Percent 2025 Year in Review: Scaling with Discipline
A Note From Our Founder
Dear Percent Community,
2025 was a year of execution. While others chased headlines, we put our heads down and built: scaling our core business, strengthening our marketplace, and laying the infrastructure for what comes next.
The numbers reflect that focus. Total AUM grew 53.6% year-over-year to $350.3 million. We facilitated $532.4 million in investments across 268 deals, both records for the platform. Our asset-based securities AUM nearly doubled, growing 84.7% to $269.3 million as we continued our deliberate shift toward collateralized structures in established jurisdictions.
This year also tested our portfolio in ways that matter. We charged off $8.7 million in principal from corporate loan deals that had been in workout, primarily international borrowers where recovery efforts proved difficult. We do not take charge-offs lightly, nor do we believe in pretending they do not exist. The deals that underperformed were exactly the type of corporate loan structures we have been strategically moving away from, and our renewed focus on asset-based securities is about building a more resilient portfolio for our investors.
The strategic shift is working. Asset based deals now represent 76.9% of our AUM. Average program size grew from $2.8 million to $4.0 million as established borrowers expanded their footprint on the platform. We saw less turnover, more repeat issuance, and deeper relationships. These are the compounding benefits of focus.
We also invested in expanding how investors can access private credit. The launch of our Separately Managed Account program marked a significant step, offering RIAs and high-net-worth investors a professionally managed path to private credit. In October, we announced our strategic partnership with Pursuit Fund Advisers, who as of that date had deployed over $70 million across 100+ deals on our platform. We also continued building out Secondary Markets infrastructure, including live order books and trade history at the deal level, because repeatable secondary workflows and better price discovery are part of how this asset class matures.
To our investor community: thank you for your partnership. Whether you've been with us since 2018 or made your first investment this year, your participation is what makes this marketplace work. We don't take that trust lightly.
Looking ahead, we're focused on the long game: deepening our lender finance expertise, expanding access through new products, and building the infrastructure that will bring liquidity and transparency to an asset class that badly needs both.
With gratitude,
Nelson Chu, Founder & CEO
2025 Performance at a Glance
In 2025, the Percent Marketplace set records in transaction volume and capital returned to investors, driven by asset-based financing. All metrics are for the year ended December 31, 2025, unless otherwise noted.
Year-Over-Year Statistics
Percent's marketplace has facilitated investments in private credit since 2018. In 2023, Percent Securities became a registered Broker-Dealer to further streamline investor access to private credit. The statistics below reflect all deals facilitated on Percent’s Marketplace since 2018, including pre- and post-Broker-Dealer registration. All metrics are for the year ended December 31, 2025, unless otherwise noted.
Individual return performance on the investor portfolio page is calculated differently and uses the XIRR formula. More information here.
2025: Strategy, Focus, and Scale
The platform facilitated $532.4 million in investments across 268 deals—both all-time records—while total AUM grew 53.6% to $350.3 million.
Strategic Growth in Asset-Based Securities The defining narrative was our continued shift toward collateral-backed structures. ABS AUM grew 84.7% year-over-year, from $145.8 million to $269.3 million. Corporate loan AUM remained relatively flat at $77.5 million, consistent with our deliberate move away from corporate loan structures following this year's corporate-loan charge-offs.
Marketplace Maturation The marketplace expanded in both depth and repeat activity. We ended the year with 88 active borrower programs, and 59 of those programs were in lender finance. Lender financing represented approximately 67% of programs by count and 73% of AUM by value. As repeat issuance increased and borrower relationships deepened, average deal size grew from $1.6 million in 2024 to $2.0 million in 2025, and average program size grew from $2.8 million to $4.0 million.
Expanding Access with Separately Managed Accounts 2025 marked the launch of our most sophisticated product to date: Separately Managed Accounts (SMAs).
Designed to offer a managed path into private credit, SMAs allow investors and RIAs to build custom portfolios tailored to specific mandates. This product offers a "flexible middle ground," combining the granularity of direct investing with the efficiency of managed oversight. By providing white-label capabilities for RIAs and white-glove onboarding for high-net-worth individuals, Percent is now powering the private credit infrastructure for the broader wealth management industry.
Institutional Validation Institutional adoption accelerated throughout the year. In October, Percent announced a strategic joint venture with Pursuit Fund Advisers, an asset manager dedicated to differentiated alternative investments. As of that date, Pursuit had deployed over $70 million across 100+ asset-based deals originated by Percent, signaling strong institutional confidence in our origination and structuring capabilities.
