Sagard’s Jonathan Tétrault on the Montreal-based firm’s approach to private equity, global expansion, and sophisticated institutional investors
Jonathan Tétrault is Managing Partner, Sagard and CEO, Sagard Private Equity
Jonathan Tétrault is Managing Partner of Sagard and CEO of Sagard Private Equity. He was previously President and COO of Cirque du Soleil Entertainment Group, and before that a senior partner at McKinsey. He’s on the boards of Toronto-listed goeasy Ltd, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and the Montreal Symphonic Orchestra.
Founded in 2016, Sagard is a $46bn AUM multi-strategy alternative asset manager in private equity, VC, private credit, real estate, and private wealth. It operates from 15 offices across Canada, the US, France, Germany, Italy, Singapore, Switzerland, the UAE, and the UK.
Shaun Beaney, Editor of Preqin First Close, spoke with Jonathan about Sagard’s first decade, strategies, emerging managers, and acquiring private equity firms.
The firm was founded in 2016 when Paul Desmarais III and four other partners decided to launch an alternative asset manager, leveraging $500mn of balance-sheet capital from Power Corporation of Canada. At the time, Sagard was primarily focused on fintech investments and private credit investments.
Fast forward ten years and Sagard now manages $46bn of capital across four asset classes: private equity globally; private credit in North America; VC globally; and real estate. We have 15 offices and more than 500 employees. The firm has evolved through a mix of organic and inorganic growth. We’ve completed six transactions – acquisitions and partnerships – representing roughly two-thirds of our growth. The rest came from launching new products and fundraising new vintages of existing products.
Today, we have more than 500 institutional LPs from 35 countries. We're a combination of a highly entrepreneurial culture and a firm built from day one to respond to the needs of sophisticated institutional investors.
We’re very focused on the mid-market and lower middle market – which, in terms of private equity, translates into investing in companies between $100mn and $2bn enterprise value. We believe this segment is most attractive from a risk-return standpoint, and also attractive in terms of exit options and the overall market dynamic.
The emerging manager space is very interesting. This is a market that’s becoming more developed and sophisticated. Institutional investors increasingly understand the benefits of investing in the space. With adequate manager selection experience, you have additional potential alpha.
The secondary market is going through a fascinating transition. We’ve seen record fundraising again in the first part of the year, as well as record deal-making. The VC secondary space is particularly attractive. We've seen a lot of capital going through a number of funds and fast-growing companies over the past five to six years. There's now a more developed, more structured market for LPs and GPs to trade on these positions.
We’re doing three things in VC. First, we have Diagram, a venture studio involving fintech and climate tech, which is developing new ideas and has launched more than 25 companies since it started in 2017. Second is Portage, which invests in fintech globally, from early-stage to structured equity and growth.
Third, we have a multi-manager strategy where we invest with well-established GPs, such as Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, and Creandum, to name a few. It’s a fund-of-funds product we offer to institutions and high-net-worth individuals that allows us to source attractive co-investment opportunities while accessing information that helps us assess companies on the secondary market.
We really started in the diversified private equity space in 2024 through our first transaction, Performance Equity Management, a US-based private equity and VC fund focused on traditional multi-manager, co-investment, and secondaries strategies.
The second step in our journey was a partnership with BEX Capital, a secondaries firm based in Nice, focused on buying highly diversified private equity portfolios, such as funds-of-funds. Our ambition was to keep scaling it and adding significant capabilities in that space.
Finally, Unigestion was very attractive from a strategic standpoint for two reasons. First, it gave us the chance to significantly increase our presence in Europe, which was a core strategic objective for Sagard. Second, it gave us access to outstanding capabilities in secondaries. They have a highly successful LP-led and GP-led secondaries business that’s truly scalable on a global basis.
Sagard and Unigestion had a very consistent view of the evolution of the private equity industry – about the importance of additional scale, additional reach, and additional networks to attract and retain top talent, offer tailored solutions for LPs, and strive to deliver alpha. It quickly became clear that, from a cultural standpoint, the firms were well aligned.
M&A and partnerships are absolutely part of our strategy, so yes, we are in the market. We are proactively looking in the private equity space, in the private credit space, and in real estate. In private equity, any adjacent investment strategy is something that’s top of mind for us. From a geographical standpoint, we’re still very focused on building additional scale and strength in Europe, and also in Asia.
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Special thanks to Elodie Duvaldestin and Faith Tibble at Sagard, Sailor Jiranek at Prosek Partners, and Eric Alvarez at BlackRock.
The views expressed are the opinions of Sagard as of August 2026. They do not constitute an endorsement, recommendation, or any other advice, and are subject to change. The content does not necessarily express the views of BlackRock, Preqin, or any of their affiliates. Sagard is not affiliated with Preqin.