Acurio Ventures' €115M Secondaries Fund: What VC Secondaries Actually Are, and Whether US Investors Have an Equivalent

TL;DR: Bilbao-based Acurio Ventures closed a €115 million fund built entirely to buy stakes in European VC funds from LPs who want out early, a corner of the market called "VC secondaries." Acurio says its existing secondaries book is marked at a 1.75x TVPI (total value paid in, meaning the value of the stake divided by what was invested, including unrealized gains). That number is self-reported and mostly paper gain, not cash back yet. The real story: Europe just had its toughest VC fundraising year in 25 years, per the firm's own framing, and secondaries funds like this one are what LPs reach for when they want liquidity instead of waiting a decade for a primary fund to pay out. There's no direct US equivalent at this deal size yet, which is either a gap or a warning, depending on how much homework you're willing to do.

Acurio Ventures, a Bilbao-based venture firm run by managing partner Ander Michelena, announced this month that it closed Acurio Secondaries I FCR at roughly €115 million, beating its €100 million target. The vehicle invests exclusively in what's called VC secondaries: European venture capital fund stakes bought from existing investors who want out before the fund's natural 10-to-12-year life is up, according to Tech.eu's coverage of the close. If you've never heard the term "secondaries" outside of a stock trading context, you're not behind. It's a niche even inside venture capital, and that's exactly why Acurio thinks it can make money here.

What "VC secondaries" actually means, in plain English

When you invest in a venture fund as a limited partner (LP), you're typically locked in for 10 years or more. The fund calls your capital in tranches, invests it in startups, and, if things go well, distributes cash back to you as those startups get acquired or go public. That's the primary market: you commit money upfront and wait.

The secondary market is what happens when an LP doesn't want to wait. Maybe a pension fund needs cash now, an endowment is rebalancing, or a family office that backed a fund five years ago wants to lock in a gain rather than sit through another five years of uncertainty. That LP sells its stake, its claim on future distributions from the fund, to a buyer like Acurio, usually at a discount to the fund's stated net asset value (NAV). The seller gets liquidity today. The buyer gets exposure to a portfolio of companies that's already partly derisked (some startups have already failed, others have already shown traction), typically at a lower price than buying in from scratch.

Two numbers matter most in this world, and they get confused constantly. TVPI (total value to paid-in capital) measures the value of your position, both cash already distributed and the fund's own estimate of what unsold holdings are worth, divided by what you put in. A 1.75x TVPI means the fund believes your stake is worth 75% more than you paid, on paper. DPI (distributions to paid-in capital) measures only the cash you've actually gotten back. A fund can show a great TVPI for years while DPI sits near zero, because TVPI includes the general partner's own valuation of companies that haven't sold yet. That distinction is the single most important thing to understand before looking at any secondaries fund's marketing numbers.

The Acurio deal, and why it exists now

Acurio isn't new to venture investing. Its direct-investing strategy has backed roughly 120 European companies, including Seedtag, Preply, Jobandtalent, Indexa Capital, Lingokids, and Refurbed, per EU-Startups' report on the launch. The secondaries fund is a new leg of the business, built specifically to buy stakes in other VC funds rather than write checks directly to startups.

The firm says its total assets under management across five vehicles now exceed €450 million, with roughly €45 million of the new €115 million fund already committed and a self-reported TVPI of 1.75x on that early book. I want to flag something here rather than bury it: those specific figures (the >€450M AUM figure, the 1.75x TVPI, and the "toughest fundraising year in 25 years" characterization) come from the fund's own statements and were not independently verified by primary reporting I could confirm. Treat them as Acurio's account of its own performance, not an audited fact. That's not an accusation of dishonesty. It's just standard practice: private fund NAVs are marked by the GP itself, and TVPI in particular is easy to make look good in year two or three of a fund's life, before any real cash has come back to investors.

The LP base backing the fund is a genuine signal of institutional appetite, though: about 30% of commitments came from institutions, led by a US endowment, alongside pension plans and more than 35 family offices. The general partners themselves put in over €15 million of their own capital, which puts real skin in the game alongside the outside LPs rather than just collecting management fees on someone else's money. For context on how unusual this fundraising environment is, Acurio closed this fund while several much larger European VC funds were also raising in 2026: Kembara hit a €750 million first close, Earlybird Fund VIII closed at €360 million, Seedcamp raised €279 million combined across vehicles, and both Samaipata and Ysios Capital targeted roughly €100 million each. Fundraising was happening, in other words, just not easily, which is precisely the condition that pushes LPs toward secondaries.