Q4 2025 New Borrowers
In Q4 2025, we welcomed several notable additions to our borrower network, including:
- B9 ($2.5M across 1 deal): Florida-headquartered provider of earned wage access, active across the United States with operations in Mexico and Eastern Europe.
- Fondimex ($0.8M across 1 deal): Mexico-based invoice factoring provider serving merchandise suppliers, established in 2021.
- Kikin ($1.2M across 1 deal): UK-based supply chain finance provider offering short-term loans for supplier invoices and FX solutions, established in 2023.
- Plaintiff Investment Funding ($1.1M across 1 deal): Michigan-based litigation finance company established in 2007, providing non-recourse consumer legal funding in 32 states.
- SellersFi ($2.0M across 1 deal): Florida-headquartered eCommerce financing specialist founded in 2017, serving Amazon and Walmart retailers with working capital solutions.
For a complete review of new underwriters and borrowers across Q1, Q2, and Q3 2025, see the quarterly reports on our Track Record of Performance page.
Navigating 2025 Workouts, Recoveries, and Charge-Offs
Private credit comes with real risk, and transparency about that risk is how we build trust. While 2025 delivered record growth and strong overall performance, some deals required workout interventions. A subset of those workouts, after extended recovery efforts, were charged off when further positive outcomes became unlikely.
What We Charged Off
In 2025, we charged off $8.7 million in principal from deals that had been in workout with no realistic path to recovery. The full charge-offs were Taiger, Fiberight, and Bringo. LVL’s principal outstanding was 75% charged off. Every one of these was a corporate loan. Every one was domiciled outside the United States.
That geography and structure matters. Recovery in international corporate loans is harder for two reasons: limited or no collateral value in the security package, and legal frameworks that make enforcement slow, expensive, or impractical. Despite our recovery efforts across all deals in workout, these are the types of deals we've been moving away from.
What Remains in Workout
As of year-end, 14 borrowers had deals in active workout, representing $26.1 million in outstanding principal. Corporate loans account for $22.6 million of that total (86.7% of principal) across 9 of the 14 deals (64.3% by program count). The concentration in corporate loans reflects both their higher inherent risk and the reason we've pivoted hard toward asset-based structures.
Each workout situation is managed by dedicated teams, including specialized legal counsel or liquidators when needed. Several deals in workout continue to accrue interest, accept payment-in-kind arrangements, or make partial payments during proceedings.
Resources for Investors
We publish detailed updates on all active workout situations in our quarterly Deals in Workout blog post. For historical context on recovery outcomes, see our Charged Off and Recovered Deals tracker.
Workouts are part of private credit. Our job is to manage them aggressively for the best path to recovery, communicate them clearly, and learn from them structurally. If you have questions about any specific situation or our workout process, reach out.
Building for Scale: Platform Innovations in 2025
2025 delivered the infrastructure we've been building toward. While SMAs and Secondary Markets represented the visible expansion of how investors access private credit, the platform team focused on building the infrastructure required to support them.
Secondary Markets
In December, Secondary Markets officially launched to all investors on the Percent Marketplace. Investors can now post indications of interest to buy or sell positions, view live order books, and access deal-level trade history. The feature introduces a mechanism for potential liquidity in an asset class historically defined by its lack of it. The first secondary transaction closed on December 15th.
Separately Managed Accounts
The SMA program launched in mid-2025, giving RIAs and high-net-worth investors a professionally managed path into private credit. SMAs combine white-label capabilities for advisors with white-glove onboarding for individual investors. The product removes operational friction from institutional adoption and positions Percent as infrastructure for the broader wealth management industry.
Deal-Level Reporting
In October, Percent launched a consolidated reporting page at both the deal and portfolio levels. Investors can now access surveillance reports, collateral verification updates, and borrower communications in a single view. The feature replaced fragmented email distribution with a centralized system that scales as both deal volume and reporting complexity increase.
Anticipated Refinancing Date
In December, the Portfolio page added Anticipated Refinancing Date as a visible data point. The field gives investors visibility into expected exit timing for deals where refinancing represents the most likely repayment path, particularly relevant for commercial real estate and corporate lending transactions.
Retiring APY, Introducing Coupon Rate
In February, Percent transitioned from 'APY' to 'Coupon Rate' across all investor-facing materials, aligning with how institutional private credit markets communicate returns.
Under the Hood
Behind these features, the product team shipped dozens of releases focused on stability, performance, and scalability. Backend refactors improved data processing speeds, while new banking functionality in the Manager portal allowed servicers to process transactions directly within the platform. These upgrades don't always show up in feature announcements, but they are the engine that keeps the marketplace running as investor activity scales.
