Co-investment program primer

November 2020

Co-investments have become increasingly popular among many private equity investors as a way to efficiently invest in private equity.

As further detailed below, co-investments have features making them attractive for investors, but come with their own sets of considerations. While we begin with a general discussion of co-investments, the execution and deployment portions of this paper focus on processes and considerations for investors that have investment staff. We recommend that investors looking to build their own portfolio of co-investments carefully review their capabilities to successfully execute co-investments, and look to develop strategy and staffing to build and maintain a multi-year co-investment program. Alternatively, an investor can hire one or more managers to execute a co-investment program either as a separate account or invest in a comingled co-investment fund.