The Development and Growth of Private Markets, and a Need for Research Support Services
Published on: 9 Dec 2025
Last updated: 9 Dec 2025
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Trends and Factors Shaping the Need for Robust Data Research
Private markets have emerged as the cornerstone of modern asset management, with assets under management (AUM) surging from $13 trillion in 2023 to a projected $20 trillion by 2030, driven by a 17% year-over-year increase in 2025 deal activity reaching $451 billion.
This explosive growth in private equity, credit, infrastructure, and real estate underscores a seismic shift where institutional investors increasingly favor illiquid, high-yield opportunities over traditional public markets.
However, this expansion demands scalable, robust research support services to navigate opaque data landscapes. Outsourcing secondary data research to specialists like Ascentrik provides financial research firms with custom, triangulated intelligence, filling critical gaps in easily available and hard-to-find information to fuel data products and decision-making.
Historical Development of Private Markets
The evolution of private markets traces back to the 2008 financial crisis, when a flight to quality propelled capital from volatile public equities into alternatives, accelerated by prolonged low-interest rates and pension fund mandates for diversification.
By 2015, private equity alone had doubled its AUM to $2 trillion, setting the stage for broader adoption across asset classes. Key milestones include the private credit boom—fundraising hit $100 billion in H1 2025 alone—and the secondaries market's maturation, now valued at $150 billion annually, allowing LPs to exit positions of liquidity.
Today, private markets represent over half of global asset management revenues, forecasted at $432 billion by 2030, with infrastructure AUM growing 12% YoY to $1.2 trillion amid energy transition demands.
This scale reflects institutionalization: sovereign wealth funds, endowments, and insurers now allocate 15-20% of portfolios to privates, up from 5% a decade ago. Yet, this growth amplifies data challenges, as fragmented disclosures hinder comprehensive analysis.
Growth Drivers in 2025 and Beyond
The AI and data center boom has supercharged infrastructure, with deals in renewable energy and digital assets eclipsing $200 billion, while private credit's $542 billion dry powder targets mid-market lending gaps left by banks.
Asset class surges are pronounced: real estate transactions are outpacing 2024 by 25%, fueled by logistics and multifamily rebounds, and venture capital rebounds with late-stage tech rounds.
Regionally, emerging markets like India drive GDP-linked expansion, with private capital inflows hitting $50 billion in 2025, bolstered by policy reforms. Looking ahead, tokenized real-world assets promise a 41% CAGR through 2030, blending blockchain with privates for fractional ownership.
These drivers signal sustained momentum, but they intensify the need for real-time, granular data on fundraisings, deployments, and exits—areas where in-house capabilities often falter.
Data and Research Challenges Amid Growth
Rapid private markets expansion exposes acute pain points: opaque LP-GP dynamics, where commitments and performances hide in fragmented SEC Form ADV filings, local registries, and sporadic news.
Real-time tracking in volatile environments proves elusive, with 70% of GPs reporting disclosure fatigue amid LP transparency demands. Scalability burdens in-house teams, overwhelmed by volume—global private fund filings exceed 500,000 annually—while verification demands consume 40% of research time.
Secondary research addresses this via triangulation: cross-verifying public sources like PitchBook equivalents, industry reports, and trade publications without primary outreach costs.
For hard-to-find data, such as under-the-radar LP family offices or niche GP strategies, human-led mining uncovers insights automated tools miss. Yet, generic aggregators fall short on customisation, leaving financial platforms with stale or incomplete coverage.
The Imperative for Outsourced Research Support Services
Outsourcing to bespoke secondary research firms like Ascentrik delivers transformative benefits: custom datasets built from scratch, freshness guarantees with replacement policies, and 95%+ match rates at 30-50% lower costs than in-house expansion.
Specialists triangulate LP commitments, GP performances, and market events into proprietary intelligence, enabling product differentiation—think alerts on $10B+ fund closings or regional LP shifts.
Implementation is seamless: from needs assessment to API-integrated feeds and dashboards, streamlining coverage for DaaS platforms. Financial research organisations gain a dedicated team of domain experts layering automation with manual oversight, sourcing niche data like private debt co-investments invisible to standard databases. This one-roof solution—research, list building, CRM enrichment—frees internal analysts for high-value modeling.
Market trends affirm bespoke sourcing's future: with private markets AUM projected to hit $25 trillion by 2028, 62% of allocators seek enhanced data partners for alpha generation, per 2025 surveys. Firms outsourcing report 25% faster product launches and 15% subscriber growth.
Future Outlook and Strategic Recommendations
Projections paint a vibrant horizon: LP secondaries engagement to double to $300 billion by 2030, tokenised privates unlocking retail access, and AI-augmented research processing 10x data volumes. Yet, enduring opacity necessitates robust support from bespoke data services.
Strategically, firms should begin by auditing their current LP and GP coverage to identify where data gaps and blind spots exist in private markets. Once those priorities are clear, a practical next step is to pilot outsourced secondary research and triangulation specifically on high‑value areas such as infrastructure, private credit, or real assets.
Building on that, integrating event‑driven alerts—covering new commitments, fund closings, and key personnel changes—into client-facing platforms can deliver more proactive, real-time value for subscribers and significantly enhance user engagement.
Partner with secondary experts like Ascentrik to harness this growth, turning challenges into competitive moats. Contact Ascentrik Research today to bespoke-build your private markets edge.
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