Hamilton Lane, a US private markets investment firm with over $986 billion in assets under management and supervision, held a media roundtable event in London last week, highlighting the benefits of private markets, the AI boom and strengths in the European and Asian markets compared with the US.

Ken Binick, co-head of direct equity investments at Hamilton Lane, said he expects private markets to outperform public ones over the next few years, with infrastructure playing an important role.

At the London event, Binick highlighted that private equity has historically outperformed public equity, although 2022 and 2023 were tough years. This was due to factors such as high inflation, rising interest rates and a slowdown in merger and acquisition exits. It led to lower deal volumes and exits, decreased returns, and a less favourable environment for selling companies, despite a large amount of “dry powder” or cash still being held by firms. “US import tariffs are expected to drive inflation higher for the foreseeable future, but have recently showed signs of coming down from record high expectations,” Binick said.

“Private equity has bested liquid equities over most 10-year time periods. There are also over 140,000 private companies with annual revenues of over $100 million versus about 19,000 public companies with the same annual revenues,” he continued.

“Private equity outperformance of public markets tends to be at its greatest level during periods of mediocre or negative public market returns. Buyout has outperformed global equities in all vintage years apart from 2022 and 2023, which are still young vintages. Credit has also outperformed leveraged loans in each of the past 24 vintage years,” Binick said.

“Infrastructure has seen a similar story,” Leigh Hazelton, principal on the infrastructure team, added.  

Outlining investment opportunities in artificial intelligence, Hamza Azeem, managing director in the portfolio management group, said AI has dominated the venture capital space. “Significant upward pricing pressure has been exerted by AI deal-flow and corporate research and development spend in venture capital,” Azeem continued. “As AI’s footprint expands, exposure cannot be avoided as more than 50 per cent of venture deal volume is AI. We are seeing a lot of opportunities in the venture space.”

Hazelton said a lot of capital is going into AI. “Data centres require access to power and water, consuming equivalent water to about 100,000 homes. In 2023, energy use by the US data centre reached as much as 4.4 per cent of total US electricity consumption and this is expected to grow further,” he continued. “This creates opportunities for infrastructure in power, notably renewable energy, and water, with the most opportunities seen in power.” Despite water being a scarce resource, Hazelton sees opportunities for upgrading infrastructure for water, saying that this can benefit both data centres and households alike as infrastructure is often poor in remote areas.

Europe, Asia versus US
Looking at investment opportunities outside the US, Anita Rana, principal in the portfolio management group, said demand has been growing. “In recent years, Europe and Asia have seen significant net asset value (NAV) growth with a combined market share of 29 per cent in 2025, up from 12 per cent in 2000. Despite this...private markets NAV is still dominated by North America,” she added. “Less than one in 10 Western European buyout deals have historically been written off compared to almost one in eight deals in North America. Western Europe is the only region with a total loss ratio below the deal vintage average of 22 per cent. The Asia-Pacific region meanwhile has higher costs compared to North America and Western Europe deals, but has less full write-offs than North America.”

“There are good opportunities for cautious investors outside the US, with a lot of opportunities in Asian markets,” she continued. “We have been cautious on Asia but are now seeing some green shoots in Japan and Korea in particular,” Binick added. “There are also some interesting opportunities in the UK market.”

A number of wealth managers including Nils Rode, chief investment officer at Schroders Capital, the specialist private markets arm of UK-listed Schroders, also believe that the potential of investing in private markets to help deal with this prevailing global uncertainty has arguably never been more important. See more commentary here.

A new report from Barclays Private Bank and Wealth also highlights the role that private markets play for wealthy individuals and family offices. It shows that a majority (89 per cent) of those already actively participating in private markets view them as important for shaping their overall investment strategy, while 79 per cent of those surveyed expect to increase their allocations to private markets in the future. See here. 

See more about Hamilton Lane here.