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Where the Money Talks to Itself: Notes from SuperReturn 2026 - Berlin
- Jul 16
- 8 min read
Every June, Berlin becomes the capital of private capital. SuperReturn is a global series, with editions running from Amsterdam to Monaco, New York to Singapore, each with its own focus, from emerging markets to secondaries. But Berlin is the flagship: SuperReturn International, the most senior gathering in the industry. This year it ran alongside SuperVenture from June 8th, drawing more than 6,000 senior decision-makers from over 80 countries. North of 2,000 LPs representing tens of trillions in assets, some 3,000 GPs, and a constellation of satellite events orbiting the main venues.
It was our first time attending the Berlin edition, and it lived up to its reputation. We were there doing what ALBAN Global Network does: connecting.
What follows are field notes rather than a full recap: a set of observations, organized loosely by who they matter most to, on how the industry seemed to be reorganizing itself this year. They come from conversations, panels, and dinners rather than from a survey or a dataset, so treat them as one network's read on the mood in the room, not as a market study.
A Note Before We Start: The Conference playing out beyond the main stage
The first thing worth naming: the event has quietly outgrown its own walls. The breakfasts, dinners, and side gatherings hosted by everyone from the Luxembourg Chamber to Davos-adjacent communities have turned Berlin's hotspots into a distributed marketplace, with whereabouts and access exchanged through curated WhatsApp groups. Access is moderated, yes. But the quality of the people in those rooms was remarkably high, and the informality does something the main stage cannot.
More than one attendee made the same point to us in different words: relationships in private markets aren't built on pitch decks. They're built in the off-the-cuff conversations between sessions, over coffee, at the bar. The panels set the agenda; the corridors move the capital.
For us, this environment is home turf. People arrived open, curious, and unusually willing to engage, which made real-time matchmaking possible: introductions arranged on the spot, meetings organized mid-week, follow-ups agreed before anyone left the city. The noise hasn't disappeared, and the circuit still needs better streamlining from one conference to the next. But when it works, it works fast.
Observations for Fund Managers and GPs: The Art of Positioning
One professional discipline separated the effective from the exhausting this year: the ability to articulate, in a few sentences, what you offer and what you're looking for, without the endless, dreadful detail. Enough to make your position in the ecosystem legible, then move to the personal level where trust actually forms.
LPs we spoke with appreciated this. It signals respect, an awareness of one's partners, and a collaborative instinct: working together rather than competing each other to the last drop. It also fit the broader mood we picked up on: several LP conversations suggested that storytelling alone is losing ground as a fundraising tool, with more weight going to returns, differentiated strategy, and evidence. If that reading is right, it points to a widening gap between managers who can back their pitch with substance and those who cannot.
One LP we spoke with put their filter simply: "We like to invest in people who know what they're doing, and are in it for the long run. Not just for the return, but to keep building together, systematically."
Observations for LPs and Allocators: Liquidity Was the Word of the Year
If there was a single dominant theme on the LP side of the conference, it was distributions. Several allocators referenced exit values running meaningfully below last year's, and a good number were candid that DPI, not paper markups, is now driving their re-up decisions. "DPI is the new IRR" was a phrase we heard repeatedly in LP-focused sessions, and it didn't sound like a throwaway line.
It's worth unpacking why the phrase carries weight. IRR, the internal rate of return, has long been the industry's favorite scoreboard, but it has a convenient property: it can look excellent on paper long before any money actually comes back. A fund can mark up its portfolio, show a strong IRR, and still not have wired a single distribution to its investors. DPI, distributions to paid-in capital, is the more demanding measure. It counts one thing only: of every euro an LP committed, how much has actually been returned. Cash in hand, not valuation on a spreadsheet.
The shift toward DPI, as several LPs explained it to us, is structural rather than a matter of fashion. A backlog of deals struck at rich 2021 valuations is still sitting in many portfolios, exits have slowed, and the distributions LPs rely on to fund their own obligations, pension payouts, endowment spending, new commitments, have thinned as a result. Several allocators told us they are effectively self-funding their private markets programs, with new commitments coming from old distributions. When distributions dry up, so does appetite for new funds.
The practical consequence for GPs, based on what we heard in meeting after meeting, is that the fundraising conversation now tends to start with realizations rather than projections. Several LPs told us they would rather see a disciplined exit at a fair price than a hold-and-hope strategy defending a paper number.
This connects to a second theme we heard repeatedly: secondaries have gone mainstream. Continuation vehicles and GP-led transactions came up constantly in deal talk, and several people described the secondaries market, once a niche corner, as maturing into a distinct asset class, with dedicated summit tracks and serious conversation about the technology and transparency needed to scale it further. For GPs sitting on 2021-vintage portfolios, and for LPs asking for liquidity, several attendees described secondaries less as an exotic tool now and more as infrastructure.
