Why Are Private Equity Firms Increasingly Building Offshore Research Teams in India?

Private equity used to run on a simple staffing model. A handful of associates in New York, London or Singapore did the screening, the modelling and the diligence, while partners focused on judgement calls and relationships. That model is under strain. Deal volumes are up, holding periods are longer, and limited partners want evidence of value creation, not just a good entry multiple. Something had to give, and for a growing number of firms, the answer has been to build a permanent research capability in India.

This is not the outsourcing story of a decade ago, where a vendor was handed a task and asked to return a spreadsheet. It is closer to an extension of the investment team itself, staffed with analysts who understand the thesis, review the same data, and are held to the same standards as anyone in the home office. According to the Economic Times, India now has more than 500 GCCs owned or acquired by PE-backed companies, and nearly 31 per cent of all new GCC additions in India between FY21 and FY26 have come from this segment. The shift is not confined to the large buyout houses either. ANSR data cited in the same report shows that close to 65 per cent of the more than 220 mid-market firms that have set up GCCs in India since 2021 are PE-backed.

From cost centre to capability layer

The reasons firms give for making the move have changed. A few years ago, the pitch was almost entirely about cost. Now it is about repeatability and speed. Zinnov managing partner Amita Goyal put it plainly: "PE-backed GCCs have moved past the experimental stage and are increasingly becoming a standard lever in PE value-creation programmes". Sundeep Sharma, CEO of Summit, an ANSR company that helps PE-backed organisations set up these centres, describes the growth pattern: teams typically start with "20-25 employees in the first year, before reaching an average headcount of about 70". Software-as-a-service, cloud and IT security account for 55 per cent of PE-backed mid-market GCCs, with banking, financial services and insurance a distant second at 15 per cent.

What is actually being built inside these centres is the more interesting question, and it maps closely onto four stages of the private equity lifecycle: commercial due diligence, market mapping, deal sourcing and portfolio support.

Commercial due diligence: analysts, not just spreadsheets

Commercial due diligence has traditionally been the domain of large advisory firms, and it still is for the most complex, high-stakes deals. But the mechanics of that work, market sizing, competitor benchmarking, customer reference calls, and business plan stress-testing are increasingly delivered out of India-based teams working either inside a GCC or alongside a specialist partner.

Alvarez & Marsal's India commercial due diligence practice is a useful illustration of the scale to which this has grown. The firm's India-based CDD leads have advised a long list of global PE names, including BPEA-EQT, TPG, Everstone, Partners Group, Advent International, Bain Capital, Blackstone, Temasek, General Atlantic, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, KKR and Warburg Pincus. One A&M partner has led more than 100 commercial and operational due diligence engagements from India, while a colleague has covered 70 or more engagements across the healthcare value chain alone, evaluating 47 distinct business models across segments. That is not a junior support function. It is a genuine centre of technical expertise that happens to be based in Mumbai, Gurugram, or Bengaluru rather than London or New York.

For a fund running several live processes at once, the appeal is straightforward. A dedicated India-based CDD team can be briefed on a Monday and produce a first-cut market model by Friday, without pulling a deal partner away from negotiation or a junior associate away from the data room.

Market mapping: the groundwork behind every thesis

Before a single company is approached, most funds need a clear-eyed view of the industry they are betting on: how big it is, who the credible players are, where growth is coming from, and which sub-segments are becoming crowded. This is market mapping, and it is exactly the kind of structured, research-intensive work that lends itself to a dedicated offshore team.

Dawn and Dusk Advisors, which extends offshore support to private equity and venture capital clients across the deal cycle, lists industry landscape and market mapping, thematic research, and sector or sub-sector analysis as core deliverables sitting alongside deal sourcing. The output typically feeds directly into the investment thesis long before a target is identified, and it is refreshed continuously as a fund tracks a sector over months or years rather than compiling a one-off report.

Because this work is repeatable across deals and sectors, it is well suited to a standing team rather than a one-off engagement. An analyst who has already built the competitive map for enterprise software in Southeast Asia can update it in days when a new target surfaces, rather than starting from a blank page.

