Ardian experts champion preparation and process in changing markets at IPEM Global 2026

Ardian brought two perspectives to that conversation. Emmanuel Miquel, Head of Buyout France and Managing Director, joined the Private Equity Summit panel on what leading sponsors are seeing inside their deal pipelines. Carole Barnay, Deputy Head of Europe Co-Investment and Senior Managing Director, spoke during a session titled "Co-investments: sophistication over syndication." 

Emmanuel Miquel: the pipeline rewards preparation

Miquel's starting point was selectivity. Ardian's Buyout team concentrates on four conviction sectors: health and wellness, food value chain, B2B essential services and applied technologies. That focus enables the team to leverage their extensive sector knowledge built over 30 years of experience, select the most relevant and attractive assets in its segments, and build trusting relationships with a management team well before a process begins. This results in a strong investment thesis together with industry experts and experienced senior advisors.

It also shapes how the team considers exits and liquidity events. Nine exits and roughly $5 billion of processes over the recent period have given Ardian an informed read on buyer behavior, and Miquel was direct about how that market now works. Broad auctions in Europe are becoming rarer. Exits are prepared in advance; potential bidders require education well ahead and the seller must put in the work upfront to provide context for the asset and the market around it. Prosol, a unique specialist retailer of fresh products and Frulact,  a global natural ingredient solutions platform, were the examples he returned to, businesses with fundamentals strong enough to survive that scrutiny.

Artificial intelligence has also become a fixed item in the investment case. Every due diligence at Ardian now addresses it, and a credible risk of disruption is disqualifying. 

Robot-Coupe, a global market leader in professional benchtop equipment, has for instance already benefitted from these augmented capabilities. On value creation more broadly, Miquel pushed back on the idea that buy-and-build carries all the weight. M&A can make a business more robust and more diversified, though integration, governance and systems decide whether a platform really delivers. 

Carole Barnay paints the co-investor as a strategic partner for GPs 

Barnay's panel took on the premise that the relationship between GPs and co-investors is being rewritten. Managers today place far greater value on co-investment than in the past – not as a side allocation, but as a strategic capital solution.

2025 was the fourth consecutive year of decline for the private equity market, and yet  co-investment funds raised a record $47.3 billion in 2025, according to PitchBook. Secondaries and co-investment have kept growing while the broader market contracted for the 4th consecutive year. 

Ardian's Co-Investment team manages or advises $9 billion, with deal flow drawn from its Secondaries & Primaries leading worldwide platform and from investment activity across both the United States and Europe.  

Today 70% of Ardian dealflow is pre-signing, a clear signal that co-investors have moved from being invited in post signing syndications to being actively sought after in co-underwriting partnerships. In today's market, GPs are deliberately targeting more complex situations, carve-outs, public-to-private transactions, parallel acquisitions for combination, because that is where the strongest operational value creation levers sit. These deals demand a level of sophistication where Ardian's experience and execution capabilities set it apart.  

Single-asset continuation vehicles are part of the same pattern: one third of the team's deal flow in 2025, an attractive risk-return profile, and a level of complexity that means Ardian regularly acts as lead or co-lead.  

The market has changed, and the work is evolving with it. Data has long been a competitive advantage for the team, built on Ardian's proprietary Secondaries & Primaries intelligence platform and on data scientists embedded within the investment teams. With three to six weeks to execute a co-investment, AI now extends that base: it takes out the low-value-add work, freeing time for deeper analysis, better decisions and greater selectivity. 

Two vantage points on a similar shift

Neither speaker described a market waiting to return to how it worked before. Buyout sells businesses now through bilateral conversations that start months ahead. Relationships between GPs and co-investors are now better defined as partnerships – where co-investors are active stakeholders and data-based evidence is paving the way forward.