All right. Hello, everyone, welcome to our next session. I'm Ben Budish, Barclays analyst, covering the U.S. brokers, asset managers, and exchanges. And, with us for this chat is Todd Sisitsky, president of TPG. Todd, thanks so much for being with us.
Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Thanks. Maybe just to jump in some background on TPG. You know, the company was founded in 1992, but was one of the more recent IPOs among the alternative asset managers. So maybe for those less familiar with the story, can you give a brief overview of the company? You know, what differentiates TPG from a strategic and cultural standpoint?
Sure, well, first I'll start off. I've been here about 21-22 years now, so I'm like a part of the furniture at this point. And I think I've stayed really for a combination of reasons, and I've. I think that's, it's one of the reasons we've had such consistency in our people and why we have so much tenure and it feels we've all grown up together. On the cultural side, actually, our heritage does really play a role in how we think about our jobs, and I think why people enjoy working there. We started not on Wall Street, but really as a family office. It was originally. The founders came from the Bass family office, and so I feel like there's a bit of a service mentality.
It's a very low ego environment. It's very flat as an organization, and I'll come back to a little bit more in a moment, but I think that the culture for us really is a strategy, and I'll elaborate on that in a moment. As I think about strategy, this is an industry with a tremendous number of incredibly smart people, and we try to apply to ourselves the same discipline that we ask our companies to apply as it relates to their strategy. In a competitive world, that's only becoming more competitive, how do you focus on what you're really good at? Make sure that you've resourced yourself around that, and how do you make sure that you continue to build your competitive advantages every year?
And I think we start by, you know, particularly discovered this during the financial crisis, outlawing FOMO. So we do not worry about how other people make their money. We do not worry about the number of great competitors we have out there that might pursue very different strategies and might be very valid strategies. We just try to be very good at what we're doing. For us, that means picking our spots.
On the sourcing side, what it really means is we are students of our sectors. We're students of our themes, and we try to pursue those and really try to figure out what's interesting, not just chase what's actionable, but really try to pursue what's interesting, to create opportunities that we think are well-positioned from a secular growth standpoint, and where we really build conviction over years, not you know, not over months or over a few chaperoned hours with a management team. Then secondarily, we want to invest in places where we can inflect the growth of an already growing company. That entails having an operating capability, so we have folks that are from the financial backgrounds and from operating backgrounds. Same bonus pool, same promote pool, sitting side by side as partners running these groups together.
And we tend to be very patient, very deliberate. We celebrate what we think of as the inputs to these interesting deals, and we never feel pressure to chase what happens to be available. I think that's put us in a lot of interesting situations, you know, over the years. People ask me sometimes: Are you a contrarian investor? And we have been at times, but really I think it's more as just independent-minded investors. So we were doing leveraged buyouts or levered investments in technology in the mid-1990s when everyone thought that that was an oxymoron, leveraged in technology. I think our first buyout was in 1996 or 1997 in the technology space. We were early investors, even as large check investors in Airbnb and Uber.
You know, our healthcare franchise is, has been investing really for the full three decades of the firm, is one of the largest, the global franchise, one of the largest investors in healthcare. And there are a number of spaces that historically have not been the center of the fairway for private equity, and we've had a lot of success there. Most recently in climate and impact investing, and I think we'll probably talk about it a little bit more later, but we've been really innovators and I think have approached the space quite differently, and I think as a result, have had a lot of success and have established ourselves.
I think at this point, we have $19 billion of assets under management, after, you know, less than a decade focusing in and have a pathway to $35 billion by early 2026. So in any event, we've had a lot of benefits, I think, by trying to be students of our sectors and thinking about where opportunities might emerge over time and where we want to put our energy against it. Back just for a moment to the culture point, which is really important to us. It is differentiating. It's a very flat organization. It's. I don't think I ever remember hearing someone yell or run down the hallways in my 22 years of being at the firm, and everybody is really on the front line.
