments since inception and total AUM of around $1.4 billion. C-SPEF’s portfolio construction is shaping up as expected.
00:02:19 – 00:02:53
The fund is highly diversified and now indirectly holds interests in 1,477 portfolio companies across 171 funds and 82 GP sponsors. Let’s dive deeper into the C-SPEF portfolio as of March 31st, 2026. At the top left of the screen, you can see C-SPEF is invested in many blue-chip GPs, including TPG, Primera, KKR, Silver Lake, Advent, and CVC. This is intentional.
00:02:54 – 00:03:09
Over our long history, we have built deep relationships with many top-tier GPs, and that access pays off. At the bottom of the screen, you can see the diversification of the portfolio, which is in line with our investment strategy.
00:03:09 – 00:03:21
The portfolio is predominantly allocated to North America at 59% and Europe, with 25% in Europe ex UK and a further 13% in the UK.
00:03:21 – 00:03:47
By strategy, 61% of the fund is invested in LP-led secondaries and 37% in GP-led, with co-investments and primaries making up the small balance. This split offers a strong blend of asset growth and continuous liquidity potential and is a feature that makes our secondary strategy particularly well-suited to an evergreen structure.
00:03:47 – 00:04:02
In all, as I mentioned, we are very pleased with the portfolio and performance to date. Before we turn to the top company exposures, I want to spend a moment on how we are thinking about AI across the portfolio.
00:04:02 – 00:04:18
AI technology has advanced rapidly over the last year, heightening concerns around disruption of traditional business models, software in particular. We think it is too early to call the winners and losers, but we are taking both the risks and the opportunities seriously.
00:04:19 – 00:04:32
To that end, we have developed an AI assessment framework to understand the risk in our portfolio and to help identify new opportunities. The framework considers five criteria.
00:04:33 – 00:04:51
Dimension one, how mission-critical the product is. Two, how deeply embedded it is in customer workflows. Three, the degree of regulatory exposure. Four, switching costs. And five, whether AI is likely to expand or compress the addressable market.
00:04:52 – 00:05:11
We have also tested our work against two independently prepared analyses, one of which was undertaken by the team at EQT. The output is the AI red, amber, green rating you’ll see that we have included for the fund’s top company exposures on the next slide.
00:05:11 – 00:05:26
Green indicates companies we view as well-positioned, typically those with resilient core businesses, those already monetizing AI in a practical way, or those with non-replicable data or mission-critical infrastructure.
00:05:27 – 00:05:41
Amber flags exposures are where we see greater execution risk or potential for AI to compress the opportunity. And we also call out companies where we see an expected direct benefit from AI adoption.
00:05:41 – 00:05:51
The overall conclusion is that the portfolio has a resilient core, but we will continue to monitor developments closely as the technology evolves.
00:05:51 – 00:06:02
Let’s quickly look at some of the largest company exposures in the fund at March31st and what is driving our strong performance. Again, our portfolio is highly diversified.
00:06:03 – 00:06:13
Our top 10 companies make up less than 20% of the total portfolio. Action remains the fund’s largest company holding at 3% of FMV.
00:06:14 – 00:06:31
Action is a leading non-food discount retailer and one of the strongest value-based consumer platforms in Europe, a name well known to Coller from previous transactions, and one that continues to deliver. We expect limited AI disruption for this investment.
00:06:31 – 00:06:45
Next is CBR Fashion, also at 3% of FMV. CBR is one of the largest mid-market apparel platforms in Germany, acquired through a GP-led continuation alongside Aurora.
00:06:46 – 00:06:56
Beyond the top two, our next largest exposures include Endeavor, Explore, Identity Digital, and Genesis, all at around 2% of FMV.
00:06:57 – 00:07:06
In summary, we are pleased with the performance of our top company holdings, which reflects Coller’s careful and selective approach to investing and portfolio construction.
00:07:07 – 00:07:16
Onto quarterly performance drivers. C-SPEF’s Class I returned 3.97% in Q1 2026.
00:07:17 – 00:07:33
The primary drivers of value creation in the quarter were Evelyn Partners, David Lloyd, and Project Ignition. Evelyn Partners, held through our Project Peter Pan GP-led, was realized in the quarter at a 2.2 times gross multiple.
00:07:34 – 00:07:50
David Lloyd, held through Project Deuce, posted 25% EBITDA growth year over year alongside the strategic acquisition of Espria. And Project Ignition, our largest new investment of the quarter, was acquired at an8% discount.
00:07:51 – 00:08:14
One of the benefits of the C-SPEF secondary strategy is its ability to generate liquidity. There were several partial realizations seen in Q12026 across the fund’s LP-led portfolio, totalling approximately $33 million, including activity from Project Cobalt, McLean Power, Standard Aero, and Project Taurus.