Percent in the Spotlight
The market paid attention in 2025. Here's where Percent showed up in the conversation:
- Bloomberg quoted Nelson Chu in its "Going Private" newsletter, highlighting how private credit platforms are positioning themselves against traditional banks as the sector approaches the $5 trillion mark.
- In Forbes, Ilona Limonta-Volkova explored the infrastructure gap keeping private credit out of retirement portfolios, featuring Percent's push for standardization and live order books as the key to unlocking transparency and liquidity for individual investors.
- Wealth Management reported on the launch of Percent’s SMA program, detailing our move to offer RIAs a white-label path to asset-backed, non-bank loans under $25M with fully handled deal selection and servicing.
- In Fast Company, Nelson Chu argued that “wearing many hats” is a founder advantage, using Percent’s build story to show how firsthand customer work drove critical product decisions, including our one-month investment notes.
- Alternative Credit Investor profiled Percent’s strategy for the sector’s next chapter—secondary-market trading—quoting Nelson on the need for standardized pricing and automated matching to solve the industry's liquidity problem.
Founder Notes Podcast For an unfiltered look at private credit and fintech, tune in to Founder Notes featuring Nelson Chu and Prath Reddy. Biweekly, they round up the latest happenings in the private credit world and share the realities of building a disruptive platform. Listen here.
Looking Ahead: Private Credit in 2026
Private credit enters 2026 with momentum, but the market's tolerance for weak underwriting and marketing-first narratives is shrinking. After a year of headline risk and high-profile defaults across the broader industry, scrutiny is replacing speed as the default mode.
The Macro Picture
The US economy enters 2026 from a position of relative strength, though growth is moderating. Inflation remains above the Fed's 2% target, pressuring intermediate and long-term yields. With the Fed continuing to ease and fiscal stimulus arriving via the new administration's tax bill, the outlook remains credit-positive.
We see five defining themes that will separate winners from losers in the year ahead:
- The Shift to Scrutiny The "capital-at-any-price" era is over. Capital may not be scarce in 2026, but it will be selective. Managers who demonstrate clean data, auditable servicing, and consistent collateral verification will win. Those relying on pitch decks and marketing narratives will struggle.
- Asset-Based Finance Normalization ABF will continue taking share from corporate direct lending as investors prioritize collateralized structures and shorter paths to repayment. In specialty finance, performance depends on underwriting plus collateral monitoring, servicing discipline, and reporting cadence, not enterprise value alone.
- The Risk to Watch: The Consumer Fracture While the market focuses on corporate credit, we're watching consumer credit at subprime and near-prime tiers. "Average" consumer data masks a deep split between prime and subprime borrowers. We expect rising delinquencies among lenders concentrated in subprime and near-prime exposure. We favor platforms that demonstrate diversified borrower mix and real-time performance reporting.
- Algorithmic Crowding Risk A systemic risk is underappreciated: as more managers rely on similar AI models for risk management and portfolio construction, blind spots become synchronized. If algorithms de-risk the same segments simultaneously, the result is a correlated shock that's hard to spot in advance. Investors should push managers on model diversity, scenario planning, and what happens when everyone's system reacts the same way.
- The Illiquidity Premium May Compress One contrarian view: the days of a durable illiquidity premium may be numbered as the market scales, standardizes, and digitizes. The future favors technology-enabled marketplaces that support consistent data standards, repeatable secondary workflows, and improved price discovery.
Percent's Strategic Focus
Our positioning in 2026 centers on three areas.
First, we're deepening our focus on the sub-$50 million lender finance segment, with short-duration assets across litigation finance, merchant cash advance, revenue-based finance, earned wage access, medical receivables, and factoring.
Second, we're moving beyond the traditional buy-and-hold model by developing infrastructure that supports secondary activity and price discovery.
Third, we're doubling down on real-time performance monitoring and surveillance to meet the market's demand for transparency.
Ultimately, we expect the private credit market to bifurcate. Mega-managers will defend scale and brand, while specialist platforms and managers gain share by offering differentiated exposure, structure, and data. We are building infrastructure that helps this asset class mature, with standardization, improved price discovery, and repeatable secondary workflows.
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2025 proved that focus compounds. The shift toward asset-based securities created a more resilient portfolio. The launch of SMAs gave RIAs and institutions the infrastructure they needed to access private credit at scale. The investment in secondary markets addressed the liquidity constraints that have kept this asset class from reaching its potential.
To the investors who deployed $532 million through our platform this year: thank you. To the institutional partners who validated our approach with tens of millions in capital: your confidence matters. The market is maturing. The standards are rising. We're building the infrastructure this industry will need next.