So I, you know, I've had only one continuous job since I joined TPG, which is as a healthcare investor, co-leading the TPG Capital Healthcare efforts. And we have a lot of co's, actually, of all of our business units, co-leaders, because everybody remains active on the investing front. We want to keep our experienced folks in the field. At the same token, we have open investment committees. Every member of the firms is not only invited to participate, but expected to participate when they have a point of view, particularly on their own deals. And I think that reflects a recognition that this is going to be a humbling business, and there's no group that has a monopoly on investment judgment. And ultimately, the proof is in the pudding.
So in the twenty-two years that I've been, you know, as a TPG healthcare investor in that capital business unit, we've never lost a person that's led a deal or been number two on a deal. It's like Hotel California, you know, there's a lot of continuity, and we even though we spend more time with each other than we do with our own spouses, we really, I think, you know, it's a place that people like to work and where we've had great continuity from a human capital standpoint.
... Maybe let's ask one more, kind of high-level question before we dig into some of the businesses. Maybe just to set the stage, talk a little bit about what you're seeing in the current market environment. You know, on the August call, you said it seems like we're in a period of new higher volatility, more imminent rate cuts, heightened geopolitical risk. You know, how is this going to impact the economy, the business, the companies into which you invested, and realization outlook? I mean, there's a lot in there, but, you know, the high level of what's happening in the world question.
Well, it felt like at the time we were in earnings season, and today, that it almost just depended on the day as to whether people were. I mean, since the market's up today, everything's great. I take that now. But I think this is definitely a moment of greater volatility. And you know, candidly, I think this is a moment where it is tricky as an investor because there's probably a little less clarity and a little more opacity in terms of the global economic environment, some of the geopolitical risks.
For us in that environment, first of all, we're long-term investors, but we also, in those situations, in those environments, take the opportunity to really just double down on our strategy and double down on our playbook and focus on those areas that we've built conviction over, again, years, that we understand and know which companies we want to partner with, which CEOs we want to partner with. And so we have found some of the most interesting investments in my career, probably in the last few years, even at a moment where we're modeling multiple compression between the investment and the exit. And I think that's in large part a function of how we go to market.
You know, the other, I mean, there's not any question, the other thing that people ask when we're meeting with investors is, how are we seeing this global uncertainty reflect itself in our portfolio? And the answer is, perhaps in part because we're focused on businesses that are solidly growing, where we can inspect their growth curve, our portfolio has been performing quite well. So I think as of June 30, our private equity portfolio was up 18% on a revenue basis. And actually, net margins have... were a little better than that. So EBITDA was up low twenties. And on the other sort of business that we get asked about a lot is the middle market direct lending business, Twin Brook. That business has continued to perform very well.
You know, it's a sort of lower middle market business, so we have two covenants in every deal, you know, tend to be the sole lender, but the business has a you know, one basis point loss ratio since its inception. The watch list is very steady, so it hasn't increased. So we're seeing a lot of health in our portfolio, but again, it's a time to be cautious. In my opinion, to your original question on differentiated strategy in the competitive market, it's time to stick to your knitting in the areas where you feel really comfortable.
Jumping to private equity a little bit, you know, maybe another kind of high-level question. You know, how are LPs thinking about private equity these days, given more mature allocations, and maybe thinking about where we are versus the last few years and have lower levels of DPI impacted the ability to raise here?
Yes, I mean, it has been an interesting moment in private equity. I mean, when we went public a few years ago, we characterized the period we're going into as a fundraising super cycle, primarily for private equity, which was a big portion of our asset management, particularly then, and you know, I'm happy to tell you that those fundraisings, I think there were four of our flagship funds, were successful. They all were up, I think, 12% on average, but it did take a little bit longer. I think it is an environment where the fundraising fundamentals are a little bit more challenging, you know, from our standpoint, actually, first, it varies quite a bit by market.
