Continuation Vehicles Explained: Single-Asset vs Multi-Asset

Introduction

A continuation vehicle is two transactions closed under one set of signatures: an older fund sells, a newly formed fund buys, and the same general partner (GP) manages both. Everything distinctive about the structure, from the conflict to the pricing process, follows from that double role. Once the structure is clear, the next question is how many companies go inside it, and the answer changes most of what an advisor has to manage. In Houlihan Lokey's 2025 continuation fund study, single-asset continuation vehicles (CVs) made up 69% of sampled transactions by count, yet the median multi-asset CV was worth about $1.9 billion against roughly $330 million for a single-asset one. The two versions share a legal shell and an election mechanism but differ in concentration, diligence depth, who can lead, and how prices form. Which structure a set of assets suits, and why neither reliably prices better, comes up in the first conversation a private capital advisory (PCA) banker has with the GP.

The overview of GP-led secondaries places the CV within the wider family of manager-initiated deals. The focus here is the shared machinery of every CV, whatever it holds.

A New Fund Buying From an Old One

Legally, a CV is a new limited partnership, or a similar entity, sponsored by the same manager, with its own partnership agreement, its own investors, and its own term. The legacy fund sells the chosen companies, or its stakes in them, to the new vehicle under a purchase agreement, at a price the manager does not set alone. A lead investor, chosen through a competitive process the advisor runs, sets the price, usually quoted as a percentage of the reference-date net asset value (NAV) explained in how fund NAV is set. Because the GP sits on both sides, the fund's limited partner advisory committee (LPAC) is asked to clear the conflict, and each limited partner (LP) decides for itself whether to sell.

At closing, cash and interests move in a fixed order, and that order separates the three groups of investors a CV creates.

Where the Money Comes From and Where It Goes

The result is three classes of investor in one vehicle. Selling LPs leave with cash at the lead's price. Rolling LPs keep their exposure, though not always passively: in 68% of the transactions Houlihan Lokey reviewed, rollers had to commit their pro rata share of the new unfunded capital, one of the trade-offs weighed in LP elections and status quo terms. New investors supply almost all of the cash, and the GP's own capital sits beside theirs.

The vehicle usually raises more than the purchase price. More than 90% of the transactions in the same study included additional unfunded commitments, with a median of 17% of the NAV implied by the deal in 2025, reserved for add-on acquisitions or growth. Sometimes the new money goes straight into the company: Carrick Capital Partners' roughly $600 million single-asset vehicle for identity-security company Saviynt, closed in August 2026 with Coller Capital as lead, came with a new $255 million investment in the business as part of a larger financing round.

Fresh Capital (Continuation Vehicle)

New money committed to a continuation vehicle beyond what is needed to buy the assets and pay selling investors, usually held as unfunded commitments for add-on acquisitions, growth investment, or balance-sheet needs at the transferred companies. It is also called primary capital or a follow-on reserve.

A CV with a large reserve is partly a new investment program, so buyers underwrite the business plan the reserve will fund, not only the entry price.

New Terms for an Old Asset

A CV also restarts the clock. In Houlihan Lokey's sample, about 70% of vehicles had a base term of five years with two one-year extensions, management fees sat at or slightly below 1% of invested capital, lower than a blind-pool fund charges, and every vehicle used a tiered carry waterfall linked to the performance of the transferred assets. How the GP's carry in the old fund is crystallized and rolled, what the new tiers pay, and when premium carry applies are the subject of CV economics. For comparing structures, what matters is that the new terms are negotiated with the lead and apply to the vehicle as a whole, whether it holds one company or ten.

The same shell produces two different investments. A single-asset CV is closer to a concentrated buyout: one company, one business plan, one exit. A multi-asset CV is closer to a small closed-end fund of companies the buyer can name in advance. The table sets out the main differences, with 2025 survey figures where a survey measures them directly.

Each row traces back to one variable: how many independent outcomes the buyer is exposed to.

Concentration and Risk

In a single-asset CV, the investors' return depends on one company's earnings, one capital structure, and one exit. A missed plan cannot be offset elsewhere, and company-level leverage matters more because nothing else in the vehicle absorbs a refinancing problem. Buyers charge for that concentration risk through a higher return target: Evercore's 2025 secondary market report found single-asset GP-leds attracted the highest targets in the market, with almost all respondents aiming for 1.9x gross or more, while multi-asset targets centred on about 1.7x to 2.1x.