One step behind the secondaries conversation, tokenization came up as its more speculative cousin. The idea, as it was described to us, is to represent fund interests as digital tokens on blockchain rails, enabling fractional ownership, automated compliance and distributions via smart contracts, and eventually regulated secondary trading of stakes that today take weeks of paperwork and GP approvals to transfer. What was a crypto-adjacent curiosity a few years ago is now reportedly being piloted by some of the industry's largest names, including BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and Hamilton Lane, the latter with tokenized feeder funds said to lower entry minimums and open the door to secondary trading.
Citi has projected tokenized private equity could reach $700 billion by 2030, roughly a tenth of the asset class. The conversations we had in Berlin were still more exploratory than transactional, and the operational questions are real: how do capital calls work through a smart contract? How do you keep a constantly rotating token-holder base compliant with KYC and investor-qualification rules?
In Luxembourg, Europe's largest and the world's second biggest fund domicile, that build appeared further along than the Berlin conversations implied. "Luxembourg has answered tokenisation's hard questions in law, not theory," says Gilles Bropsom, Partner and Head of Luxembourg Desk at Liberius, also attending SuperReturn in the German capital. "Four blockchain laws in, a fund interest can be perfectly issued and transferred natively on-chain, with eligibility enforced at the token level, the rails are already laid, very much reflecting, yet again, the country's visionary and pioneering positioning when it comes to embracing new technologies."
Taken together, the direction of travel seemed clear to us: an industry whose LPs are asking for liquidity, and whose next growth frontier is private wealth, has every incentive to make its ownership structures more divisible, more transferable, and more transparent. That's our reading, not a settled fact, but it was hard to leave Berlin without hearing some version of it.
Observations for GPs: The Ones Worth Watching Are Building, Not Just Deploying
On the GP side, the most interesting pattern we noticed, echoed across dozens of fund conversations, was a shift toward a more hands-on, boutique, involved style of investing. The best European GP and fund teams we met were talented, experienced, and refreshingly original in their theses. Notably, they weren't positioning themselves as capital deployers. They described themselves more as co-builders: working hand in hand with founders, embedding operating capability early, and, in several cases, folding their own LPs' networks into the support structure around portfolio companies.
A related point came up often enough that it felt like a consensus rather than a one-off: multiple expansion is no longer seen as a reliable return generator on its own, and with entry prices elevated, several GPs argued that value now has to come from real operational change and genuine growth rather than efficiency gains alone. The managers who had internalized this earlier looked, to us, better positioned in the current fundraising environment than those still leaning on the old playbook.
Observations for Allocators and GPs: Where the Capital Is Heading
Sector-wise, the direction of travel was hard to miss. Deep tech, AI, and infrastructure dominated GP theses, with dual-use and defense technology coming up more than we expected, a theme likely amplified by adjacent events in Berlin that same period, including aerospace and defense gatherings around ILA. Many GPs described a similar pattern: early-stage bets in these categories, paired with collaborative structures to help scale the winners toward larger rounds.
AI, meanwhile, seemed to have moved from thesis to working assumption. Few conversations in Berlin were still about whether to adopt it; the discussion was about how AI reshapes sourcing, portfolio value creation, and even valuation itself, with "AI resilience" coming up repeatedly as a pricing factor in its own right. European technology broadly seemed to be attracting real capital, with AI-native companies offered by some as an alternative to a saturated US market. A few LPs also told us directly that they already have plenty of software exposure from the last cycle and are actively looking to diversify. It's a small signal, but one worth watching.
Our Read: Where This Seems to Be Going
Step back from the individual themes and a pattern emerges. The industry looks, from where we sit, less like a set of isolated teams working ad hoc and more like a set of tightening ecosystems: family offices, LPs, fund managers, GPs, lawyers, allocators, and financial planners, each playing a defined role rather than competing for another's. These ecosystems connect to other ecosystems, and reputation seems to compound for the participants who work well with others. The market, in our observation, is self-selecting for collaborators.
That pattern is also the reason a network like ours exists, and it's worth being upfront about that rather than folding it into the analysis above. LPs and family offices we work with tell us they value interconnected partners not just for visibility or event access, but for relationships that carry across more than one investment. That's the role ALBAN Global Network tries to play: connecting LPs to GPs, from emerging managers we've come to know to established ones, and connecting GPs back to LPs, funds of funds, and each other.
What's Next
After SuperReturn, we were back in Berlin at the end of June for GITEX Europe, where we brought a curated delegation of LPs, VCs, and high-potential founders, and co-organized a side event with our Berlin partners as part of our Berlin Fellowship program with the state of Berlin. A separate set of notes and our impressions you'll find in this article:
We'll be at SuperReturn Europe, running 3 to 6 November 2026 at the Hotel Okura in Amsterdam. Given what we saw in Berlin, on liquidity, secondaries, and LPs rewarding managers who can back their pitch with substance, we expect those same conversations to carry into Amsterdam.
We're putting together a delegation of VCs to join us there and meet directly with LPs we work with across our network. If you're a fund manager who wants warm introductions rather than another badge in the crowd, get in touch and we'll tell you how it works.
For partnerships or to join the delegation: info@albanglobal.com
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ALBAN Global Network is a Belgium-based nonprofit connecting founders, angels, VCs, GPs, LPs, and family offices across borders.
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