So the U.S. pension fund market, and that's still a very important market for us with some of our most important partners, that has had more capacity issues. And so that's, you know, an area where you have investors that are really picking their partners and down-selecting to the folks that they want to have multiple relationships across multiple asset classes with. And that's what we're seeing in that part of the market. There are other parts of the market, the Middle East, Asia, that continue to be quite healthy and growing, and you see that in the composition of our investor base.
If you look at TPG Capital Asia, I think we went from more or less a third of the institutional LP base coming from Asia and the Middle East to a little over half in the most recent fund. That's a fund-over-fund evolution. We're building and investing in our capital raising capabilities. There are, of course, a lot of opportunities which we'll get to, I'm sure, in the retail space, which we're pursuing aggressively in insurance and elsewhere. But it is definitely a case that there are some parts of the market that are more challenging from a fundraising perspective.
I would tell you that the other thing that is implicit in all that is sort of what is the criteria? How are people deciding who to work with? One of the main criteria is certainly the liquidity that's getting returned to them. So we try to apply as much discipline as we do around liquidity and exits, as we do the investment decisions. And you know, for us, in TPG Capital, for example, about 60% of our whole company sales have been to strategics. That's a little less sensitive to the macro volatility. We're trying to build you know, growing businesses that will perform well after we sell them, and that's sort of why they end up in strategic hands.
In other markets, I think in India, we've taken, I think, eight companies public since late 2021, most recently one in August. So that's been a great opportunity. And we reentered the IPO market in a scale way with Viking not too long ago. Of course, with billions more equity in that company. So we're very focused on liquidity, and then it's performance, performance, performance. And we feel really good about where we stand, but in the private equity world, that is something that is highly scrutinized, and you're compared certainly against all your competitors.
I feel really good about where we sit, but that's something we're never gonna compromise on, is just always making sure that we're delivering for our LP, because that's the, that's the key to all the other successes that we wanna have in, in private equity and across the platform.
And given thinking about, you know, liquidity, exits, monetizations, just given the sort of industry-specific focus areas you have around technology, healthcare, are there any nuances investors need to be aware of as we're, you know, thinking through kind of modeling what the next year looks like? Any, anything in particular for TPG to keep in mind?
This is more on the deployment side?
Monetization.
Oh, on the monetization side? Well, on the monetization side, I feel-
Sort of both.
Let me start on the monetization side. We got a lot of credit, I believe, because perhaps because we're all, we've been cautious about the macro environment now for a while, in that we were very aggressive in selling in 2020 and 2021 and 2022. In fact, we were net sellers through the end of 2022. It was only in 2023 that we switched to net buyers. We were investing in software companies, but in TPG Capital, we sold every software company prior to our 2019 vintage fund. At the same time that we were buying other companies that we felt then and feel now are compelling. We continue to be aggressive in thinking about, and systematic in thinking about ways to create liquidity.
Actually, you know, no promises, but I feel very encouraged about some of the activity that I see now, you know, particularly on the whole company sale side, but also potentially on the public side. We have a lot of activity really across the platform, across the geographies, that I think will continue to keep us in good stead with our investors as it relates to the liquidity. On the deployment side, this may sound a little bit like I'm talking out of both sides of my mouth here, but I do feel like it's a challenging environment for investments. I, as I mentioned, feel like some of the things the opportunities that we're creating are extraordinarily interesting.
I think that the investments that are in our portfolios, across private equity and across real estate, and increasingly some other parts of the business, look very different from what you would see in our competitors' portfolios. A reason for that, I believe, is that, you know, there's sort of a flow side of the market that is very active when multiples are high, debt is readily available, interest rates are low. Those tend to be intermediated. You know, you tend to have less time to figure those out. That's never been our sweet spot, but particularly in a moment where we're, you know, a little cautious about some of the macro, we're finding things that we think of as the more bespoke, customized source side of the market.
That, that's what's been comprising our portfolios. In many of these cases, it's structured deals with corporates. In some cases, there's no seller and no buyer. It's just two parties trying to come up with a way to create a great company or corporate carve-outs. I mean, we've partnered with not-for-profits. That was the last investment in TPG Growth, which was a not-for-profit healthcare system, with families, with universities, and with a number of strategics. I think somewhere between 60% and two-thirds of TPG Capital's current portfolio are some combination of structured deals and carve-outs. 60% of TPG Growth's portfolio are proprietary deals.
