Private Debt Funds London

Private Debt Funds United Kingdom

An Overview of UK's Private Debt

The UK is one of many major financial hubs found across the globe.

Its reach is international and its economic infrastructure is cutting-edge. This provides an ideal location for scale-ups and private debt funds to thrive.

Private debt is becoming increasingly popular in the UK, especially off the back of the Covid-19 pandemic, where the flexibility of private debt allowed borrowers to overcome economic obstacles.

Private debt in this sense has become a crucial pillar in business survival, bridging the unachievable with real-world collaboration and support.

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London bears promising annual investment figures; from 2018 to 2019, 35% of the total UK debt investments were concentrated within London-based businesses.

Similarly, the average investment deal sits at £21 million compared to £9 million in surrounding regions, demonstrating the liquidity levels for London-based private lending.

As mentioned in our article on private debt funds, we have built a trusted network of some of the most technology-savvy private debt lenders in the world. In London specifically, we have close working relationships with over 30 private debt funds.

In 2023, ~1500 of +4500 total European private debt deals happened in the UK with UK funding partners. While there's a tendency for new funds to emerge outside of the UK, it remains the powerhouse, concentrating +30% of deals in a region comprising almost 30 countries. (per Deloitte)

Now that you are familiar with the growing private debt ecosystem in London, two questions arise:

1) Which capital provider should your business talk to?

Even if you know the established private debt providers in London, would you know the best contact to reach out to? And would you have the time to do so?

It’s also worth noting that few private debt funds in London lend to borrowers with less than US$5m in EBITDA.

As a debt advisory and brokerage established in 2013, we are heavily involved in the business community. We have established close working relationships with some of the most technology-savvy private debt lenders in the world, and have helped over 350 technology businesses secure private debt solutions to support their growth.

This means that we can help you save precious time by quickly assessing who the best private lenders for your business are and who to reach out to, and we do so while keeping your business name anonymous.

2) Do you know the local business culture?

Private lending funds like to work with us for the same reason – we save them a great deal of time. We know what they want, what companies want and we help accelerate the matching process. We can do this as we are like an intelligence hub – we get inbound requests all the time, both from funds and from companies.

Our expertise as debt advisors and entrepreneurs allows us to evaluate your business model accurately and present a detailed case to our partners. We are passionate about helping you explore all of the options available to you in order to find the loan that’s right for your business.

Working in partnership with London private debt funds

How Simplestream captured the attention of a London private debt fund

As mentioned, we have helped over 350 tech companies secure private debt as growth capital.

One such company that we’ve worked with on two occasions is Simplestream, a B2B SaaS company.

Simplestream offers a seamless live and on-demand streaming platform for video content delivery. The needs of the multi-device OTT world are often complex, especially as the broadcast and TelCo landscape changes at a rapid pace.

Fuse Capital first worked with Simplestream in 2018, where we helped the company secure a loan to support their high cash burn as they were undergoing a rapid growth phase.

Three years later, Simplestream hit its growth objectives and came back to us with a very impressive valuation. This time, they required a totally different deal structure to suit their new goals.

This has allowed the firm to provide a 24/7 engineering support service to all clients, employ a product marketing manager to assist with pre-sales, continue investment into the in-house sales and marketing team, and handle at least one new OTT platform each quarter.

Our lending team had to understand how to integrate venture debt into their diverse cap structure with a suitably sized loan and a beneficial amortisation structure. The deal needed to allow Simplestream the flexibility to spend their loan quickly and reap the rewards of a later repayment schedule.

We have since helped the firm secure a multimillion-pound term loan with an optimal deal structure.

Private Debt Funds UK