Deal sourcing: widening the funnel without widening headcount

Deal sourcing is where the case for an offshore team is most tangible in pure economic terms. According to Outsource Accelerator, an outsourced research desk lets a fund review far more opportunities without adding permanent headcount, citing the example of a four-person fund that "can suddenly review 30 targets a month without adding staff, benefits, or a new office". The same piece notes that global private equity investment reached a four-year high of US$2.1 trillion in 2025, according to KPMG, a volume that has made screening capacity, not capital, the binding constraint for many mid-market funds.

The typical division of labour keeps origination and relationship management onshore, close to management teams and intermediaries, while target screening, comparable company analysis and pipeline management move to the India-based team. Outsource Accelerator frames the boundary clearly: "The provider assembles evidence; the deal team interprets it". Judgement on valuation, negotiation, and the final investment decision remains firmly with the partners who bear the risk.

Pricing tends to follow one of two models. A retained desk bills a flat monthly fee for a set block of analyst hours and suits funds with steady screening volume, while a project model bills per engagement and suits funds that spike around live processes. Most growth-stage funds start on the project model and move to a retainer once they trust the output and can predict their own cadence.

Portfolio support: where the value creation argument gets real

The fourth pillar, portfolio support, is where GCCs have moved furthest beyond a support function. Everest Group partner Akshat Vaid frames the decision to build in-house rather than outsource as genuinely strategic: "It depends on factors such as the scale of operations, the uniqueness of the work, intellectual property requirements, existing vendor relationships and long-term business goals". Once a centre is built, though, its mandate tends to expand quickly from reporting and monitoring into AI adoption, platform modernisation and cybersecurity work across the portfolio, according to the same Economic Times report.

Dawn and Dusk Advisors' portfolio support offering mirrors this pattern, listing portfolio monitoring, financial analysis and modelling, key metrics tracking, and CFO-facing MIS support as standing services delivered across a fund's holding period. The centre effectively becomes the analytical backbone for every portfolio company at once, rather than a resource each company has to build separately.

Where the four functions plug in

Table 1: Commercial Due Diligence, Market Mapping, Deal Sourcing and Portfolio Support

Function	Core activity	Typically stays onshore	Typically moves to India
Commercial due diligence	Market sizing, competitor benchmarking, reference calls	Client relationship, final DD sign-off	Data gathering, model building, sector expertise
Market mapping	Industry sizing, thematic and sub-sector research	Thesis validation	Continuous landscape tracking, competitive mapping
Deal sourcing	Origination, screening, pipeline management	Relationship management, negotiation	Target screening, comparable analysis, pipeline hygiene
Portfolio support	Monitoring, reporting, value-creation analytics	Board-level decisions	KPI tracking, financial modelling, MIS preparation

How a research request typically flows

A well-run India-based research team does not operate as a black box. Requests move through a clear sequence, from the deal team defining the question, to scoping and staffing, to parallel workstreams across the four functions, to evidence returning to the deal team, to partners applying judgement, and finally into a feedback loop that sharpens the next cycle.

Figure 1: How a Research Request Flows Through an India-Based PE Team

The lesson for PE leaders

None of this replaces the judgement that makes private equity a people business. No offshore team decides whether a thesis is right or whether a price clears the fund's hurdle rate. What it does is remove the ceiling that headcount used to place on how many opportunities a fund could credibly evaluate, and how closely it could watch its own portfolio once the ink was dry.

The firms getting the most out of this shift are treating India-based research teams as a standing capability rather than a temporary fix for a busy quarter. They are building institutional memory into the centre, so that the market map built for one deal strengthens the pitch for the next, and the KPI dashboard built for one portfolio company becomes the template for the rest of the fund. Sundeep Sharma's description of the shift is a fair summary of where the industry has landed: setting up a GCC is "no longer a set of isolated company-level decisions". For private equity, that is as true of research capability as it is of anything else in the operating model.