The UBS Preview Club in Union Square is a red leather couch-mahogany wood place, and as good a spot as any to inhale coffee at 9 AM.
Since moving back to New York, I’ve resolved to cover private equity more (after all, New York is the private equity capital of…everywhere). So, that’s how I landed at the PitchBook’s 2026 Private Equity Outlook event earlier this week.
And a couple things are really clear: First, that the last couple years in private equity have been complicated, and that heading into this year there’s a lot of “there’s good news, and there’s bad news.”
The good news: Exits are up, with 2025 coming in as the second-best year for exits ever surpassed only by 2021, according to PitchBook data. That amounts to just over 1,600 exits, and nearly $730 billion in terms of exit value.
“While it’s a really nice rebound, you really need to see that momentum sustained in the year ahead to make up for that lost time from 2022 through 2024,” said Kyle Walters, PitchBook private equity research analyst. “A lot of sponsors remained on the sidelines, waiting for what they deemed to be a better exit environment, and now it finally seems that that exit environment has arrived.”
