Ahead of SuperReturn Asia, three shifts are changing not just the opportunity set, but how LPs assess it. Venture managers are rethinking holding periods and exits, the growth of private wealth is putting evergreen liquidity and alignment under closer scrutiny, and AI is moving deeper into sourcing, diligence and portfolio management. We look at what those changes mean for manager selection, portfolio construction and due diligence.

Venture capital 2.0: Recovery is not a reset

Mohamed Eissa, described the challenge last year [1].

Venture capital remains one of the most powerful engines for innovation and company building, but the asset class is at an inflection point
Mohamed Eissa, Global Head of Venture Capital and Direct Investments at the International Finance Corporation

Liquidity, performance and longer private holding periods were forcing investors to reconsider what the venture model should look like. The current numbers give that debate a new backdrop.

VC-backed companies in Asia raised $50.8 billion across 2,676 deals in Q2 2026, the region’s strongest quarter since Q4 2021, according to KPMG. China accounted for $35.1 billion. But this does not look like a simple return to the last venture cycle. AI, robotics, semiconductors, infrastructure, advanced manufacturing and alternative energy attracted significant investment during the quarter, with corporate and government capital playing an outsized role in some of the largest financings [2]. That fits Eissa’s argument that venture needs to move beyond a purely software-centric playbook and towards areas where technology meets the physical world – from manufacturing automation and healthcare delivery to climate infrastructure, data centres and specialised chips. Individual Asian markets are also developing models of their own.

Sandeep Murthy, Lightbox Ventures, put the India challenge particularly memorably.

The Google of India is Google, and the OpenAI of India is OpenAI
Sandeep Murthy, Partner, Lightbox Ventures

Rather than attempting to reproduce Silicon Valley, Murthy pointed to opportunities to build fundamental businesses in industries that remain fragmented or under-organised – sometimes requiring higher ownership, longer time horizons and greater investor involvement.

The bigger point is that a recovery in venture funding does not necessarily mean a return to the old venture model.

Liquidity: No longer an afterthought

Holding an exceptional business for longer can make perfect sense. The harder part is reconciling that with LPs that need cash back. Murthy summed it up simply.

Liquidity is the oxygen in the system that enables everyone to feel OK.
Sandeep Murthy, Partner, Lightbox Ventures

Managers are becoming more deliberate about how they solve for it. Nikhil Kapur, General Partner at Grayscale Ventures, described splitting his portfolio into quartiles and taking different approaches to each: holding the strongest businesses, considering partial secondary sales where appropriate and using strategic exits elsewhere. That is a useful shift in thinking. The choice is not necessarily between holding the winner forever and selling it for DPI. Partial liquidity can allow investors to return capital while retaining exposure to an asset they still believe can compound.

SuperReturn Asia’s 2026 Venture Capital Summit reflects that tension directly, with exits, IPO markets and secondary liquidity among the topics on the programme. As companies stay private for longer, liquidity is becoming less of an end-of-fund problem and more of an ongoing portfolio-management decision.

Private wealth: Opening the gates, testing the plumbing

The prospect of significantly more private wealth entering private markets was already raising uncomfortable questions among institutional investors.

A wash of money coming into any asset class is broadly negative. I worry if all this capital can be digested.
A family-office investor

The concern was not simply that more money would enter private assets. It was what that money might do to pricing, return expectations, co-investment allocations and alignment between investors in traditional closed-end funds and those entering through evergreen structures. The pool of potential capital is substantial.

PwC forecasts high-net-worth assets across Asia-Pacific to reach $52.4 trillion by 2030, while private markets are expected to account for a growing share of the region’s asset and wealth management revenues [3]. But the events of 2026 have also provided a useful reminder that liquidity in private assets has limits.

In June, Partners Group disclosed that redemption requests in its Global Value SICAV private equity evergreen fund had reached approximately 9.8% of NAV for the second quarter. The vehicle then operated its existing quarterly liquidity limit of 5% of NAV – a feature designed to protect long-term investors and keep portfolio decisions from being driven by short-term flows [4]. That does not mean the evergreen model is broken. The limits are part of how these structures are designed. But it makes one warning from last year particularly relevant:

I refuse to call these liquid vehicles… Private markets are illiquid
Managing Director, asset management firm

Access can change. The underlying assets do not suddenly become liquid.

For investors, that puts the focus on redemption terms, portfolio construction, valuation policies and how capital and investment opportunities are allocated between evergreen and closed-end vehicles.

AI: From experiment to investment infrastructure

AI adoption has moved quickly. Ash Gupta, Partner at Albourne, said last year that the proportion of managers in its annual GP survey with an AI policy had risen from two-thirds to 88%, with use increasing across investment processes, business development, finance and operations.

More interesting than the adoption rate are the use cases. Managers described AI-assisted CRM systems, proprietary sourcing tools and automated analysis of founder and portfolio-company data. LP applications included extracting information from audited statements, LPAs and PPMs, comparing GP pipelines with deals in the market, improving benchmarking and experimenting with predictive fund-performance analysis.

Those practical applications increasingly match the direction of the wider industry. Deloitte’s 2026 Asia-Pacific Private Equity Almanac describes AI as influencing the full investment lifecycle, from sourcing and execution to operations, value creation and exits [5]. It also stresses that practical adoption remains uneven. That distinction is important. Most managers can now access increasingly powerful AI tools. The advantage is more likely to come from what sits around them: proprietary data, investment judgement, workflows and the ability to integrate the technology into how the firm actually operates. LP scrutiny is developing alongside adoption.

Marius Chirila, the European Investment Bank, said investors would increasingly want transparency around where GPs were deploying AI and the governance surrounding it.

Blind reliance on AI at either LP or GP level introduces new risks.
Marius Chirila, Head of Institutional and Strategic Funds, the European Investment Bank

The question is moving on from Do you use AI?

It is becoming: What are you using it for, what data sits underneath it, and is it actually making the investment process better?

The playbook is changing

Taken together, these developments point to more than three fashionable themes. Venture capital is recovering, but the technologies, ownership models and exit strategies receiving capital are changing. Private wealth is broadening access, but it is also forcing a closer examination of liquidity and alignment. AI is speeding up investment processes while raising new questions around governance, data and implementation.

The opportunity is significant, but execution increasingly matters as much as access. Those issues will be explored at SuperReturn Asia, 28 September–1 October 2026 at Marina Bay Sands Convention Centre in Singapore, including dedicated Venture Capital, Private Wealth and AI & Deep Tech summits alongside the main conference. The private markets model in Asia is not being replaced overnight. But in several important areas, the next version is already taking shape.

References

[1] SuperReturn LP Insights: Asia.
[2] KPMG, Venture Pulse Q2 2026 – Asia.
[3] PwC, Asset and Wealth Management Revolution Asia-Pacific.
[4] Partners Group, evergreen platform update, June 2026.
[5] Deloitte, 2026 Asia Pacific Private Equity Almanac.