As 2025 has thus far failed to deliver a surge in exits and liquidity that many had hoped for, perpetual capital strategies have gained traction among the largest publicly traded asset managers, ensuring consistent cash flow from insurance and retail investor channels.
At the end of 2024, private equity’s portfolio reached nearly 12,000 companies, with over 35% needing to be realized soon, according to PitchBook’s 2024 Annual US PE Breakdown. This has intensified the market’s search for liquidity, ranging from partial exits to continuation vehicles.
While some firms—like KKR—joined the trend more recently, a few have been emulating this Berkshire model for quite a while. London-based Cranemere was founded in 2014 and invests between $75 million and $250 million per deal (and up to $400 million with co-investors). It now manages $3 billion in shareholder equity.
Cranemere CEO Kamil Salame spoke with PitchBook to discuss his firm’s decade-old approach.
PitchBook: Walk us through Cranemere’s investment strategy. How does it differ from the standard PE/LBO model?
Salame: Cranemere was founded in 2014 as an alternative to traditional private equity, aiming to address two key issues: the pressure to sell winners early due to fund life cycles and the excessive use of leverage to boost IRR. Instead of a GP/LP fund structure, Cranemere operates with permanent capital and long-term shareholders instead of limited partners.
Kamil Salame, Cranemere CEO
On average, how long do you hold companies?
When we invest in a company, with the premise that we’d like to own it forever, how do we make sure employees of the company get sufficient liquidity so that they’re excited about working for a Cranemere-controlled company? Within the company’s resources, we have to plan for employee liquidity, let’s say every five years, even though the company might not be sold.
What does liquidity management look like for employees, and how does it differ from the traditional PE model?
Cranemere ensures liquidity for employees by locking in management incentive payouts at year five, regardless of whether a company is sold. In traditional PE, compensation depends on a successful exit, which may take three to four years or come sooner.
Who are your investors?
Our investors are perpetual shareholders. Two-thirds consist of wealthy families, and the other third are institutions with long-term investment orientations, like sovereign wealth funds.
You acquire family-owned and founder-led businesses. What regions or sectors in the US have a lot of family-owned businesses?
There tends to be manufacturing, transportation and logistics in the Midwest and the center of the country, and family-owned businesses on the coast, where there are more people, but really they’re all over the country.
What is your course of action when business owners can’t pass on the business to their children or don’t have a successor?
While we haven’t dealt with family businesses passing stakes to children, some owners use liquidity to fund other ventures, philanthropy, or retirement. In one case, we helped buy down an owner’s stake at Velocity Vehicle, growing EBITDA from $60 million to $240 million while maintaining low debt and using a bond offering to fund management incentives.
How does perpetual capital work into your investment model for it to be a win-win situation for everyone? What are some concerns?
Unlike traditional PE, which requires LPs to stay liquid for unpredictable capital calls, Cranemere raises capital occasionally, prioritizing existing investors. It operates like a mini Berkshire Hathaway, with shareholders rather than public markets.
The challenge is you don’t pay dividends—you can always make your own dividend by selling a share. So we have shareholders but not a public market. We have to figure out, periodically, how to give the shareholders who want liquidity without selling a company or a bunch of companies as a fund would, just to liquidate and get it all back.
We’ve had little demand over the last 10 years from any of our shareholders to sell shares, but investors are getting bigger. We’ve been working with shareholders over the last six months to figure out a mechanism for buying and selling among existing shareholders.
What’s an example of your model achieving value creation?
As the majority owner of a major anesthesia provider for six years, Cranemere navigated COVID-19 with low debt, maintaining full employment despite a 40%-50% EBITDA drop. We injected capital, confident in the business’s long-term value. The company had a record year in 2024 and expects strong performance in 2025, with patient satisfaction rising from 35% to 95% since the acquisition.
Correction: A previous version of this story misspelled KKR.
Featured image by Walter B. McKenzie/Getty Images
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About Janelle Bradley Janelle Bradley is a New York-based private equity reporter covering leveraged buyouts for PitchBook News. Previously, she covered private credit at With Intelligence (formerly Pageant Media). Janelle is a graduate of the City University of New York Brooklyn College.