A note on what's next for Percent
To the Percent community,
You may have already seen the news today, but it's the kind of thing you should hear from me directly.
After eight years as CEO, I'm handing the role to Prath Reddy, CFA, our co-founder and President. I'll be moving into the role of Chairman of the Board. We've planned this carefully, and I want to be clear about why it's happening: not because anything is wrong, but because so much is right.
When we started Percent in 2018, the idea was almost stubbornly simple. Private credit needed better rails. The asset class was enormous and growing, and yet it ran on spreadsheets, PDFs, and relationships, closed to all but the largest institutions. We thought there was a better way to source, structure, and distribute these deals, and we set out to build it.
We got plenty wrong along the way and learned from all of it. We started as a marketplace and found that what people needed first was transparency and better data. We expanded into new asset classes and figured out which ones actually mattered. When we brought managers onto the platform, they told us they wanted exactly what we were building: access to deals, real visibility into them, and a route to liquidity. Every step taught us something, and all of it pointed in the same direction.
It's all led us here. Today, more than 50,000 investors and over 140 asset originators are on the platform. We've facilitated more than $2 billion in issuance across over 1,200 deals, with more than $350 million in assets under administration today. In the first quarter of this year, we originated over 80% of lower middle market lender finance deals under $25 million by issuance volume. We built the infrastructure for modern private credit, and it works.
So why now. The work ahead is a different kind of work than the work behind us. Percent is moving from proving that modern private credit can work to scaling it for institutions, and that next phase is, more than anything, capital markets work. It happens to be the exact work Prath has done his entire career. Part of a founder's job is knowing when to hand the company to the person built for what comes next, and doing it from a position of strength rather than necessity. I'd rather pass the baton now, while the company is performing and while I'm still here to support it, than wait for a moment that forces the decision.
There's no one I trust with this more than Prath. He's been here since the very beginning, part of the founding team in 2018, and he's shaped Percent's strategy and operations at every turn. He came to us from UBS's debt capital markets group, he's a CFA charterholder, and he has personally overseen our origination, structuring, and distribution work since our earliest days. Many of you already know Prath well, especially those of you who've been with us the longest. You've talked to him, learned from him, and watched him operate. You know exactly what kind of leader you're getting.
I'm not going anywhere. As Chairman of the Board, I'll stay close to the company, focused on long-term strategy and governance and on supporting Prath and the team. And the things you value about Percent are not changing: the transparency, the discipline, the insistence on getting the details right. If anything, this is how we protect them as we grow.
Thank you for being part of this. It's been quite a ride, and the best part is that it isn't over. I'll let Prath take it from here.
— Nelson Chu
Co-Founder & Chairman of the Board, Percent
A few words from Prath
Nelson, thank you. What you built, and what you trusted the rest of us to build alongside you, is rare and I don't take it lightly. We appreciate your years-long dedication to our collective success and we're excited to take this business to the next level.
To our investors: most of you know me, so I'll keep this brief. The reason Percent works is that we've never treated private credit as a black box. You can see what you own, you know how it's structured, and we hold ourselves to that standard on every deal. That doesn't change under my leadership, it will only continue to become enhanced. What will change is our ambition. We've spent eight years building the foundation for a more accessible, more liquid, more transparent private credit market, and we're entering the phase where that foundation allows us to launch products not just designed for accredited retail but for institutional investors as well. I'll have more to share on where we're headed in the coming weeks, including at our next quarterly investor update.
For now, thank you for your trust. We've earned it deal by deal, and we intend to keep earning it year over year.
— Prath Reddy
Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Percent