And so I am excited about these opportunities because I think they're quite unusual, and it requires us celebrating again, the effort to put into these investments that don't always come to fruition, but when they do come to fruition, you have something pretty special. So we hear a lot about the pace of deployment increasing in the second half of 2024. Based on how busy my summer was, I'm actually a little worried about that. You know, we've been very busy, already, and we'll be out, you know, three to four years from starting the raising of TPG Capital IX and Healthcare Partners II , which is exactly the pace we identified. And, you know, we've seen good strong deployment and a really healthy pipeline really across our businesses.
Again, we're talking about private equity, but the same is true for our credit businesses as well.
Great. So under the PE umbrella, you know, your impact strategy is one of the newest. I think it's about seven years old. You know, can you talk high level, talk a bit about what your goals are for this business, and then maybe just given sort of the changes in sentiment around ESG, at least on the public side, you know, how has investor appetite evolved over the last few years, and how does the LP base compare to, like, the legacy base across capital and growth?
Absolutely. I'm excited to talk about the impact platform. There's a lot to be excited about in this for us and for all of our investors. Let me just go back to the comment I made at the beginning. We try to think of ourselves as really independent thinkers, not necessarily contrarian. But as we approached, and it really wasn't that long ago, it was in the mid-2010s, as we looked at the impact world, we started with a DNA that is very consistent with impact. So we looked at the thirty years that we've been investing in healthcare. That's been one of our overarching criteria. We wanna be part of the on the side of the angels, improving the system.
But as we looked at the impact investing world per se, we noticed, observed a few things that we thought were interesting. The first was that there's capital formation around the venture side for new technologies. There was capital available for some public companies, Tesla and others, that could credibly claim to be impact companies. But there was really no capital formation and no organized capital availability in the great middle... which is literally trillions of dollars a year of capital need, and for us, was clearly the most compelling part of the broader impact arena, and the most compelling opportunity. The other issues we saw were, first, there was a distinct lack of rigor, clarity, and measurement of impact.
There was a sense of, you know, if you use the right words, it's impact. But of course, that creates a backlash from people having uncertainty as to whether or not you are driving impact. And then there was a sense, which we became convinced, after a lot of study, was not accurate, that there was a trade-off between impact and financial reserves. So when we decided to get into the space and to get into the space with real focus, we created Y Analytics, which is an internal platform that brings the same level of rigor and measurement to impact that we do to financial returns. When we're underwriting, we have the same level of focus on both sets of metrics when we're measuring the performance of these companies, and we're ultimately reporting back when we sold the company.
Our investors care about those numbers very much. We also believe strongly, and I think now have the evidence to demonstrate, that not only is there not a tension between financial returns and impact returns, in fact, they're collinear, they're self-reinforcing, in part because as a leader, many of the folks who are selling or looking to partner their businesses want to be with someone who is authentically very focused on impact, and who will raise their visibility and help them do what they do better. And it's not just what's the highest price that I can get for my share with or the best terms for my investment. As I said, now as we have evidence, I think we've continued to prove that out.
Of course, as we do with any of our sectors or any of our business units, we applied an enormous amount of time, energy, and resources to building out what we think of as an excellent ecosystem that differentiates us in impact investing. That's everything from public policy experts to climate scientists, who can help us in thinking about some of the decarbonization technologies, to companies, corporate leaders. I mean, you know, I'm sort of evolving or moving to your last part of your question, which was: Do we have new investors as a result of our rise in climate investing? The answer is absolutely. I think 70% of our Rise I investors were new to the firm, and they were unusual investors. So we had 28 companies that were literally the who's who of corporate America.