A multi-asset CV spreads the exposure, so a single disappointment hurts less. Diversification is not free, though: a portfolio can mix companies of very different quality, and Houlihan Lokey observed that multi-asset CVs are harder to underwrite for exactly that reason, especially when the companies span industries and geographies.

Multi-Asset Continuation Vehicle

A continuation vehicle that buys stakes in two or more portfolio companies from one or more existing funds of the same manager, so its investors hold a small, fully identified portfolio rather than a single company. It is priced as a portfolio but underwritten company by company, and it often requires the transaction value to be allocated between assets and between selling funds.

That last point is easy to miss. Houlihan Lokey found that most multi-asset CVs in its 2025 sample held companies from two or more of the sponsor's funds, so the advisor has to split one negotiated price between assets and between groups of LPs whose interests differ, and defend the split to each fund's LPAC.

Diligence Depth

A single-asset buyer underwrites the company much as a buyout investor would: management meetings, a quality of earnings review, the operating plan the fresh capital will fund, the debt terms, and an exit route several years out. Evercore's buyers described GP-led investing in 2025 as "asset underwriting". The questions are the ones in what makes a good LBO candidate, asked about a business the GP already knows intimately, which is why a single-asset mandate can involve as much company-level work for the advisor as an M&A sale.

A multi-asset buyer cannot go equally deep everywhere, so diligence concentrates on the largest positions and on how the portfolio behaves as a whole: the spread of expected exit dates, the correlation between companies, and how much of the value sits in one or two names. How buyers turn that work into a bid is covered in how buyers assess a continuation vehicle.

The perimeter is a diligence question before it is a pricing one: companies with a shared thesis and comparable quality are easier to underwrite than whatever the legacy fund happens to hold.

GP Alignment

Concentration raises the stakes on alignment. When all the capital rides on one company, buyers want the GP's own money and carry committed to that company on the same side as theirs. Evercore reported that premium pricing in single-asset deals was reserved for high-quality assets and strong GP alignment, and ILPA's 2023 guidance recommends that a GP roll all of any crystallized carry in almost all cases. In a multi-asset vehicle the GP's reinvestment is spread across the portfolio, so buyers judge it against the size of the whole vehicle.

The buyer pools for the two structures have grown in different directions, and the available lead capacity shapes the deals an advisor can bring to market.

Single-Asset Leads: Specialists and Buyout Firms

A single-asset deal needs a lead that can diligence a company and hold a large, concentrated position, and two kinds of capital have been built for it. Dedicated secondaries managers have raised single-asset funds: Carlyle AlpInvest closed its second such fund at a $1.7 billion hard cap in July 2026, against a $1 billion target, bringing its single-asset CV capacity across vehicles to $7 billion. Buyout firms have entered as leads too. Leonard Green & Partners closed Sage, its first program focused mainly on other managers' single-asset continuation funds, at more than $3.6 billion in January 2026, and in March 2026 Sage led and fully underwrote an Ares fund's roughly $850 million continuation vehicle for security-systems integrator Convergint Technologies, with Goldman Sachs Alternatives' Vintage Strategies also investing.

Check sizes still limit the pool. In Evercore's 2025 survey, 39% of buyers said their maximum single-asset check was below $50 million and only 13% could write $300 million or more, so a large single-asset CV depends on a lead willing to take a big position and a syndicate of smaller checks behind it. Diversified secondaries funds also watch how much of their capital any one company represents. How the lead's terms are set and the remainder is placed is covered in lead investors and syndication.

Multi-Asset Leads and the Evergreen Bid

Multi-asset CVs draw on a broader pool. Houlihan Lokey found that lead commitments skewed larger for multi-asset deals, reflecting the capital available for diversified portfolios. Lazard named evergreen and '40 Act funds, vehicles registered under the Investment Company Act of 1940 that must put inflows to work quickly in diversified assets, as natural buyers of multi-asset CVs, and cited investors' focus on managing concentration as a reason the segment stayed large.

Leonard Green has used the structure as a seller as well. In December 2023 it closed a continuation fund with about $2 billion of commitments holding four companies from two of its buyout funds (SRS Distribution, ExamWorks, Veritext, and Troon Golf), led by AlpInvest with Carlyle AlpInvest Private Markets also participating and Evercore as financial advisor. Existing LPs could roll on the same terms or take full liquidity.

The 2023 vehicle also illustrates a difference in timing. Home Depot agreed in March 2024 to buy SRS Distribution and completed the acquisition in June 2024 at an enterprise value of about $18.25 billion, so the continuation fund realized one of its four companies within months of forming. That pattern matches the HEC Paris study summarized in Evercore's report: multi-asset CVs have produced distributions earlier than single-asset ones, whose investors usually wait for a single exit.

