Amid the evolving economic landscape of the past few years and continued shifts in 2025, we at William Blair have worked hard to expand our platform and provide creative solutions. It’s part of our mission to meet our clients’ needs as markets continue to evolve—which we’ve outlined in the following video.
Our recent platform expansions include:
- Stronger Buy-Side Capabilities
- A Growing Fund Placement and Secondaries Team
- A Focus on Non-Control Investments
- Deepened Relationships With Family Office and VC Investors
- A Trusted Partner for Founder-Owned Businesses
Video Transcript
Hi, I’m Matt Zimmer, global head of investment banking at William Blair. I’d like to start by thanking our clients and community partners for their continued trust and collaboration. I also want to thank the William Blair team for their efforts and dedication to our clients and our firm.
M&A activity increased in 2024, but with interest rates still high, investors need options for liquidity. That’s why the platform we’ve worked to expand has delivered such strong results—and why it’s so well-suited for this moment and into the future. Over the past few years, we’ve thoughtfully expanded our platform to provide comprehensive and integrated capabilities that enable our team to provide creative solutions for our clients around the globe. We’ve bolstered our buy-side capabilities, grown our emphasis on secondaries and fund placement, strengthened our focus on non-control investments, deepened our relationships with family office, and venture capital investors, and expanded our focus to advise more founder and family-owned companies.
I’d like you to hear from a few of our great teammates who are driving these new and highly relevant initiatives. Buy-side activity comprised nearly one-third of William Blair’s M&A transactions in 2024. These deals involve blue-chip acquirers across North America and Europe and represented a variety of industry verticals, reflecting our broad sector expertise. Amid a dynamic market environment, we provide highly tailored tactical M&A advice and strategic input to enhance our clients’ post-transaction value-creation plans.
Our Private Capital Advisory franchise has grown to over 50 professionals across the U.S. and Europe. Our secondary advisory team is delivering on a comprehensive suite of secondary solutions that allow GPs to own great businesses longer, while generating premium pricing outcomes for LPs seeking liquidity. Our market-leading fund placement team, led by Brian Williams and Jerome Wallace, is leveraging longstanding relationships to deliver strategic LP capital in support of GPs who are fundraising or making direct investments.
We’ve expanded our emphasis on building relationships with founder- and family-owned businesses—providing expert advisory services before, during, and after a transaction. We know that the stakes are incredibly high for these owner-operators, whose companies have become their lives’ work, maybe even central to the fabric of their families. Understanding our clients’ goals, we walk them through their options and potential partners for the next phase of their business. We feel honored to be part of these journeys as we help determine what makes the most sense on a personal and professional level.
Our industry-leading Private Capital Market’s practice is solely focused on bespoke minority and non-control capital transactions, to finance shareholder liquidity, acquisitions, and growth. Fueled by the recent convergence across the public, private, equity and debt capital markets – we have seen a significant increase in the availability, flexibility, and size of non-control transactions. Our clients can now access minority capital from a wide range of crossover funds, pension and sovereign funds, family offices, as well as global private equity and credit investors.
Going hand-in-hand with our focus on founder/family-owned businesses, we continue to deepen our relationships with family offices that invest directly in private companies. Knowing those parties allows us to connect business owners with a unique type of partner that provides patient capital. This is a very differentiated class of investors. There is an expression out there that if you’ve seen one family office, you’ve seen one family office; our role is to identify, for each situation, those family offices that align with the goals of each business owner based on knowledge of each family office’s profile, which includes their sectors of expertise, their hold periods, their viewpoints on debt, and their cultures.
Why does this matter to our clients? We’ve built capabilities that are most relevant to them—and that meet their needs in today’s environment. Those efforts have yielded impressive results: In 2024, William Blair completed nearly 300 transactions, representing approximately $175 billion in value. While we are proud of those results, we’re even prouder of our team who offer world-class technical expertise—but most importantly aligned with our culture of collaboration, team-orientation, and transparency.
Finally, thank you. Thank you to all of our clients who put their trust in us every day. We are so very grateful to have developed and grown so many extraordinary relationships over the years and can’t wait to serve you for years to come.