Ares Management pulled in a record $36 billion in second-quarter fundraising, defying a wave of investor anxiety that has rattled the broader private credit industry in recent months and reinforcing the firm’s position as one of the sector’s most trusted names.
Another Record Quarter for Fundraising
Ares reported second-quarter 2026 results on Friday showing GAAP net income of $150.6 million, alongside after-tax realized income of $467.6 million and fee-related earnings of $491.1 million for the period ended June 30. Chief Executive Officer Michael Arougheti credited the firm’s consistent fund performance for the strong showing, saying clients continued rewarding Ares with fresh capital across its various strategies even as broader sentiment toward private credit remained shaky.
The $36 billion haul builds directly on an already record-setting first quarter, when Ares raised roughly $30 billion, itself up more than 45% year-over-year. Together, the two quarters underscore a fundraising pace that has left Ares among the strongest capital raisers in the alternative asset management industry this year.
Institutional Money Keeps Flowing Despite Industry Jitters
The results arrive at a genuinely difficult moment for private credit more broadly, an industry that has faced mounting scrutiny in recent months over loan quality, concentrated exposure to software-sector borrowers, and a wave of investor redemption requests at several major competing firms. Despite that backdrop, institutional investors such as pension funds have continued allocating substantial capital to Ares, taking a longer-term view that has helped cushion the broader slowdown affecting the private wealth channel specifically.
Analysts have pointed to this dynamic as a sign that institutional capital is consolidating around larger, more established managers during periods of volatility, rather than pulling back from private credit altogether. That shift has clearly worked in Ares’s favor, even as smaller or less diversified competitors have struggled to raise fresh capital from newer investors amid the industry’s negative headlines.
Strong Deployment and a Growing Asset Base
Heading into the quarter, Ares had already built a substantial pipeline of capital ready to deploy, ending the first quarter with $158.1 billion in uninvested capital, up 11% from a year earlier. Total assets under management stood at $644.3 billion as of March 31, up 18% year-over-year, with the firm targeting $750 billion in AUM by 2028.
The firm has also continued expanding through acquisitions, closing its purchase of Whitestone REIT on July 14, extending its recent pace of capital deployment into real estate alongside its core credit and direct lending strategies. A preliminary filing in early July had already signaled stronger performance income for the quarter, with Ares projecting realized net performance income exceeding $50 million, compared with just $16 million in the same period a year earlier.
A Bright Spot in a Turbulent Sector
Ares’s results stand out against a difficult backdrop for the broader private credit industry, which has faced roughly $265 billion in lost market value across major alternative asset managers so far in 2026, driven by a wave of redemption requests and growing concern over loan quality tied to private equity-backed companies. Several rival firms have been forced to impose limits on investor withdrawals in recent months, a sharp contrast to the steady inflows Ares has continued reporting.
That resilience appears tied to Ares’s diversified platform, which spans credit, real estate, private equity, and infrastructure investing rather than relying on any single strategy. The firm’s ability to keep attracting institutional capital even as retail-oriented private credit vehicles face redemption pressure suggests investors are increasingly differentiating between managers based on track record and platform breadth, rather than treating the entire private credit industry as a single, uniform risk.
What Comes Next
With another record fundraising quarter now in the books and a substantial pipeline of uninvested capital still available for deployment, Ares appears well positioned to continue capitalizing on institutional demand for alternative investments even as parts of the broader private credit industry work through their own reckoning. Whether that momentum can be sustained through the back half of 2026 will likely depend on how the wider private credit turbulence evolves, and whether institutional investors continue favoring scale and diversification over the higher-yield promises that drew so much retail capital into the sector in the first place.
