AI has moved into the private equity deal process, but its value inside portfolio companies is still uneven. Drawing on 2026 research from McKinsey, Bain, BCG, FTI Consulting, Deloitte and Morgan Stanley, this piece looks at where AI is paying off in private equity, where it is not yet, and why governance is setting the pace.

EVIDENT Group has joined the Hong Kong Venture Capital and Private Equity Association (HKVCA), Asia's largest private capital association, as a full member. We join at a defining moment: the next phase of growth in Asian private markets will be shaped by how capital from private wealth reaches private assets, and by how investors manage those positions over time.

Private capital continues to flow into long-life infrastructure, from energy networks to ships on long-term charters, and the way these investments are managed is changing as well. Drawing on 2026 research from BCG, McKinsey, Deloitte, The Private Markets Forum, the HKMA and the FTAHK, this piece looks at how AI in capital markets is moving from individual tasks to agentic workflows, and how Hong Kong is shaping that shift.

Infrastructure is one of the fastest-growing asset classes in private-market fundraising, valued for essential services and steady, long-term income. Ships carry most of the world's trade and, when employed on long-term contracts, share those traits. This piece updates the case for shipping as part of the infrastructure asset class and what it means for private-market investors.

Two SEC cases in seven weeks involved funds sold on access to SpaceX and other pre-IPO names, and both Anthropic and OpenAI have said unapproved transfers of their shares may not be recognized. In each case, what decided the outcome for investors was not the company but the structure between the investor and the share.

Institutional counterparties ask us: you are an SFC-licensed firm operating under regulatory supervision. Why would you build on an open, permissionless network that anyone can join, rather than on a private network you control? It is a fair question and it deserves a full answer.

AI agents are becoming the investment industry's next workforce. What most people miss is what that workforce needs to stand on; the firms that already built it are about to pull away.

A new business unit for firms getting ready for the next era of private markets: a strategy, structuring, and infrastructure service for asset managers, funds, and family offices that want to build, launch, and run digital market infrastructure of their own. Anastasia Nizhegorodtceva joins EVIDENT as Director of Growth to lead its expansion.

Ben McQuhae, founder of Ben McQuhae & Co and former partner at Jones Day, joins EVIDENT as Chief Business Officer and Head of Transactions. Jessica Ha joins to lead EVIDENT Arc, a new advisory practice focused on digital market infrastructure and private markets.

SpaceX has begun trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX in the largest initial public offering in history. As pre-IPO investors in the company, EVIDENT and its clients mark the moment a private-market position becomes public-market liquidity - a direct expression of EVIDENT's purpose in opening institutional access to the world's most consequential private companies.

The world is about to spend on the order of $16 trillion a year building the future. The interesting question isn't what gets built — it's who finances it, and through what plumbing.

EVIDENT has launched a proprietary Model Context Protocol (MCP) infrastructure designed to structure and automate fragmented private market deal communication through AI-driven workflows. The system enables partners to post, query, and retrieve live deal data in real time through natural language interactions, creating a scalable infrastructure layer for private markets.

Private markets are hitting a structural wall. Our 2025 Annual Letter breaks down the two technological revolutions rewiring the industry, the reality of the "Efficiency Paradox," and how we deployed capital over the last year.

MCP has become the standard protocol for AI-to-tool communication, with adoption from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind and the firms that build MCP infrastructure now will become the network nodes others route through, compounding their advantage over time.

Private markets deal flow is structurally fragmented — terms shared over WhatsApp, availability tracked in Excel, and critical information living in message histories rather than any centralised system, meaning deals are routinely missed simply because the right person did not have the right information at the right moment. AI agents paired with structured, machine-readable deal infrastructure offer a way to close that gap — and that is precisely what EVIDENT is building.

MCP operates through three interconnected layers — host, client, and server — enabling AI to query live data and trigger real-time actions through a standardised protocol. The deeper opportunity, especially in private markets, is building proprietary MCP servers that give AI governed, controlled access to internal systems rather than generic public tools.

Most firms use AI as a text tool. Few have asked what it takes for AI to actually reach their systems, data, and deal flow and even fewer have built the infrastructure to make that possible. MCP (Model Context Protocol) is the open standard that changes this, and the financial services industry is only beginning to engage with what it means to build on it.

In 1865, an economist discovered that efficiency doesn't shrink markets - it grows them. Two shifts in market infrastructure are about to prove him right in wealth management.

The Asian Banker featured EVIDENT in an in-depth analysis highlighting our Hong Kong SFC-licensed, full-stack tokenization platform built for private equity, private credit, and fund structures. The coverage underscores EVIDENT’s regulatory-first strategy, full lifecycle infrastructure, and focus on solving operational complexity in private markets for professional and institutional investors across Asia.

EVIDENT and Dewu Finance’s Digital Bridge event, covered by Titanium Media and Futu News, showcases compliant access to high-yield China supply-chain assets via Hong Kong. The coverage highlights live adoption through SFC-aligned structuring, AI risk controls, and on-chain transparency via Polygon.

EVIDENT Group celebrates the successful Hong Kong IPO of Iluvatar CoreX, a company in which EVIDENT and clients participated as pre-IPO investors through our digital-native investment infrastructure. This milestone validates the effectiveness of modern alternative asset access in connecting institutional capital with transformative AI infrastructure companies driving technological innovation.

EVIDENT has been recognised by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority as one of the Industry Pioneers in Project EnsembleTX, the pilot phase enabling real-value transactions of tokenised deposits and digital assets. As the only participant operating with an institutional license covering the issuance, administration, and distribution of tokenised alternative assets, EVIDENT continues to contribute to building Hong Kong’s regulated digital market infrastructure.

From the trading floors to the policy halls, Hong Kong Fintech Week 2025 marked a defining moment in Asia's financial transformation. Our CEO Florian M Spiegl joined industry leaders on the "RWAs Revolution: Reshaping Global Markets" panel, offering insights from our position as operators of one of Asia's largest digital markets for alternative assets.

EVIDENT Group ("EVIDENT") and CavalRe announced a strategic partnership to solve the key challenges facing tokenized assets: primary market distribution and follow-on secondary liquidity. By integrating CavalRe's core technology—Multiswap, an automated market maker for fungible digital securities—with EVIDENT's scaled tokenized alternative assets offering and licensed infrastructure, the partnership aims to create deep, on-demand liquidity pools. This collaboration bridges TradFi and DeFi, using cutting-edge automated liquidity technology to transform illiquid private assets into instantly tradeable.

Illiquidity in private markets doesn’t have to constrain allocation design with a clear liquidity stack: semi-liquid structures, secondaries, NAV financing, and a treasury sleeve backed by cash-flow modeling and governance triggers. This turns lockups into a manageable variable, letting institutions maintain pacing, meet obligations, and harvest private-market return premia without forced sales.

Private credit has grown into a mainstream institutional allocation, offering higher yields, structural protections, and portfolio diversification compared to traditional public debt. Its rise reflects long-term shifts in financing and investing, making it a permanent feature of modern private markets.