Consider the situation facing a successful private equity manager who has spent 15 years building a firm with $20 billion in AUM. The partners who built the business have most of their personal net worth tied up in an illiquid equity stake. The firm is growing and needs capital to hire senior talent, co-invest alongside its own funds, and expand into new strategies. Selling the firm entirely is not the objective. GP stakes investing offers a middle path, per private credit manager.

Blue Owl Capital’s GP Strategic Capital platform — the successor to Dyal Capital Partners — has been executing this type of transaction for more than a decade. It holds $68.8 billion in AUM as of September 2025 and has completed more than 95 equity and debt transactions (finchannel.com/moodys-upgrades-blue-owl-bdcs-to-baa2/) since inception. GP Stakes V, the platform’s fifth dedicated flagship fund, closed at a record $12.9 billion.

The Anatomy of a GP Stakes Transaction

Blue Owl acquires a minority equity stake in a private capital management company — not a fund, but the management company itself. That distinction matters. A stake in the management company entitles Blue Owl to a share of the recurring management fees and carried interest that the GP earns on its funds, now and into the future. The partner manager retains full operational control, keeps running its investment strategies, and continues raising new funds independently.

For the selling GP, the transaction provides three things: immediate liquidity for founding partners, growth capital to invest in the business, and the backing of a scaled institutional partner. For Blue Owl Capital, it provides a stream of fee income that grows as the partner manager’s AUM grows (annualreports.com/Company/blue-owl-capital-inc) — without any direct exposure to the underlying portfolio companies the partner manager invests in.

LP Secondaries: A New Dimension

Michael Rees leads GP Strategic Capital and, in early 2026, closed a $3 billion inaugural fund focused on a related but distinct strategy: providing liquidity to private equity limited partners rather than general partners. LP secondaries address a growing constraint, as detailed in the $1.4 billion in BDC assets recently sold to institutional investors in the private equity market. Portfolio companies are being held longer as the IPO market stagnates and exit activity remains below historical norms. Limited partners who need to rebalance their portfolios or return capital to their own investors have few options — LP secondary buyers fill that gap, as detailed in the GP stakes investor’s corporate profile.

The addition of LP secondaries extends GP Strategic Capital’s footprint from the manager equity market into the fund liquidity market, giving Blue Owl Capital a position at two distinct pressure points within the broader alternatives ecosystem.