Insights from LPEA Insights 2025 — Perspectives from Luxembourg’s Private Markets Forum

By Yann Grutzmacher and Lenny Verlaine

Picture from Goldbridge Investment Club

As global markets adapt to higher rates, tighter regulation, and shifting geopolitical realities, Luxembourg’s private-capital ecosystem is redefining its focus. From defence and infrastructure to inclusion and education, the 2025 LPEA Insights Conference revealed how the country’s investors are turning structural challenges into long-term opportunities.

The LPEA Insights Conference 2025, held within the Luxembourg Venture Days in Luxembourg, once again served as the central annual meeting point for the private-capital community in Luxembourg. The format gathered general partners, limited partners, infrastructure investors, venture specialists, advisers and policymakers in the same venue as the innovation-focused components of Luxinnovation’s Venture Days, creating a rare setting in which capital formation, regulatory direction and entrepreneurial origination are examined within one integrated event.

LPEA invited some Goldbridge Investment Club Members to attend this flagship event, among them the authors of this article: Yann Grutzmacher (President, Goldbridge Investment Club and invited panellist) and Lenny Verlaine (Portfolio Management, Goldbridge Investment Club). Numerous panel discussions, pitches and private exchanges with investors and executives were followed across the day. From these interactions, several discussions stood out as particularly relevant to the current positioning of private assets.

What Defined the Tone of the 2025 Edition

The overall environment at the conference reflected a market that has undergone a structural reset. The phase in which low rates and abundant liquidity absorbed most of the return burden has ended. Capital is now allocated under conditions shaped by higher financing costs, geopolitical instability and a European regulatory context that is demanding in both cost and compliance. As a consequence, managers have shifted focus toward operational value creation, disciplined deployment, structured liquidity tools such as continuation vehicles, secondaries and co-investments, and stronger governance.

Despite these constraints, the tone was not defensive. There was a distinct forward-looking interest in the opportunities that arise precisely when allocation becomes more selective and execution-driven.

Against this backdrop, several sessions offered a clear window into the forces currently shaping allocation decisions. One of the most illustrative cases of this adjustment appeared in the panel on defence, where security was treated not as a short-term response to crisis but as a durable and investable theme in its own right.

Invest your money where your mouth is

The panel, organised by PE4W – Private Equity for Women, an initiative by the LPEA, aimed to promote equal opportunities for women in Luxembourg’s Private Equity ecosystem. Moderated by Laura Zahren (KPMG) and Manon Aubry (RSM), the discussion brought together Luis Galveias (LPEA), Éléonore de Potesta (Converginvest Capital Partners), and Yann Grutzmacher (Goldbridge Investment Club).

Throughout the session, the panellists shared their personal journeys and investment philosophies, from Yann’s early start in investing at age 14, to Luis’s creative idea of gifting stocks to his children instead of physical presents, and Éléonore’s hesitation with cryptocurrencies.

A recurring theme was the influence of family in shaping financial awareness. Yann credited his father’s encouragement for helping him begin so early, while Luis noted that his children now actively ask to invest in companies they know, such as Disney or Roblox. For Éléonore, growing up in a family already active in finance meant that conversations about money and markets naturally happened around the dinner table.

The panel then turned to risk and investment behaviour across generations. Yann highlighted that young people tend to have a higher risk tolerance, as they often face fewer financial obligations and are already familiar with volatile assets like cryptocurrencies. In contrast, older investors typically prioritise security and long-term planning.

Another topic discussed was the variety of investment opportunities available today. Beyond traditional, liquid assets, investors can now access alternative investments such as private equity funds, some with entry points as low as one euro. Luis even shared his own experience investing in music royalties, showcasing how diverse and creative the modern investment landscape has become.

To close, Éléonore highlighted the gender gap in investing, pointing out that women still invest less frequently than men — a challenge PE4W is determined to address. Encouraging more women to take ownership of their financial futures remains one of the initiative’s key missions.

Despite their different backgrounds and experiences, all panellists shared the same conclusion: financial education is essential, and it is never too early or too late to start investing.

