Claret Capital Partners has closed its fourth European growth debt fund at €575M, well past the €500M it set out to raise. The London firm announced the final close today, splitting the total into €440m of Fund IV commitments and €135m of affiliated discretionary mandates.
The money lends rather than buys, as growth debt gives companies capital without the ownership cost of an equity round, which is a proposition that gets more attractive the harder equity becomes to raise on acceptable terms.
Around 32% of the fund has gone out across 27 companies, among them the B2B buy-now-pay-later platform Billie, the commercial property software firm PRODA, the sales-intelligence company Surfe, and the clinical-stage drug developers Cinclus Pharma and Inventiva.
Claret describes itself as Europe’s largest independent growth debt fund manager, and the qualifier is doing real work. Kreos Capital raised a larger fund at €1.25bn, but BlackRock bought Kreos in 2023, so the biggest balance sheet in European venture lending now sits inside the world’s largest asset manager.
That consolidation is the backdrop to this raise. An independent lender at €575m is a different participant from a business line inside a firm managing trillions.