Everyone from Apple and Alphabet to 3M and, you know, and Westinghouse or Honeywell. A whole bunch of additional companies that partnered with us because they were trying to develop their own strategies and because they wanted to be part of the journey, and of course, that has positive benefits, not just in our impact platform, but across the broader TPG landscape, so it's been a great journey for us. Today, as I said, we're at, you know, $19 billion with line of sight by early 2026 to go to $35 billion-$36 billion, and we see a whole host of places to grow from there. I mean, we probably have sourced $30 billion of opportunity in infrastructure for climate, but we didn't have the capital base, so we made a senior hire from Goldman. We're going to pursue that.
Credit, real estate, public equity. There's just so much behind that, and, you know, we really want to be the household name in impact investing and feel like we're, you know, on our way to doing that.
Maybe one other kind of high-level private equity question, and then we'll move into credit and Angelo Gordon. How do you think about new opportunities and organic growth? It seems like a lot of your growth comes from horizontal expansion rather than, you know, fund-over-fund growth. You have a lot of new strategies, tech adjacencies, and healthcare partners. So what do you see as the benefits of this approach, and how do you think about, you know, organic growth in private equity at a high level?
If you think about TPG prior to the Angelo Gordon acquisition, the vast majority of our growth, almost all of our growth is really organic. Excuse me. And I think a lot of that goes back to this cultural question. Nobody gets into their little hole and focuses only on their job. We think of ourselves as business builders. When we think about organic growth, we're not looking at a blank sheet of paper around alternative assets and saying: Oh, we want to be here because that's open or that's there. We've tended to start with our strengths and to follow those, open the aperture of the sourcing and to follow those into new opportunities. And our LPs have been really excited by that. So if you look at two recent examples of organic innovation, the Healthcare Partners Fund, and now..
TTAD, which is our tech adjacencies fund, both of those, not only were they interesting starts, but the fund-over-fund growth has actually been very exciting. TPG Healthcare Partners II , I think, was a third bigger than Healthcare Partners I , and we probably could have allowed it to be bigger still, if we, you know, if we wanted to at the time. TTAD was more than twice, more than 100% bigger, TTAD II versus TTAD I. There's a lot of opportunity for organic growth, and beyond that, there's a lot of opportunity for incremental organic growth. We're looking in Asia at sort of something that leverages our strength in growth investing and our Asia platform, in what's called TGA.
And that, you know, is exciting and I think has a lot of legs. Then there are a series of newer things that also feel like natural extensions for us. So we haven't given an update, but hopefully we'll be able to soon on our secondaries business in the U.S. and Europe, TGS. They leverage a lot of the same ecosystem and a lot of the same IP that we have in the private equity business. They focus on the similar sectors. They often bring the team over to help with some of these investments. They're off to a great start from a capital formation and from an investment standpoint, and that has the opportunity to scale significantly. TRECO, which is our real estate debt business, real estate credit business-...
Again, a natural extension of what we're already doing in real estate. So you, it might not surprise you to hear, I'm actually very excited about all of the opportunities to grow organically from where we are, not just fund-over-fund , but with these new capital bases. And while we're talking about private equity, I would be remiss if I didn't say that there's also a whole set of new opportunities that were not even available to us a year ago, that reflect the intersection between what legacy Angelo Gordon has, and the skills and resources that they have, and what we have on the legacy TPG side.
We've already started by launching the fund, but there's a series of opportunities that we can pursue behind that, that I think are, you know, quite exciting from an organic standpoint.
That, that's a great segue to the next-
Thank you.
Questions on Angelo Gordon. So maybe you talked about sort of the opportunities there. Maybe remind us of the strategic rationale, and perhaps you were kind of leading there anyway. But what do you see as sort of the benefits to the business? How's the integration going?
Yeah, absolutely. I spent a lot of my last two years focused on the Angelo Gordon acquisition, so I'm excited to talk about it. Now, the net-net is, I think we have a lot of. We're where we want to be on the integration in terms of we've put a lot of resources against it, we've put a lot of energy, and we feel really good about where we sit. Just to step back, to set up the rationale and the strategic points that have made us so excited about this one. If you start at the time of our IPO, we said that we wanted to continue to grow organically, which has really been much of the history of the firm, but that we also wanted to explore, in the right situation, strategic acquisitions.