Defense as a Strategic Asset: Investing in Security

In this discussion, David Dana (Expansion Ventures) and Quentin Dupraz (Ilavska Vuillermoz Capital) made the case that defence is no longer an area that institutional allocators can categorically avoid. The war in Ukraine and the uncertainty of transatlantic guarantees have forced Europe to consider endogenous capability. Crucially, the opportunity set is not limited to traditional weapons but increasingly sits in dual-use, high-technology layers: counter-drone defence, autonomous systems, secure communication stacks, cyber intelligence and space-based resilience. These are precisely the areas where Dana and Dupraz see venture-stage European firms scaling and where private capital can accelerate time-to-deployment.

Adrian Pawelec (Marguerite) linked the defence argument back to the infrastructure substrate: one cannot speak of security without redundancy in energy, data, and transport nodes. Jeremy Teboul (OTB Ventures) pointed to the NATO Innovation Fund’s involvement in European deep-tech startups as evidence that defence innovation has shifted from closed procurement to venture-compatible scaling.

Across the panel there was a shared conclusion: Europe does not lack state intent, it lacks execution speed, and private capital is the only scalable accelerator available. Ethical concerns were addressed briefly: the capital discussed is directed toward defensive mission sets, not offensive escalation. The signal from this session is therefore not cyclical but structural: defence has entered the investable universe as a long-horizon, policy-anchored, capital-deployable theme.

If defence exposed the security layer that must be financed privately when states alone cannot deliver, the infrastructure session revealed the institutional analogue: the physical systems without which any economic or strategic resilience becomes theoretical.

Bridging the Gap: Private Capital and the Infrastructure Imperative

Gwen Colin (Vauban Infrastructure Partners) opened by emphasising that infrastructure has become the operational carrier of public-policy mandates: decarbonisation, digitalisation, mobility and resilience. Stefan Huber (Patrizia GrundInvest) and Tristan Schirra (Swiss Life Asset Managers) both cautioned against the narrative that an “infrastructure supercycle” implies equity-style returns. The value case remains what it has always been: predictability, inflation participation, contractual protection and sovereign alignment, not abnormal outperformance.

Oliver Zwick (Clifford Chance) detailed the legal architecture that makes this co-delivery model possible: states retain steering power, while private capital assumes execution and risk within contractually framed structures. This is not ideological substitution — it is fiscal necessity. With public balance sheets constrained, private markets have become the execution arm of long-dated national priorities.

The implicit message was that infrastructure has migrated from a satellite exposure to a portfolio backbone. In the same way that defence capitalises the protective layer of the state, infrastructure capitalises the civilian layer on which economies and societies rely.

If defence and infrastructure described what must be financed under the current regime, the session on carried interest addressed how senior capital allocators and managers are incentivised and retained within jurisdictions that compete for talent and fund-formation footprints.

The Value of Carried Interest

In the discussion with Giuliano Bidoli (BC Partners), Ed Nevens (Cinven) and Keith O’Donnell (IFA Luxembourg), carried interest was analysed not as a political symbol but as an alignment instrument. Bidoli and Nevens framed carry as a voluntary concession by sophisticated LPs — they agree to share upside precisely because well-structured carry lifts net outcomes. O’Donnell focused on Luxembourg’s reform: not a revolution, but a codification of existing practice into legal certainty, removing ambiguity and positioning Luxembourg on equal footing with competing regimes in Switzerland, Italy or Spain.

The panel stressed that the effect of this clarity is not instantaneous but cumulative across full carry cycles. Jurisdictional talent decisions are not made on sentiment but on predictability. This observation is consistent with earlier work on the topic, including a prior article published by Lenny Verlaine on the likely implications of the carried-interest reform for Luxembourg’s competitive positioning, where the central claim was the same: clarity is competitiveness in private markets.

The relevance of this session lies in the fact that capital follows people, and people choose environments where performance participation is both recognised and legally secure. In that sense, the carried interest regime is not a side issue — it is infrastructure for the human layer of private markets.

A market in transformation

The 2025 edition of LPEA Insights made one thing clear: Luxembourg’s private markets are not in transition, but in transformation. From new asset classes such as defence and infrastructure to the human and educational dimensions explored by PE4W, the ecosystem is aligning itself with a future defined by clarity, accountability and inclusion. The country’s competitive edge will not rest on scale alone but on its ability to connect innovation, policy, and education into a coherent capital formation model.