The Latest in ABS and Debt Markets

Welcome to The Data Tapes—your biweekly snapshot of private credit and ABS markets. In each edition, we bring you concise updates on debt financings, platform fundraises, data insights, market trends, and the latest from Setpoint.

We launched this newsletter in July last year to fill a gap in consistent, high-quality coverage of asset-based finance and private credit. Over the past five months, The Data Tapes has grown to 4,000+ subscribers, delivering insights on financings, platform activity, market commentary, and more. We’re grateful for the support and excited to double down in 2025.

🚀 What’s New at Setpoint

• 2024 Recap: What a year—our team more than doubled, we closed a $31M Series B, and launched multiple tier 1 products helping customers move faster and smarter. Check out the recap here.

• Capital Conversations Happy Hour: Join us for The Asset-Backed Finance Happy Hour, hosted by Setpoint, next Wednesday, 1/15, in NYC. Sign up here.

• Heading to SFVegas? We’d love to meet you! Share your details here to set up a time to connect.

💸 Debt Financings & Acquisitions

• Affirm, the consumer BNPL lender, entered into a three-year forward flow with Sixth Street, who is committing $4B to purchase Affirm’s loans. 

• Aquila Air Capital, an engine lessor, announced the completion of its acquisition by Warburg Pincus. ATLAS SP provided a credit facility to support the acquisition and fund future growth. 

• Best Egg, a consumer lending platform, closed a $1B purchase facility with AB CarVal to offer more vehicle equity loans that let people use their car's value as collateral. 

• Brigit, a consumer financial health and cash advance platform, was acquired by Upbound Group for $460M in total consideration. 

• Chime, a consumer neobank, confidentially files for IPO. The company was last valued at $25B. 

• Consumer Portfolio Services, a consumer auto finance platform, amended its credit facility with Citi to increase capacity from $225M to $335M. 

• Credit Acceptance Corporation, a subprime consumer auto finance company, completed a $300M ABS transaction.

• Crusoe, a vertically integrated AI infrastructure provider, closed a $600M Series D led by Founders Fund alongside Fidelity, Long Journey, Mubadala, NVIDIA, Ribbit, and Valor. 

• Current, a consumer neobank, raised an additional $200M in debt and equity. Debt came from Cross River and General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund, while equity came from a16z, Wellington, and Avenir. 

• Ladder Capital, a commercial real estate finance platform, closed an $850M credit facility from a syndicate of banks including JPMorgan, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, M&T, and others. 

• Octane, a fintech platform for recreational purchases, closed a $125.76M ABS transaction collateralized by a pool of installment loans secured by new and used RVs, powerboats, and pontoon hybrids. 

• One, a consumer fintech platform that is majority-owned by Walmart, raised $300M in additional equity capital from Ribbit and others at a $2.5B valuation.

• Quantix Technology Projects, a UAE-based fintech that operates the CashNow consumer lending platform, raised a $500M asset-backed credit facility from Citi. 

• Parafin, an embedded SMB lending platform, raised a $100M Series C at a $750M valuation led by Notable Capital alongside Redpoint, Ribbit, Thrive, and GIC. 

• Porsche Financial Services, launched its third US auto ABS issuance of $891M backed by retail sales contracts financing Porsche vehicles. 

• Siena Lending Group, a middle market asset-based lending platform, increased its credit facility with Wells Fargo Capital Finance to $850M. 

• Unnamed SMB finance company closed a $75M revolving warehouse line of credit from Keystone to help finance originations. 

• Vultr, a cloud computing infrastructure platform, completed a new growth financing round that values the business at $3.5B from LuminArx Capital and AMD Ventures.

💰️Platform Growth

• AlpInvest, the secondaries business within Carlyle, and Mubadala formed a new partnership to provide NAV financing to private equity firms. 

• Amundi and First Eagle have launched a private credit fund to allow non-US investors to access First Eagle’s US private credit strategy.

• Bastion Management, an asset-based credit fund with $2B in lifetime commitments, announced its acquisition by Mesirow. Bastion will serve as the asset-backed lending arm within Mesirow Global Investment Management. 

• Canyon Partners raised $1.2B for its real estate debt strategy.

• Carlyle raises $7.1B for its latest flagship opportunistic credit fund. 

• Diamond Hill launched the Diamond Hill Securitized Credit Fund, an interval fund that invests in illiquid, higher-returning credit securities. 

• GoldenTree Asset Management closed a $500M CLO. 

• MA Financial launched MA Specialty Credit Income Fund (SCISX), a closed-end interval fund that invests in a portfolio of US private credit assets spanning asset-based lending, specialty finance, and co-lending opportunities. 

