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Is India’s secondaries market hitting an inflection point?

Kristie Neo

Fri, September 18, 2026 at 12:44 PM GMT+3 4 min read

Secondaries investing in India has long been regarded as a young, premature asset class, but not any longer. Over the past year, a growing number of Asian mid-market funds, including TR Capital, Neo Asset Management and Kenro Capital, have expanded their secondaries remit to India or launched new dedicated secondary vehicles.

Secondaries investors have sailed into India on several independent tailwinds. First, a healthier IPO market has given secondaries investors a more credible path to an exit. Second, regulators have tightened rules on primary funds and created demand for solutions from secondaries investors. Third, aging funds are putting pressure on GPs to provide liquidity.

More Indian companies are raising capital in public markets each year, driving interest among pre-IPO secondaries investors. The number of Indian IPOs jumped by over one-third to 108 listings in FY2026, while proceeds grew 8.4% to 1,761 billion INR ($18.3 billion). Of these, 35% of these were PE-backed firms, according to a KPMG report.

Meanwhile, Indian private markets have struggled. While Blackstone Asia's $13.1 billion mega-fund gave the region a boost this year, Indian fundraising has declined for four consecutive years following a 2021 peak, according to PitchBook's 2026 India Private Capital Breakdown.

After the US-Iran war erupted in February, IPO hopefuls, including Zepto, Reliance Jio Platforms and PayU, have delayed their listing plans while they wait for the market jitters to shake out. But secondaries players like 360 ONE Asset Management are just getting ready to deploy.

"We love this market that we're in," said Sameer Nath, chief investment officer of 360 ONE Asset Management, a $74 billion AUM Indian firm covering wealth, asset and alternative management.

"In just two hours, we will be sitting down on one deal that you could say was a 'broken IPO' ... Can you do a secondary deal at a price and come back to do the IPO next year? Absolutely. We have an excellent hospital asset, and it's going to come back to the IPO market later this year at 3x what we paid for it in 18 months," shared the Mumbai-based investor.

For context, Indian secondaries only became common as a strategy in the past four to five years. Even though the bulk of secondaries transacted are still in direct deals and pre-IPO cap table cleanups, the market is showing early signs of sophistication with the rise of GP-led secondaries and continuation vehicles.

Given the size and complexity of such deals, these transactions are more often led by bulge-bracket firms such as HarbourVest Partners and TPG NewQuest. While such deals remain few and opportunistic for now, experts highlight that this will only grow over time as the ecosystem matures.

Navigating red tape

India's GP-led and multi-asset secondary transactions are also driven by one additional factor: regulation. The newer regulatory frameworks, notably the Alternative Investment Funds (AIFs) structure, which caters to rupee funds, tend to face stringent regulatory requirements.

These can limit fund managers in a range of ways, such as the ability for a GP to expand its fund life beyond the standard 10 years, the size of a single asset in a CV, and certain waterfall or distribution structures.

These exclude other cost burdens such as taxes, feeder vehicle setup, and currency conversions, especially if the investor prefers to transact in US dollars.

While these may pose some hindrance to Indian primary fundraising, investors said they open new demand for secondaries players to customize bespoke solutions that can unlock liquidity while keeping investors compliant.

Demanding DPI

But even more importantly, the pool of India's aging funds is also growing larger.

India's first private equity and venture capital funds started around 2005 to 2006, which means the market has seen roughly 20 years of primary deployment.

As limited partners continue to emphasize cash distributions, the demand for liquidity solutions will only grow stronger with time, said Umang Agarwal, managing director and co-head of India at TR Capital.

"Indian IPOs contribute about two-thirds of total exits, secondaries contribute less than 20%, and M&A transactions are far fewer. If we contrast it to the global benchmark, one-third of exits have been secondaries according to the most recent vintages," said Agarwal from Bengaluru.

"Not all companies can go public at the time they want to. That's why we believe the market will start to appreciate this asset class," he added.

This article originally appeared on PitchBook News