TIFF Investment Management appointed Andrew Murray as Managing Director and Head of Secondary Investing, alongside Stephen Grau as Executive Director for Secondary Investing. The $60 billion Toronto-based institutional manager now operates a dedicated secondaries desk for the first time in its 38-year history.
Murray arrives from Northleaf Capital Partners, where he spent nine years building secondaries infrastructure across North America and Europe. Grau joins from Pathway Capital Management. Both report directly to TIFF's alternatives leadership. The firm declined to specify initial capital allocation but confirmed the desk will focus on LP-led and GP-led transactions across private equity, infrastructure, and private credit. TIFF manages assets for the University of Toronto and 87 other institutional clients, most of them Canadian endowments and pension plans with 15-to-30-year liability profiles.
The move reflects structural pressure in private markets. GP-led secondaries volume reached $67 billion in the first nine months of 2024, up 28% year-over-year, according to Jefferies data published in October. Continuation funds—where GPs roll top-performing assets into new vehicles rather than exit—now represent 62% of all GP-led deal flow, the highest share on record. Traditional exit routes remain frozen: U.S. PE-backed IPO proceeds fell 79% in 2023 and have not recovered. Strategic M&A multiples compressed to 9.2x EBITDA in Q3 2024 from 11.7x in 2021. LPs holding 2017-2019 vintage funds face a choice: wait for distributions that may not arrive until 2027, or sell positions at discounts that have narrowed from 25-30% in 2023 to 10-15% today as secondaries capital floods the market.
TIFF's timing coincides with three other institutional buyers launching or expanding secondaries platforms since September: HarbourVest filed with the SEC for a $3.2 billion secondaries fund in early October, Lexington Partners closed its tenth vehicle at $22.6 billion in August, and Partners Group announced a $9 billion evergreen secondaries product in November. The compression of pricing spreads—and the surge in dedicated capital—suggests the secondaries market is professionalizing rapidly. Allocators who waited for distress are instead finding a liquid, competitive market where information asymmetry is narrowing. Managers like TIFF are no longer treating secondaries as opportunistic; they are building permanent infrastructure.
Watch for TIFF's first secondaries close in Q2 or Q3 2025, likely a mid-market LP portfolio with exposure to 2018-2020 vintage buyout funds. Canadian pension systems—TIFF's core client base—are overweight private equity relative to public peers and face mounting pressure to rebalance without triggering capital calls. The firm will also compete for GP-led deals in the $500 million to $2 billion asset range, where fewer buyers operate and pricing remains less efficient. If HarbourVest's fund reaches a final close above $4 billion by March, expect two more top-20 institutional managers to announce secondaries hires before summer.
The professionalisation of secondaries infrastructure is not a liquidity event. It is the replacement of exits with transfers, and the replacement of hope with math.