Introduction
Private credit fundraising held firm in 2025, defying a tough environment in private equity.
We tracked $240 billion of final closes last year from 115 funds, up by about 10% on 2024’s total of $217 billion, and 19% above 2023’s $198 billion.
However, 2025’s fundraising landscape looked very different to previous years, with direct lending fundraising falling significantly, and specialty finance and secondaries funds both posting record years (Figure 1).
Similarly, European and multi-region funds captured their highest-ever market share as allocators looked to diversify after years of overweight US allocations.
Evergreen funds continued their rapid growth, surpassing $700 billion in AuM, as private debt managers continued to court retail clients. However, it should be noted that redemption requests from some of these funds have since increased markedly, amid growing concerns over high-profile bankruptcies and BDCs’ heavy exposure to the software sector.
Regional breakdown
Private credit’s geographic profile shifted dramatically in 2025, after years of dominance by North America.
North America-focused funds raised $87 billion in 2025 – down 13% on 2024’s total (Figure 2). While North America was still the largest fundraising market, its overall share fell from around 50% in each of 2023 and 2024, to just 36% of private credit fundraising in 2025.
Meanwhile, multi-region fundraising increased 38% to $82 billion, and Europe set a full-year record of €59 billion ($69 billion), up 35% on 2024’s total.
Allocators are increasingly looking to diversify geographic exposure (Figure 3), particularly as US direct lending becomes more commoditized, while European rearmament and growing infrastructure spending are expected to produce significant origination opportunities in the coming years.
Strategy breakdown
Direct lending retained its position as the most popular sub-strategy in private credit, with $106 billion of final closes from 38 funds (Figure 4). That represented a 25% decline on 2024’s $142 billion total, with market share falling sharply from 65% to 44%.
Specialty finance strategies had a breakout year, with 28 funds closing for a total of $47.4 billion in commitments – 72% higher than the amounts raised in 2023 and 2024 combined – amid a surge in interest in strategies such as asset-based finance, fund financing and significant risk transfer.
Opportunistic credit funds raised $57 billion, up about 6% on 2024’s total, as fund managers looked to build war chests in anticipation of a turn in the credit cycle.
Specialty finance accounted for a fifth of all private credit fundraising in 2025, up from just 4% in 2024.
Speciality finance
Specialty finance funds raised a record-breaking $47.4 billion in 2025 – more than double the total raised in 2024 and approximately 20% of all private credit fundraising. The number of fund launches also grew sharply, rising from 72 in 2024 to 107 in 2025 (Figure 5).
Generalist asset-based finance funds were the most popular subset of specialty finance (Figure 6), raising just shy of $20 billion – including KKR’s $6.5 billion Asset-Based Finance Partners II, now the second-largest closed end fund in the asset class (Figure 7).
Fund finance strategies – including NAV lending and capital call financing – raised $12.9 billion, with 17Capital closing the largest ever NAV lending fund at $5.5 billion.
Credit secondaries
Credit secondaries had a record year, raising $16.7 billion (Figure 8), as GP-led and LP-led deals become an embedded portfolio management tool in private credit.
Coller Capital set the record for the largest ever credit secondaries fund in July (Figure 9), raising $6.8 billion for Coller Credit Opportunities II. Pantheon also closed its third senior debt secondaries fund, Pantheon Senior Debt III, at $5.2 billion in April.
The surge in secondaries fundraising has continued into early 2026: at the time of publication, three credit secondaries funds have closed, totalling $9.2 billion in commitments.
Antares, Blackstone, HarbourVest Partners and PGIM are all building out dedicated credit secondaries platforms this year.
Methodology
Includes all fund closes tracked by us in 2025, through the stories and signals published by reporters and data researchers throughout the year. Some of the fund closes have been included through press releases and direct
manager reporting to us. Funds that were raised in local currencies have been converted to USD ($) at the rate of €1 = $1.17 and INR 1 = $0.012.
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