Best Alternative Funds of 2025

Summit Partners Europe Growth Equity Fund IISummit Partners · European growth equity · 2018 vintage

Summit Partners, founded in Boston in 1984 and now managing roughly $46bn, is among the oldest names in growth equity; its London-based European team raised this €700m fund in 2017 to take minority stakes in profitable, category-leading software and healthcare companies. Its defining bet was Odoo, the Belgian open-source business-software group and a low-cost challenger to SAP and Oracle. Summit led a $90m investment in December 2019 — Odoo's first major growth-equity round — and followed with €180m in 2021. The thesis was a rare one in software: a company growing fast while remaining genuinely profitable and founder-controlled. By a November 2024 secondary led by Alphabet's CapitalG and Sequoia, Odoo was valued at €5.26bn (about $5.3bn); Summit sold down part of its holding while remaining the company's largest institutional shareholder, converting a 2019 minority position into a substantial realised gain. By the 2025 data the fund had distributed more than twice its capital in cash — a documented result, not a paper mark.

Greenbriar Equity Fund IVGreenbriar Equity Group · transport & industrials · 2018 vintage

Greenbriar Equity Group, formed in 1999 by a trio that included two former Goldman Sachs partners and based in Rye, New York, does one thing with discipline: control investments in transport, logistics, aerospace and industrial services. Fund IV produced two well-documented results. It bought the vehicle-telematics company Spireon from Bertram Capital in 2018 and sold it to Solera in February 2022 — a sale Greenbriar's own announcement attributes explicitly to "Greenbriar Equity Fund IV." And in October 2020 the firm led a $500m preferred investment in Uber Freight at a $3.3bn valuation, capital that helped fund Uber Freight's acquisition of Transplace — a business Greenbriar had itself owned years earlier. In October 2024 Uber redeemed that preferred for $851m: a 1.5x liquidation preference plus a 6% compounding dividend that delivered a contracted return even as Uber Freight's value had fallen well below the 2020 mark.

It is a textbook case of how deal structure — not just entry price — protects a return when the market moves against you.

HitecVision North Sea Opportunity FundHitecVision · European energy · 2020 vintage

HitecVision, founded in Stavanger in 1985, is Europe's leading dedicated energy private-equity house. This fund, which drew on US capital and held its final close in March 2020, was built for one timely purpose: to consolidate the late-life North Sea assets the oil majors were rushing to shed. Through its platform company NEO Energy — created in 2019 — it acquired a portfolio of non-operated UK fields from ExxonMobil for more than $1bn plus contingent payments (completed December 2021, roughly doubling NEO's output), bought Zennor Petroleum for up to $625m, and took on North Sea assets from TotalEnergies. The timing was the trade: aggregate unloved barrels through the 2020 downturn, then ride the 2021–22 energy-price rebound.

An honest caveat: much of the value still sits in the marked NEO stake rather than in booked exits, and the platform is now heading into a 2025 merger of North Sea businesses with TotalEnergies and Repsol — so the realised return is not yet fully in hand.

Epiris Fund IIIEpiris · UK mid-market buyout · 2021 vintage

Epiris is the London mid-market firm that rose from the wind-down of Electra Partners, rebranding in 2016 to pursue control buyouts of UK businesses — often complex carve-outs and take-privates. Its defining recent transaction is the £1.6bn take-private of Euromoney in 2022, executed alongside Astorg at 1,461 pence a share: Astorg took the Fastmarkets price-reporting business while the Epiris-controlled vehicle took the rest, rebranding it Delinian. The firm has also owned auction house Bonhams since 2018, scaling it through acquisitions across Europe.

Attribution, stated plainly: Fund III is tagged to a 2021 inception but held its final close — above target, at over £1bn — only in early 2024, and the Euromoney deal completed in November 2022, so it most likely sits in the prior fund or straddles the two; Bonhams is firmly a Fund II asset. Fund III's headline marks reflect a young, still-early book (just over half its capital returned), which is the right way to read a high early IRR.

Bain Capital Life Sciences Fund IIIBain Capital · biotech crossover · 2021 vintage

Bain Capital Life Sciences, established in 2016, is the healthcare arm of Bain Capital, running a "crossover" book that straddles private biotech and the public markets. The franchise's signature win is Cerevel Therapeutics, a neuroscience company spun out of Pfizer in 2018 that AbbVie agreed to buy for $8.7bn in December 2023 — a result widely reported as roughly ten times the investment.

The crucial caveat: Cerevel was created in 2018, funded by Bain's earlier life-sciences vintage alongside its private-equity arm — it is not a Fund III holding, and we don't present it as one. Fund III (2021) applies the same crossover playbook to a newer book of private and public biotech names; it also deployed at the top of the market, just before the 2022 biotech drawdown — which makes the cash it has actually returned (DPI 73%) a more meaningful signal than the IRR alone.