At the very top of the list, of course, was credit. That was important because our LPs want us to be in a broader set of products and increasingly want to focus on a smaller number of GP relationships. But it was also important because it represents a very big opportunity in terms of places to express the themes and the IP that we have developed on the TPG side, and that frankly, the AG team has done in their history as well. We want to be able to play at different parts of the capital structure. It was also a very logical extension of what we tried to build in our broader business over the decades that we've been working on it.
Because we were without a credit platform, it might not surprise you to hear that we had many, many credit firms that approached us during the course of a year or so after our IPO. I think we had at least 50 or 60 dialogues. And I can tell you among all the dialogues we had, Angelo Gordon was far and away the most exciting, and not by a marginal amount, by a lot of those dialogues. And as a deal person, it doesn't always work this way, but, you know, we worked on it for over a year. Every week, every month, I felt more excited about the combination. There were a range of reasons.
One of those reasons was certainly that we liked the parts of credit they're in, and I'll give you a quick recap, recount of those in a moment. They're in growing areas. It's balanced among these three areas. We like very much their real estate business. We feel like that real estate business is quite complementary to our real estate business, geographically and from a skill set perspective. Secondly, I think there's just a great cultural fit. You probably can imagine that some of those 60 people that came to us were looking more to sell their business or to crystallize their business, as opposed to throw in and to build businesses together.
That's what we have in this group at Angelo Gordon, and we've. That's only been proven to us with even more clarity now that we've had a few quarters under our belt of the transactions being closed. And finally, there was just a sense of the range of growth opportunities that would be available to us. And some of that relates to the fact that we had a surprisingly limited overlap of LPs, and some of it was just based on the fact that we feel like the Angelo Gordon chassis is built to be bigger and to grow with more capital, more resources. And so we just see a lot of opportunities for that, and I can come back to some of those if that's of interest to you.
The business itself, as I said, three buckets, not exactly equal, but each of critical mass. One is the middle-market lending business. That's Twin Brook. I mentioned earlier, this is not the more crowded part of the market. They're a real leader in this low middle market, and they have a really, I think, distinctive product that has performed very well over time. And as we've learned about it, we've understood the interesting attributes of that, and we've come to really like it. In fact, we think there's some growth opportunities to graduate with these companies, but it's a great starting point. There's a Credit Solutions business. The Credit Solutions business is a little more like what we think of in the private equity world.
It's more customized, it's more bespoke. That business has been very busy. Signed, you know, 190 NDAs, so there's a lot of pipeline coming. They've innovated. They call it going to the lab. They've created a, you know, a business called Essential Housing, which started with a partnership with a home builder, Lennar, and now have 10 other home builders in this partnership, and they essentially created this from whole cloth. So that's an interesting space. And then the third is structured credit, which you should think of really as the non-EBITDA part of credit, CMBS, RMBS. That's a very fast-growing area in credit. And that business, I think is, you know, really well positioned as well.
and we have a lot of interest from our LPs, and particularly some of the insurance companies we work with, to grow in that space. So there's as interest rates come down, as banks get more and more aggressive on sort of managing which risks they wanna have on their balance sheet and how they wanna manage their balance sheets more broadly, this is a great counterparty, and we've seen a nice pickup in activity. And then, you know, again, the huge opportunity here is in trying to find ways to leverage what we're doing today, whether it's a capital markets broker-dealer capabilities, which is not only a competitive advantage, but a revenue source that can be applied across Angelo Gordon, which does not have a broker-dealer.
Or it's this very big opportunity, which is a steady build opportunity around introducing TPG historical LPs, in particular, to the Angelo Gordon side. And we've had, I think, 500-plus meetings, 530 meetings, I looked at the number, of senior TPG folks with LPs, and senior legacy AG folks talking about new products. And we've gotten some nice early wins on that dimension, and I feel like there's an enormous amount of running room from here.
