Private equity used to be a lock-and-hold game. Money in, ten years later money out.
That's changing. A new wave of debt is letting fund managers borrow against the stakes they already own, and Evercore says the market could swell to $30 billion.
The pitch is simple. Instead of selling assets in a slow market or taking cut-rate prices on fund stakes, managers can borrow against what they already hold.
The fund keeps its upside, and the cash comes in early. It's a way to push money back to investors without forcing a fire sale, and Evercore sees demand for it growing fast.
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The bigger NAV lending market is on a tear, sitting around $150 billion today. Industry trackers see it hitting $600 billion by 2030.
NAV stands for net asset value - the worth of everything inside a fund minus its debts. It's the number managers borrow against.
Private credit secondaries tell the same story. That market nearly doubled in 2025 to $20 billion, up from under $11 billion the year before.
Evercore has helped guide $18 billion of these credit secondary deals in the last 18 months. That's a heavy slice of a fast-growing pie, much of it built on the same playbook used by KKR's recent Kokusai Electric exit and other big-fund moves.
Two things are driving it. First, exits have slowed, which leaves money trapped in funds. Second, investors want their cash back. Borrowing against fund stakes solves both problems at once.
It frees up capital without forcing managers to take a bad price. That's also the same logic behind big firms leaning on their portfolios to seed new bets, like OpenAI's recent Tomoro deal for access to private-equity-backed companies.
Pension funds, endowments, and family offices are pushing for liquidity after years of slow distributions. That demand pressure is part of what's making NAV loans the easiest answer in the room.
If the projections hold, NAV lending and fund-stake debt could go from niche tool to mainstream playbook in under five years. The risk is the same as any leverage - when values fall, the debt gets heavier.
Smart investors are tracking how big the market gets and how the loans hold up when conditions tighten. For now, the wave is still building.
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