Portage Ventures ISagard / Portage · fintech · 2016 vintage

Portage — launched in 2016 as Portag3 Ventures, the fintech arm of Canada's Sagard and Power Corporation, by Paul Desmarais III and Adam Felesky — was built to back the digital reinvention of financial services. Its standout is Wealthsimple, the Canadian digital-wealth and banking platform, and the position is unusually well documented because Power Corporation, a listed company, discloses it. When Wealthsimple raised C$750m in May 2021 (C$250m of new capital plus a C$500m secondary) at a C$5bn valuation, the Power group disclosed an 8.3x return and roughly a 79% annualised gain on its Wealthsimple investment — and took C$500m of cash off the table in that secondary. The fund also seeded KOHO, the Canadian challenger-bank app, leading its 2017 round.

That 8.3x is the Power group's figure on its aggregate Wealthsimple stake rather than the fund's number alone — but Wealthsimple is firmly a Portage Fund I company. It is the cleanest venture story in this list: a nameable winner, with cash returned and disclosed by a public parent.

Capricorn Technology Impact Fund ICapricorn Investment Group · climate & deep tech · 2017 vintage

Capricorn Investment Group, founded in 2000 to steward the fortune of eBay's first president, Jeff Skoll, is one of the original "profit-with-purpose" investors; its first dedicated Technology Impact Fund (2017) backs deep-tech and climate companies. Its cleanest win is Nuvia, the data-centre chip start-up Capricorn co-led at Series A in 2019 and which Qualcomm acquired for about $1.4bn in early 2021 — a fast, high-multiple outcome that anchors the fund. Capricorn also held Raxium, the micro-LED display maker Google bought in 2022, and Navitas Semiconductor, which went public in 2021.

One clarification, because the firm's own marketing blurs it: the celebrated QuantumScape, SpaceX and Planet positions sit in Capricorn's separate growth fund, not this venture fund — so we credit only Nuvia, Raxium and Navitas here. The appeal is precisely that the return traces to identifiable, cash-generating exits in the deep-tech niche the firm set out to own.

Battery Ventures XIBattery Ventures · enterprise software · 2016 vintage

Battery Ventures, founded in 1983, is a multi-stage technology investor whose enterprise-software franchise helped define a generation of cloud winners; Fund XI is its 2016 vintage, which had returned roughly twice its capital in cash by the 2025 data. An honest attribution point belongs up front: Battery's most famous exits of the era — Coupa, the spend-management company Thoma Bravo took private for $8bn in 2023, and Nutanix, public since 2016 — were first backed in earlier Battery funds (Coupa as far back as 2008), not in Fund XI. What Fund XI represents is the same playbook carried into the 2016–2020 software boom: early, conviction-led positions in enterprise software, with the product-analytics company Pendo — which Battery led at Series A in 2015 — among its signature holdings of the vintage.

It is a useful illustration of a venture subtlety: the marquee logo is the firm's; the realised cash is the fund's.

General Catalyst Group VIIIGeneral Catalyst · multi-stage tech · 2016 vintage

General Catalyst, founded in 2000 and now one of the largest venture firms in the world, backed Airbnb, Stripe and Snap on its way to a platform of more than $40bn. Its 2016-vintage Group VIII — paired with a $165m "Supplemental" co-investment sleeve — sits in the era of the firm's standout healthcare exit, Livongo, the chronic-care company co-founded inside General Catalyst that IPO'd in 2019 and was acquired by Teladoc for about $18.5bn in 2020. The fund has distributed more than three times its capital in cash, an exceptional realised result.

The honest detail, from Livongo's own filings: General Catalyst held 25.4% at the IPO, but the bulk of that sat in an earlier fund (Group VI); Group VIII and its supplemental sleeve held a meaningful follow-on slice, not the whole position. As with Battery, the famous logo belongs to the firm; the cash return is what makes this specific fund stand out.

Union Square Ventures VUnion Square Ventures · networks & the open web · 2016 vintage

Union Square Ventures, founded in New York in 2003 by Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham, is among the most consistently top-ranked venture franchises, built on a thesis of networks and the open web; its funds, kept deliberately small, backed Twitter, Etsy, Coinbase and Cloudflare. This 2016 vintage returned more than four times its capital in cash by the 2025 data — a standout even among USV's vehicles.

