Luxembourg's private equity body grows to 701 members and elects new board amid global squeeze

Luxembourg's private equity and venture capital industry delivered an upbeat health-check this week, even as the wider business it serves remains caught in one of its toughest fundraising stretches in years.

At its annual general meeting on 17 June, held at the offices of BNP Paribas in Luxembourg-Kirchberg, the Luxembourg Private Equity & Venture Capital Association (LPEA) presented its 2025 annual report and elected its governing board. The headline number was membership: the body said it ended 2025 with 701 members, after adding 104 new ones over the year — a 17.4% increase, according to the association. Of the newcomers, 39 were investors and fund managers, including several family offices.

The growth extends a steady run for the trade group, which marked its 15th anniversary in 2025. A year earlier it had counted 597 members, and roughly 630 by the middle of last year, according to figures published by Paperjam. By the day after this year's meeting, the LPEA put its tally at 702.

A new board for the next phase

Members re-elected ten representatives of fund houses to the association's roughly 30-strong board for three-year terms, drawn from some of the largest names in the asset class. They are:

• Martine Kerschenmeyer (Advent International)
• Jacob Bang-Olsen (Astorg)
• Tudor Sambritchi (Blackstone)
• Estelle Beyl Vodouhe (Carlyle)
• Antoine Servais (CVC Capital Partners)
• Mehdi Van Renterghem (EQT)
• Bjorn Tremmerie (European Investment Fund)
• Hans-Jürgen Schmitz (Mangrove Capital Partners)
• Sophie Bajwa (Marguerite)
• Claude de Raismes (Wendel)

The association is led by president Hind El Gaidi, head of Luxembourg at the alternative asset manager ICG, who was elected to the role in 2025 in succession to Claus Mansfeldt. Stéphane Pesch, chief executive since 2020, remains in day-to-day charge. The keynote at this year's gathering came from John Penning, managing director of the Luxembourg investment company Luxempart, who reflected on a decade at the firm and on family-office governance.

The meeting also underscored the LPEA's five-year strategy for 2025 to 2030, organised around three pillars it labels “Defend”, “Attract” and “Educate & Connect” — shorthand for lobbying on regulation, drawing managers and investors to the Grand Duchy, and training the local ecosystem. The association said its flagship LPEA Insights conference drew more than 1,300 participants.

As we move through 2026, the industry continues to navigate a balanced outlook: conscious of the challenges ahead, yet well-equipped to capture opportunities emerging from a more disciplined and maturing market environment.

That assessment, from El Gaidi, captures the cautious optimism running through the report. Pesch struck a similar note, saying 2025 “was marked by celebration, renewal and progress” and pointing to “the strength and resilience of Luxembourg's Private Equity and Venture Capital community”.

A big hub in a hard market

The buoyant membership figures sit against a far more strained global backdrop. Private equity spent much of the past three years digesting the end of the cheap-money era, as higher interest rates throttled dealmaking and slowed the pace at which funds could sell holdings and return cash to investors.

According to Bain & Company's Global Private Equity Report 2026, the asset class staged a partial rebound last year: global buyout deal value rose 44% to $904 billion and buyout-backed exit value jumped 47% to $717 billion. But the recovery was narrow. Overall deal and exit counts fell, and the money flowing back to limited partners — the pension funds, insurers and sovereign investors who supply the capital — stayed near multidecade lows, at roughly 14% of net asset value for a fourth consecutive year. Fundraising remained the pinch point: buyout funds raised $395 billion in 2025, down 16% on the prior year, with Bain describing the act of closing a new fund as “a slow and difficult slog”.

That squeeze matters acutely for Luxembourg, because the Grand Duchy's role in private equity is overwhelmingly as the place where funds are domiciled, administered and serviced, rather than where deals are struck. When managers struggle to raise and deploy capital, the downstream work that sustains the country's financial centre feels it too.

Why Luxembourg keeps gaining ground

For now, the structural pull of the jurisdiction appears to be outrunning the cyclical chill. Luxembourg is the world's second-largest investment fund domicile after the United States, with total assets in domiciled funds of about €7.6 trillion as of August 2025, according to industry guides compiled by Chambers and Partners and Luxembourg for Finance. Private equity has become one of the fastest-growing slices of that market: it accounts for roughly a quarter of the country's alternative fund assets and expanded about 20% in 2024, on figures from the financial regulator, the CSSF.

The Grand Duchy's dominance is starkest in cross-border vehicles. Industry data cited in the same guides put Luxembourg as the home of 51.5% of all European private equity and venture capital funds, and of 137 of the 236 European Long-Term Investment Funds (ELTIFs) registered globally as of September 2025 — a retail-friendly structure managers are increasingly using to court wealthy individuals as institutional money tightens.

Whether membership growth translates into fresh assets will depend on how quickly the global thaw broadens beyond a handful of elite managers. But the LPEA's annual stocktake suggests that, for a hub built on servicing the industry rather than betting on it, Luxembourg is so far weathering the downturn from a position of strength.