Fund	2026 Raise	Strategy
Acurio Secondaries I FCR	~€115M (vs. €100M target)	VC fund secondaries
Kembara	€750M (first close)	Primary VC
Earlybird Fund VIII	€360M	Primary VC
Seedcamp	€279M (combined)	Primary VC
Samaipata	~€110M target	Primary VC
Ysios Capital	~€100M target	Primary VC

The macro backdrop matters too. Global secondaries transaction volume, spanning both private equity and venture, reached somewhere around $225 to $240 billion in 2025, and Europe has been taking a growing share of that dealmaking, according to Jefferies' analysis of the global secondary market. Most of that volume sits in buyout and growth-equity secondaries, where firms like Lexington Partners, Coller Capital, and Industry Ventures have operated for years. Acurio's stated angle is that those larger players don't bother with sub-€20 million VC fund stakes: the check sizes are too small relative to their fund sizes to be worth the diligence effort. If that's true, it leaves a gap where a specialist willing to do smaller, more labor-intensive deals can buy in at better discounts because there's less competition bidding the price up.

Is there a version of this trade available to US accredited investors

Here's where I'll give you my honest read rather than a marketing pitch. In the US, the secondaries market at scale is dominated by the same handful of large firms: Industry Ventures, Lexington, StepStone, Coller. They mostly transact in institutional-size chunks well above what a single accredited investor could access directly. Below that, the sub-$20 million VC fund secondary market in the US exists, but it's fragmented and broker-driven: deals get sourced through platforms like Forge Global, EquityZen, or informal networks of fund administrators and placement agents, rather than through a dedicated fund vehicle built for that exact niche the way Acurio has built one for Europe. Forge Global and EquityZen, for instance, mostly support one-off trades in individual startup shares or single LP interests, not pooled, professionally managed baskets of VC fund stakes bought at negotiated discounts. That's a meaningfully different product: you're picking single positions yourself instead of relying on a manager's diligence across dozens of underlying funds.

That gap could mean one of two things. Either it's a genuine first-mover opportunity for a US manager to build a comparable vehicle (and if you're an LP, watch for that: a domestic Acurio equivalent would likely find receptive institutional demand, given how the pension and endowment LPs backing Acurio behaved), or it means the segment is small and inefficient in the US for a structural reason nobody has solved yet, like the sheer number of small VC funds and the difficulty of getting clean cap table and valuation data from them. I lean toward the first explanation being more likely to attract capital over the next 18 months, but I wouldn't bet on it without seeing an actual US vehicle raise and deploy first. For now, US accredited investors who want secondaries exposure at this scale are mostly limited to funds-of-funds with a secondaries sleeve, or direct participation through platforms that broker individual LP interests, both of which come with their own fee layers and less transparency than a dedicated single-strategy fund.

The part of the pitch that deserves skepticism

A 1.75x TVPI sounds like a strong result. It might be. But TVPI on a young secondaries fund is largely a function of how the general partner marks its holdings, and secondaries funds have a structural tailwind here: because they buy in at a discount to NAV, the position can show an immediate paper markup the moment the GP marks it back toward full NAV, even before the underlying startups have done anything. That's sometimes called the "discount capture," and it's real value, but it's not the same as cash in an LP's account. DPI is the number that tells you whether Acurio's LPs have actually gotten money back. That figure wasn't in the reporting I reviewed, which itself is a signal: this fund is early enough that there may not be much DPI to report yet.

The "toughest European VC fundraising year in 25 years" line is also worth treating as the fund's framing rather than a verified market fact. It's plausible, given how many 2026 European VC raises took longer or landed below original targets, but I couldn't independently confirm it against a quarter-century of fundraising data in the time I had. Use it as color, not as a data point you repeat elsewhere as settled fact.

Beyond the marks, there's the standard secondaries risk list: you're buying a basket you didn't choose, at a NAV set by someone else, in a market (European venture) that itself is working through a rough fundraising stretch. If the underlying startups in Acurio's basket run into their own down rounds, the discount that looked attractive at entry can evaporate fast. And liquidity, ironically, is still limited: buying into a secondaries fund doesn't mean you personally get quick liquidity. You're still an LP in a closed-end vehicle with its own multi-year horizon, just a shorter one than a primary fund.

What to actually do with this

If you're an accredited investor curious about secondaries as an asset class rather than this fund specifically, the actionable step is to ask any secondaries manager you're considering for three things before committing capital: the fund's current DPI (not just TVPI), a breakdown of how many of its positions were purchased at what average discount to NAV, and references from at least two LPs who have already received a distribution. If a manager can only show you TVPI and a story about market opportunity, you're being sold optimism, not a track record. That's true whether the fund is in Bilbao, Boston, or anywhere else. Acurio's launch is a useful data point about where institutional capital is rotating in Europe right now. It is not, on its own, evidence that you should write a check.

Author Disclosure: Jeff Barnes, MBA has no personal position in any company, fund, or platform named in this article. Angel Investors Network has no current commercial relationship with any party mentioned. AIN provides marketing and education services, not investment advice. Past performance does not guarantee future results. All investments involve risk, including loss of principal.