Candour is required on attribution. USV's most celebrated outcomes belong to earlier funds — Coinbase to its 2012 early-stage fund; Cloudflare, whose 2012 Series C USV led, to an earlier vehicle — not to this 2016 fund, whose specific winners USV has not publicly detailed. We include it for the franchise's documented top-decile consistency and the fund's exceptional realised cash, while being explicit that this is the one entry where the number outruns the public, deal-by-deal story.

Apollo Accord Fund IVApollo · dislocation credit · 2021 vintage

Apollo, founded in 1990 and now managing well over $750bn — the bulk of it credit — built the Accord series in 2017 as a dedicated "dislocation" vehicle: a fund that stays patient until markets seize, then buys secured, high-quality, mispriced credit from forced sellers and exits as conditions normalise. The discipline is in the speed. The strategy's signature proof point came in the prior vintage, Accord III, which drew down roughly 75% of its capital in nine business days during the March 2020 crash; a follow-on pool then raised $1.75bn in about eight weeks to keep buying. Fund IV closed in February 2021 at $2.34bn as the dry-powder vehicle for the volatility Apollo expected to follow.

Its fingerprint is unmistakable — a high distributed-to-paid-in ratio on a low multiple, the mark of a fast realise-and-return book. The model has since scaled into Apollo's multi-billion "Accord+" line.

Silver Point Distressed Opportunity FundSilver Point Capital · distressed · 2019 vintage

Silver Point Capital was founded in 2002 in Greenwich, Connecticut by Edward Mulé and Robert O'Shea — the former Goldman Sachs partners who had built that bank's distressed and special-situations lending businesses. The firm now runs more than $48bn and is a fixture on the creditor committees of the largest restructurings. This 2019-vintage distressed fund is a study in vintage timing: raised before the pandemic, it had dry powder ready exactly as the March 2020 dislocation forced credit to be sold cheaply, and it harvested through the 2021 recovery. The strategy is fundamental and process-led — buying impaired debt and driving value through restructurings rather than trading market beta.

The clearest external validation came in 2024, when Silver Point closed a $4.6bn successor for the same opportunistic-credit strategy — more than double the predecessor and above target — the kind of commitment LPs reserve for managers who have delivered through a cycle.

Oaktree Special Situations Fund IIOaktree Capital Management · special situations · 2018 vintage

Oaktree Capital Management — founded in 1995 by Howard Marks and Bruce Karsh, now roughly 62%-owned by Brookfield and managing some $209bn — is the name most synonymous with distressed investing. Its Special Situations strategy is the hybrid corner of the house: part distressed credit, part private equity, taking control of fundamentally sound companies caught in balance-sheet stress, typically in $100–300m positions held three to six years and overwhelmingly in North America. The 2018 vintage was well placed by the accident of timing, with capital to deploy into both the 2020 shock and the 2022–23 squeeze as higher rates exposed over-levered balance sheets. Because the holds are long and value is built through restructuring rather than market beta, cash returns late — so a fund already at roughly its money back in distributions is a healthy signpost.

The franchise's pull is visible in the follow-on: the successor fund closed at $3bn in 2023, oversubscribed and about 30% larger than this one.

VSS Structured Capital IIIVSS Capital Partners · lower-mid-market mezzanine · 2016 vintage

VSS Capital Partners — the New York firm that began in 1987 as Veronis Suhler Stevenson — has spent nearly four decades in a quiet corner of the market: the lower-middle market, where it gives founder-owned companies in healthcare, education and business services a hybrid of subordinated debt and minority equity. The structure is the strategy: the debt provides contractual income and downside protection while the equity slice captures the upside when these small companies are sold. This 2016 fund, $310m in size, is now substantially harvested — and, rare for a fund this small, it earned outside recognition, named "Performance of the Year" in the sub-$500m mezzanine category at the 2025 Private Equity Wire US Awards, judged on the year's actual performance data. (At the manager level, VSS was also ranked the top global mezzanine firm in PitchBook's 2025 league tables.)

It is the clearest example here of how a disciplined, unglamorous income-plus-upside structure compounds into a top-decile return.

ICG Europe Mid-Market FundIntermediate Capital Group · European structured credit · 2019 vintage

Intermediate Capital Group, founded in London in 1989 and now a FTSE 100 manager with around $107bn, helped invent European mezzanine finance; its Europe Mid-Market strategy makes directly originated, privately negotiated investments — subordinated debt paired with equity — in mid-sized companies across the continent. This was the debut fund in that dedicated series, closed at €1bn in 2019, and it has done what a credit fund should: by the manager's account it returned 71% of capital with four exits all ahead of target and eleven companies still held.

The validation was emphatic. In March 2025 ICG closed the successor at €3bn — triple the size, oversubscribed at a raised hard cap, with a global roster of sovereign, pension and insurance investors. Tripling a fund is the surest signal LPs can send that the first one worked.