The pricing evidence looks one-sided at first. Houlihan Lokey found that single-asset CVs generally priced above multi-asset ones in its 2025 sample, with a median price across all CVs of 97.0% of reference-date NAV. Lazard's 2025 secondary market report put about 87% of buyout single-asset CVs above 90% of NAV, in line with 2024, against about 84% of multi-asset CVs, down from 88%; about 8% of single-asset deals priced above 101% of NAV, against about 1% of multi-asset deals.

Higher Targets, Higher Prices

The puzzle is that the same buyers demand more from single-asset deals. Lazard's respondents targeted a multiple on invested capital (MOIC) of about 2.2x and an internal rate of return (IRR) of about 20.6%, net of the GP's fees and carry, on single-asset CVs, against 2.0x and 19.3% on multi-asset ones. A higher required return should mean a lower price for the same asset. The resolution is selection: GPs put their strongest companies into single-asset vehicles, the "trophy" assets both Lazard and Houlihan Lokey credit for the pricing, and a buyer who projects more growth can pay close to NAV and still reach a higher target. Houlihan Lokey also found single-asset pricing tended to fall with fund age, with younger funds and investments commanding better prices, another sign that price follows the asset rather than the wrapper.

The two targets also imply a holding period. If all the cash came back on one date, the years needed to turn a multiple into an IRR would be:

For the single-asset target, the natural log of 2.2 divided by that of 1.206 gives about 4.2 years; for the multi-asset target, 2.0 and 1.193 give about 3.9 years. Both sit close to the roughly four-year liquidity horizon Evercore's respondents anchor their targets to. Real CVs distribute unevenly, so this is a consistency check, not a forecast.

When the Portfolio Wins

Diversification can support a tighter price when the companies are of similar quality: a buyer facing several independent outcomes accepts a lower target, and a lower target supports a higher bid. What pulls multi-asset prices down in practice is dispersion inside the perimeter. The illustration below uses one GP with five companies and simple, hypothetical bids.

A single-asset CV on company A clears at par; a CV on all five clears at 93%. The lower headline says nothing against diversification: A is valued identically in both, and the gap comes entirely from D and E. Drop them and the other three price at 97.5%. The opposite case is just as possible, since a single-asset CV on a heavily indebted, cyclical company can clear well below a portfolio of steady ones. The useful question for the advisor is which perimeter produces the best outcome for the selling and rolling LPs, not which structure prices better on average.

Survey data on the split between the two structures agree on direction but not on basis, and each is only readable alongside its measurement basis:

All four point toward single-asset deals, but they measure different quantities, and multi-asset CVs remain the larger deals one by one. The latest breakdown by structure is in the GP-led market and the single-asset CV shift.

Hold periods explain part of the appeal. The single-asset CVs Houlihan Lokey reviewed came from funds about seven years old, holding companies bought about five years earlier. Add a new base term of around five years and return targets anchored to about four, and total ownership by the same manager can approach ten years.

Strip-Style and Partial-Stake CVs

Not every CV takes the whole position. Evercore's glossary treats a strip sale as the sale of a portion of asset interests carried out as part of a broader sale or continuation vehicle transaction, and some CVs buy only part of a company, or a slice across several, with the legacy fund keeping the rest. Partial transfers leave the old and new funds as co-owners, which raises its own questions about governance and the timing of the eventual exit, and the related structures are compared in tender offers and strip sales.

Second Continuation Vehicles

A CV can itself end in another CV. CapVest moved radiopharmaceutical group Curium into a second continuation vehicle in late 2025, after a first one in 2020. Houlihan Lokey calls these CV-squared transactions and found them still limited, typically reserved for assets with a compelling thesis for the next stage of growth and a clear exit path.

CV-Squared (Second Continuation Vehicle)

A continuation vehicle that buys an asset already held by an earlier continuation vehicle of the same manager, giving that vehicle's investors a new sell-or-roll choice and resetting the term and economics a second time.

The single-asset and multi-asset labels describe a vehicle on the day it closes, not over its whole life. A multi-asset CV that sells its strongest company early, as Leonard Green's did with SRS, becomes a smaller, more concentrated portfolio, and its last holding can end up as exposed as any single-asset deal, while a single-asset CV that needs more time can seed a second vehicle. The structural choice is best judged by what the perimeter does at closing to the investors on each side: the selling LPs who take the price, and the rolling LPs and new investors who take the risk that follows.