Great. You know, one of the areas of overlap or limited overlap you talked about was the LP base. You know, in terms of the synergies that have been identified with the acquisition, I think that was one of the bigger ones. What are you seeing in terms of, you know, cross-selling efforts playing out? It's a pretty consistent theme. We've heard about the GP consolidation or among LPs.
Yes.
So, it seems like this is an opportunity for you, but what are you seeing, you know, since the acquisition's closed?
Again, just to frame it, the day before the acquisition, we had 550 LPs, and the day after, we had 900. I mean, it was a very significant opening of the aperture in terms of the LPs we were able to engage with. And I think that, you know, this is more a qualitative answer, but I remember in one of the early meetings, we took some of the senior folks from Angelo Gordon to one of our very long-term partners, and the opening comment from the partner was, "Welcome to the family." You know, that's not to say that this is ever going to be easy or it's ever a matter of just show me where to sign.
This is a place, this is an environment where you earn all these things. But as we've demonstrated and shown this track record that the team has, as we've introduced the people and as the relationships are built, you know, we've really seen a lot of encouraging signals and some early wins, so we had a successful fundraise in the middle market lending business, and we have a lot of appetite among legacy TPG LPs to help us build that graduating companies vertical, which is, again, a whole new opportunity, which we're perfectly situated. To my earlier comment about starting with your strength and building from there, as opposed to just going to white spaces, we're very well positioned there.
We've launched, with a lot of support, a product that's between, as I said, TTAD and Credit Solutions, this hybrid solutions business with, you know, an anchor and a lot of interest among our investor base. And there's some early wins on the Credit Solutions side, in Asia and elsewhere, of people that are already coming through. But I think that the reality behind your answer is, this is a persistent effort that we will put in and we have put in. And, you know, those 550 meetings, they're generating, it's generating a lot of interest.
I think that the overarching desire of our LPs to focus on a smaller number of GP partners is at least as clear, or probably more clear than it's ever been in the history of our industry. The enthusiasm that they've had as they've seen the people and they've seen the cultural fit that we observed during diligence, I think has only grown. The number of dialogues and the level of interaction among this broader LP base with products that they had not previously invested in, I think all gives us a lot of confidence that the opportunity is there and already starting to prove out.
I want to ask you a little bit about the deployment environment for private credit, but maybe just given the time we have left, I'll kind of roll two into one and ask you the same on the real estate side, given Angelo Gordon did also kind of, you know-
Yeah
significantly scale your real estate business. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on both, but, you know, private credit, obviously, kind of different themes there.
Sure.
But, you know, your kind of near-term outlook on deployment for the two different-
Absolutely. Let me... I'll run through them both quickly. I realize I tend to ramble a bit.
No.
I got us down to five minutes here.
It's all good.
On the credit deployment side, you know, in Q2, we had $4.5 billion of credit deployment, which was, you know, which was up, I think more than 40% from the prior quarter, so we've seen a lot of scaling, and middle market direct lending has been very busy and feels like it's going to continue to be very busy, and so that's been off to the races. Credit Solutions has, as I said, a very big backlog of NDAs and opportunities it's pursuing. It's been very busy in Essential Housing. I think we've seen sort of an inflection, a continued growth in the activity level more broadly across Credit Solutions, and as I said, the sort of overall growth in the structured credit world is also pretty compelling.
I think there are 30 deals under review in that business right now. So you know, the short answer on credit is we continue to see a robust pipeline across the credit platform. And as you know, we're doing. We're making investments where we want to make where investments make sense. But that has a flow-through benefit to our P&L, because in much of the credit world, the fees start to flow on deployment, not once the capital is committed. So from that standpoint, I think we feel, you know, quite good about the second half of the year. On the real estate side, you know, it's interesting.
