Australia’s largest super fund is planning to increase both its allocation to private equity (PE) and the number of managers it uses in the asset class amidst a broader shift in how super funds are investing across the private markets.

“Our PE allocation is currently about five per cent, representing a portfolio of $20 billion across more than 20 primary PE relationships,” AustralianSuper global head of private equity Terry Charalambous told Investment Magazine in a statement.

“We have plans to increase the PE allocation to roughly eight per cent in the medium term. As we grow our PE allocation we will continue to add new PE managers in line with our partnership approach.”

Over the last 12 months, AustralianSuper has added more than 10 new PE managers across North America, Europe and Asia and committed over $3 billion to funds. In the financial year to date, it’s deployed more than $2 billion in co-investments across over 10 transactions.

“Private equity remains a highly attractive asset class, delivering superior long-term returns for members,” Charalambous says. “We see a lot of opportunities in this sector and we will deploy more funds as we add more managers.”

AustralianSuper follows a similar partnership approach to that used by other super funds across private market assets, investing in GP funds while also co-investing or co-underwriting alongside them in order to access “quality PE opportunities with favourable terms for members by leveraging [its] size and capability”. 

In 2023, the fund hired Eneasz Kadziela, previously deputy CIO and head of private equity at New York City Retirement Systems, to focus on “deepening AustralianSuper’s relationships with existing investment partners, while identifying additional, best-in-class partners”.

The fund’s private equity investments came under scrutiny in late 2024 following its write-down of $1.1 billion in equity and loans in collapsed online education start-up Pluralsight. At the time, head of international equities and private equity Mark Hargraves said AustralianSuper remained “strongly committed to private equity” owing to its performance.

In October 2025, Infrastructure Investor reported that the fund was considering a move away from internally managed direct infrastructure investments in favour of allocating to pooled funds. Last week, Aware Super also said that it was considering a return to investing in pooled infrastructure funds after years of favouring direct investments.

“It’s not going to result in a completely different strategy,” Aware Super head of infrastructure Mark Hector told Investment Magazine last week. “But we haven’t put anything into pooled funds over the last several years and we might have a small per cent of our capital that can tolerate going to pooled funds and having some higher fees there if it means we can get access to an even broader and better set of opportunities.”  

“There are lots of GPs that haven’t shown us anything at all that are good quality GPs. You don’t know what you don’t know. You don’t know exactly what you’re missing out on because you don’t necessarily get all of that data.”