Monroe Capital closed its latest private credit offering with approximately $500 million of investable capital, including targeted fund leverage.
The Monroe Capital Opportunistic Private Credit Fund I had investor commitments from over 75 LPs across the U.S., Asia, Middle East and Europe. The fund, which ad $286 million in LP commitments, invests in opportunistic and special situation private credit transactions across multiple industries, with a focus on asset rich directly originated and secondary credit opportunities.
“This is a high returning business that we have pursued for the last ten years,” said Monroe Chairman and CEO Ted Koenig. “We continue to search for specialized areas to leverage our core competencies and our proprietary sourcing capabilities to find attractive adjacencies in direct lending where we can generate discernable “alpha” for our limited partner investors. We believe our Opportunistic Private Credit strategy is the ultimate “all-weather” investment product. We have been able to generate differentiated and consistent risk adjusted returns over the last 18-year period, regardless of the business cycle or economic climate.”
This is the 31st investment vehicle since the Chicago-based firm’s founding in 2004. The opportunistic private credit strategy team led by Aaron Peck and Kyle Asher invests in niche credit opportunities including specialty finance, asset heavy corporate credit, highly structured real estate lending, litigation finance, fund finance, NAV lending, and secondary investments in loans.
“Monroe’s Opportunistic Private Credit strategy takes advantage of the firm’s strong underwriting skillset to focus on high-quality assets whose value is often masked by collateral complexity, market dislocations, nuance around existing credit structures, or restricted access to more traditional capital markets,” said Aaron Peck, portfolio manager of the fund. “We believe the timing for this Fund could not be better. We expect many high-quality investment opportunities given the current direction of the economy as well as public and private market liquidity needs.”
The Opportunistic Private Credit Group at Monroe has generated over $1.5 billion of investment commitments in 32 transactions since the launch of the fund primarily held across the Monroe platform. This includes over $280 million of investment commitments the fund has made to date. The firm has $14 billion in overall AUM, spread across direct lending, asset-based lending, specialty finance, opportunistic and structured credit, and equity.
Within asset-based lending, Monroe recently hired Gordon Saint-Denis as managing director and head of sports finance. He will be responsible for originating new investments across the capital structure for acquisition financing and recapitalizations for all major sports teams and venues in North America and Europe as well as other businesses in the sports ecosystem such as soccer, rugby, cycling, racing, golf, endurance races, e-sports and sports technology companies, merchandising, name, image and likeness (NILs), ticketing, and equipment companies.
Saint-Denis previously was a managing director and group head in the Sports Advisory & Finance group for Citizens Bank where he provided financing to teams and venues for the NFL, NHL, NBA, MLB and MLS.