• PennantPark Floating Rate Capital upsized its credit facility with Truist to $736M. 

• Point72 taps Todd Hirsch, former Senior Managing Director at Blackstone, to lead new private credit efforts 

• Sixth Street partners with Northwestern Mutual to manage $13B in assets across its multi-strategy private capital platform, including asset-based finance, real estate, and infrastructure. Northwestern Mutual will also acquire a minority interest in Sixth Street.

• Tacora Capital raises $268.7M for its second credit fund focused on asset-based finance and venture debt. 

• TCW Group raised $3.25B in additional commitments from Nippon Life Insurance Company to support the launch of TCW’s new alternative credit capabilities.

📈 Visuals

 🗣️ Market Commentary

• “There seems to be something that happens around $10B value...people have to decide, do they want to keep spending time really being focused on what they’re great at, being investors, or do they really want to spend time trying to be business builders? And let’s just use your number, try to cross the chasm from $10B to $40B. So we were lucky enough to have Atalaya, for example, join us to develop the asset-backed strategy as in combined form with Blue Owl. I think it was very much about, these people are the best in the business at investment and have to decide, should I spend my time and energy trying to build that business, or should I keep being the best at actually delivering for LPs? And they said, listen, I could join a platform like Blue Owl, put all my time and energy back into the investing piece and leverage the ability to scale off the back of Black Owl -- of Blue Owl. And that allows us to, I think, be a win-win solution, right?” - Mark Lipschultz, Blue Owl CEO with Reuters on benefits to scale and catalysts for M&A in private credit managers. 

• “It gets harder and harder to define as we think about private credit, and we don't really delineate private or public. Public is a little more traded, but credit is credit. And I think one of the growth engines that we've seen even in the past, call it 12 or 18 months post Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, First Republic is private credit expand even more broadly because of what it really is, is just providing credit in a world where traditionally, maybe banks and commercial banks and investment banks had been providing credit. The largest part [of private credit] that’s growing right now is asset-based finance, consumer finance, and we’re seeing that from an opportunity set, that’s actually a bigger portion of our private credit book than traditional LBO and non-sponsor financing."- Drew McKnight, Fortress CEO at the Milken Institute (full transcript) on private credit and asset-based finance observations. 

• “We like them to be scalable so that we can grow into them with our clients. And if we do a good job, they’ll grow with us. That’s exactly how it’s played out over the past few years with our open-architecture insurance model. We have grown to four strategic relationships and about 20 other insurance company clients, and now manage over $220 billion for these clients specifically in BXCI—without owning or becoming an insurance company and staying asset light.” - Gilles Dellaert, Global Head of Blackstone Credit and Insurance with McKinsey. 

• “So we’ve — but those companies are now putting out $100 billion a year in alternatives. I think — that’s why I think the fee pool from sponsors will be much larger than people think because they’re not all — if you go to their programs here, I bet none of them are talking about their private equity. It’s become almost a pimple on their — not that they don’t do it, and we want to make those M&A fees and we’re going to. But I want us to be involved in the $100 billion to what might become $200 billion a year, if you listen to the per year, they’re going to put out in alternatives [private debt]. - Ken Moelis, CEO of Moelis & Co on the banks’ view on private credit markets. 

• “Private credit is now a rapidly growing $3 trillion market, and the demand continues to exceed supply as corporate lending, specialty finance, and asset-based finance shifts from banks and public markets towards private markets, creating favorable market conditions for this business.” - Steve Cohen, Point72 Chairman and CEO on the catalysts for expanding into private credit.

📖 What We’re Reading & Listening To

• 2025 Outlooks: Apollo, Ares, Benedict Evans, BlackRock, Churchill, FT Partners, JPM, KKR, Portage, UBS

• Asset-Based Finance Shines as Lending Landscape Evolves, from PIMCO

• Asset-based Credit: Easy as 1-2-3, from TJ Durkin at TPG Angelo Gordon

• BlackRock Endgame: Building the Internet of Risk, from our friend Van Spina

• Insights into Alternative Credit with Joel Holsinger (Ares), from S&P

• KKR’s Daniel Pietrzak on private credit, asset-based finance, and SRTs, from Bloomberg

• “Narrow Banking” and Implications for Banks and Private Credit, from Matt Levine

• On Bubble Watch, latest Howard Marks memo 

• Private Credit looks to Consumers, Infrastructure for Next Stage, from Bloomberg

• The Private Credit Playbook, a conversation with Fortress, Patria Investments, PGIM Private Capital, and Sound Point, from the Milken Institute

• Satya Nadella in conversation with Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley on Microsoft’s evolution, the AI arms race, CapEx, and Model Scaling, from BG2 Podcast