Goldman Sachs Asset Management Wins PEI Secondaries Buyer of the Year, Americas

Goldman Sachs Asset Management's Vintage Strategies team, sitting inside Goldman Sachs Alternatives, won Secondaries Buyer of the Year in the Americas at Private Equity International's Secondaries Investor Awards 2025, the firm announced March 9. The recognition is part of a broader sweep: Goldman Sachs Alternatives also collected honors across real estate and private credit categories from publications including Private Equity Real Estate, Private Debt Investor, and several others over the same awards cycle.

PEI published the Americas winners on March 2, a week before Goldman's internal announcement. The awards program, now in its second year, had a judging panel of PEI Group editors selecting winners and runners-up from hundreds of submissions after vetting finalists compiled from news sources and direct submissions.

The win lands as the Vintage Strategies team is coming off its largest fundraise yet. Goldman Sachs Asset Management closed Vintage IX at $14.2 billion, well past its $12 billion target, drawing capital from institutional investors, wealthy clients, and bank employees. A separate inaugural fund, Vintage Infrastructure Partners, closed at roughly $1 billion. Together the two vehicles raised more than $15 billion for strategies that buy secondary positions in existing private equity funds.

Harold Hope, global head of secondaries at Goldman Sachs Asset Management, described the core mechanics in a Reuters interview around the same period. "What we do in our secondaries business is really go in and provide liquidity to investors in these funds, who wanted to get out before their natural termination," Hope said. "The vintage fund that we just raised will come in, look at the value of your assets, negotiate with you, agree on a price and then we'll buy you out of that investment."

Hope also pointed to continuation vehicles as a growing part of the opportunity set. These structures allow private equity firms to roll older portfolio companies into new funds rather than selling them outright, a workaround that has gained traction as PE firms struggle to return capital to limited partners who are already heavily allocated to the asset class.

Goldman Sachs manages over $3 trillion in assets under supervision globally as of December 31, 2024, with the Alternatives platform representing one of its highest-margin businesses within asset management. The Secondaries Awards recognition covers activity and performance in 2024, the period during which Vintage IX was in market and the infrastructure vehicle was being assembled.