The comments came during the firm’s second-quarter earnings call, where Ares reported record fundraising and said it is seeing improving deployment opportunities across credit, infrastructure and secondaries while increasingly using AI to improve investment decisions and operating efficiency.
Ares raised a record $36 billion during the quarter, pushing assets under management to approximately $671 billion, up 17% from a year earlier, while fee-paying assets climbed 17% to roughly $410 billion.
CEO Michael Arougheti said institutional investors remain significantly under-allocated to private credit despite years of growth in the asset class.
He pointed to Ares’ latest Pathfinder Fund III, which raised $8.5 billion against a $6.5 billion target and reached its hard cap in a single fundraising round, as evidence that institutional appetite continues to accelerate.
“I think at this moment in time… people perceive an opportunity to capture excess return given a shift in the competitive set, meaning spreads have widened, less competition, and therefore an ability to deploy maybe quicker at better returns,” Arougheti told analysts.
