Wellington appoints Alex Behm to lead Venture Growth Secondaries.

Wellington Management has appointed Alex Behm as Head of Secondaries for its Venture Growth Evergreen private investing platform, a strategic hire as the firm accelerates product innovation in private markets. The move is designed to expand the platform’s ability to deploy and manage secondary transactions alongside its established direct investing capabilities.

In his new role, Alex Behm will build out secondary sourcing and execution — covering direct secondaries, GP-led restructurings and LP-led sales — to complement Wellington’s primary venture and growth allocations. He will work closely with Mike Trihy, who was hired to lead expansion of the evergreen private investing effort, and report into the firm’s Private Investing leadership.

Behm arrives with more than a decade focused on secondaries: he was previously a deal lead on the Secondaries team at Hamilton Lane, where he originated and negotiated transactions across GPs, LPs and intermediaries; prior to that he began his career as an analyst at Butcher’s Hill Capital. That operational experience is central to Wellington’s plan to add liquidity engineering to the long-duration exposure typically associated with venture and growth portfolios.

The appointment comes as the secondaries market has matured materially, particularly in the late-stage venture and growth segments where companies remain private for longer. Secondary activity is projected to exceed US$210 billion in 2025, underlining why liquidity solutions have moved from niche to mainstream within private markets. Wellington is positioning its evergreen vehicle to offer investors continuous access while using secondaries to manage vintage-year concentration and near-term liquidity.

Wellington highlights its scale and research platform as advantages for the Venture Growth Evergreen product. The firm manages roughly US$1.3 trillion in assets globally and its Private Investing team oversees more than US$10.1 billion across venture capital, private credit and private real estate — a base the firm says will support sourcing and diligence for both primary and secondary opportunities.

Michelle L. Hunter, Director, Private Investments, framed the hire as part of Wellington’s ambition to design private market solutions that combine ongoing access with thoughtful portfolio construction. She noted expectations for strong growth in evergreen strategies among wealth-oriented investors and signalled that secondaries expertise will be central to maintaining governance standards while broadening access.

For investors, the practical implication is clear: adding dedicated secondary capability to an evergreen vehicle can reduce exposure to single-vintage risk and provide tactical plumbing for liquidity without fully exiting long-term positions. Wellington’s move mirrors a wider trend among allocators and asset managers to blend perpetual structures with active secondary programs, a response to investor demand for smoother access to private equity and venture returns.

The Venture Growth Evergreen platform will target diversified exposure to late-stage and growth companies across technology, consumer, healthcare, biotech and financial services, leveraging Wellington’s global footprint, sector teams and integrated research to source both primary and secondary opportunities.