00:08:15 – 00:08:33
The fund’s annualiszed distribution pace stood at 14% as of March 31st, 2026. Let me now talk about the new investments we made in Q12026, totaling $254 million across three transactions.
00:08:33 – 00:08:47
The largest investment for the quarter was Project Ignition, a $221 million LP-led acquisition of a $1.6 billion fund book from a North American pension plan.
00:08:47 – 00:09:09
Ignition gives C-SPEF exposure to 25 fund positions and over 670 underlying companies in a seasoned 2019 vintage portfolio that has been growing revenue at 14% and EBITDA at 15%. We made this investment at an8% discount. Crucially, this was not an off-the-shelf book.
00:09:09 – 00:09:28
We tailored the portfolio from a much larger opportunity set to focus on funds and GPs well-known to Coller, and where we are an existing portfolio in funds representing roughly 60% of the portfolio by exposure, which underpinned a high-conviction underwrite.
00:09:29 – 00:09:50
The second was Project Granite, a $20 million GP-led investment into SubCom, a global leader in subsea fiber optic cable systems that carry roughly 99% of all intercontinental internet and data traffic. SubCom occupies a uniquely irreplaceable position.
00:09:51 – 00:10:26
It operates the only subsea cable manufacturing facility in the United States and is one of only two providers globally capable of delivering a turnkey, end-to-end subsea cable system. The transaction also features strong GP alignment, with the lead GP making one of its largest-ever co-investments alongside the continuation vehicle, and the active team rolling 100% of net proceeds into the deal. Turning to the private equity market environment, our2026 key themes set the market backdrop.
00:10:27 – 00:10:51
Market confidence has been shaken by the combination of AI disruption and geopolitical uncertainty, and we see multiple contraction as a likely feature of2026 across certain sectors. The broader macroeconomic environment, however, remains broadly supportive, with resilient but moderating growth amid policy and trade uncertainty worldwide.
00:10:51 – 00:11:13
Crucially, both public and private markets came into the year at or near record valuation highs and have continued to move up since, though public markets have been considerably more volatile, with private valuations rising by materially less. One of the most visible valuation stories this year has been in software.
00:11:14 – 00:11:23
Public market software multiples have compressed meaningfully year to date, driven largely by fears around AI disruption to business models.
00:11:24 – 00:11:39
As we touched on earlier, our view is that while this concern is real, the risk is being mispriced in many cases, and that creates potential investment opportunities for a buyer like Coller who can underwrite assets with granularity.
00:11:39 – 00:12:10
As a result, we anticipate some markdowns in Q1 from GPs managing software assets. Multiple GPs have already signaled they expect markdowns, though the magnitude remains uncertain. The key point to note is that the impact will be highly uneven across portfolios, given GPs applying varying levels of conservatism in how they discount their holdings, and assets face very different degrees of actual AI disintermediation risk. Some will see limited impact.
00:12:11 – 00:12:15
Others may see more meaningful adjustments. So how does Coller think about this?
00:12:16 – 00:12:42
Our approach differs depending on whether we are looking at LP-led transactions, where acquiring diversified fund portfolios, or GP-led transactions, where we have greater selectivity. In LP-led transactions, software exposure is a normal feature of private equity fund portfolios, and our job is to price it appropriately at the point of acquisition. That pricing is built bottoms-up.
00:12:42 – 00:13:13
We run fundamentals-driven analysis on the underlying assets rather than applying a blanket sector view. We believe the current situation arising in the software sector could, in fact, be an opportunity for a disciplined secondaries buyer if it allows us to acquire high-quality GPs who are affected by general sentiment, but are not as exposed as the market assumes, often at a steeper discount inside a portfolio than we could achieve standalone.
00:13:14 – 00:13:33
In our GP-led portfolio, we have more latitude. We will only add software exposure where we believe we are being properly compensated for the risk, where the valuation and entry point are genuinely compelling, and the quality and prospects of the asset warrant it.
00:13:33 – 00:13:46
We are assessing AI risk asset by asset, and where we believe risk is being overstated by the market, that represents an opportunity rather than a deterrent. The broader theme here is straightforward.
00:13:47 – 00:14:08
Valuation uncertainty widens the range of outcomes, but it also sharpens the importance of selectivity and disciplined entry pricing, which sits at the heart of our secondaries approach. We are watching this closely and are well-positioned to deploy into dislocations where they present genuine value for us.
00:14:08 – 00:14:22
With this, I am concluding our Q1 2026 quarterly update recording. In summary, let me reiterate my three key takeaways from the beginning. We remain very pleased with CCEF’s performance.
00:14:23 – 00:14:33
The portfolio is broadly diversified, and we continue to see a strong opportunity set, which allows us to remain selective in the investments we make.
00:14:33 – 00:14:47
In the meantime, should you have any questions, please feel free to email us at cc.privatewealth@Collercapital.com and a member of our team will be in touch. Thank you.