It was quiet for a period because I think our real estate team, which is on both sides of the house, is an excellent team that has, you know, demonstrated a lot of success over time. They felt like there was more deal flow than what's being reflected in the market, and so they really took a posture of waiting for their pitches. The pitches have started to come.
So we've actually significantly picked up our activity level, and we've actually, on the real estate side, the private equity side, excuse me, the equity side as opposed to the debt side, we've seen sellers that have ranged from, you know, pension funds to REITs, nontraditional sellers that for different reasons had to offer up assets that we probably wouldn't have had access to in most environments. So really interesting deals. In the thematic areas we're focused on, some life sciences, some student housing, so it's logistics and industrial, where there's a big supply-demand imbalance. We've seen it in the U.S. and Europe. We've actually seen a lot of activity in the Asia businesses that came from Angelo Gordon.
That activity level has increased, and I'm glad we're fielding pitches because I think the investments that we're making now are quite compelling. On the real estate credit side, it's a very unusual moment, actually. I think that, you know, with the rates having risen and the spreads having widened, you know, it feels like we are seeing mid-60s LTVs in the, you know, 70% range and mid-teen returns in terms of these opportunities. And again, it's a function of activity in some part because of, you know, forced sellers, but again, as the rates have moved.
There was a moment where it was quieter, but it's certainly picked up and I think it's picked up consistent with my earlier theme of some very interesting and differentiated deals.
Great. Well, let me squeeze in one last question here on the private wealth channel.
Sure.
You know, one of the other biggest topics for the alternative asset managers. So I think you guys have talked about launching a, you know, semi-liquid private equity vehicle next year. How do you think about differentiation here, given it's, you know, becoming a bit more crowded, and what are your kind of longer term ambitions with, you know, democratized products?
Absolutely. This is a big priority for us. It's something that we think of as not only a big priority, but a place where we have a right to win. I'd start with, you know, we already are having success here. We're already putting a lot of time against it. We're at, you know, we're at north of two and a quarter times the private wealth, the retail channel's contribution to our fundraising this year than we were last year. So the growth is already there. As you point out, though, in order to really step function that growth, you not only have to sort of build your dialogue, you have to modify your products in a way that's compelling.
So the first effort for that was our non-traded BDC, which is focused on the middle market lending business, and that's on, I think, two wirehouses and a third, and the third to come. The story about it being differentiated and unusual, not one of the, not in the more crowded parts of this space, I think is playing really well. So we're excited about that. The semi-liquid private equity is certainly our next priority, and hopefully, not to sound too modest, we should win in private equity. You know, I'm knocking on wood here. Our results are very strong. Our performance has been strong. We have very interesting products, and they range. They're global in nature, secondary, climate, things that I think people are quite interested in, healthcare, technology.
We're already warehousing equity for that product. As to why we win, and we've had a, you know, dozen, I think forty-five plus dialogues with wealth management partners. As to why we win, I think the world has evolved from wanting more of a supermarket approach, giant generalist funds, to more interesting, bespoke differentiator areas where the underlying company, the underlying GP, is regarded as having authentic strength. I think we play very well in that environment. I think it's been consistent with our strategy of where we try to build resources and where we try to build capital in any event, and I think that the world is moving in that direction.
And I feel like, you know, what we hear from these wealth managers is they want something different. They want to be able to tell the story of why, you know, the TPG climate funds are something that you should invest in, that this is really differentiated. And that story has, you know, it seems to be coming from a lot of different sources now, and it feels like it's coming ultimately from the investors themselves. And in that environment, I think that we should have a lot of success.
Of course, we're putting particular amount of resource against this semi-liquid private equity product because we view that as a template for other semi-liquid products that we feel like we can introduce, whether it be across real estate, potentially more narrowly in things like climate or elsewhere. We feel like we're, you know, really well positioned. We have a strong brand name. We're spending a lot of time in brand building, but we have the underlying products that should enable us to be really successful in this space.
Great. We're out of time there, but, Todd, what a pleasure. Thanks so much.
Thank you. Really enjoyed it.