A diverse group of institutional investors, including insurance companies, pension funds, and sovereign wealth funds, which remain unnamed, have committed to PGIM’s middle market direct lending fund, leading to a $4.2bn final close.
The PGIM Senior Loan Opportunities II, the second commingled private credit fund available to unaffiliated investors in its middle market direct lending series, provides senior secured financing to middle market companies across North America, Europe, and Australia, PGIM stated.
The fund’s strategy focuses on delivering attractive risk-adjusted returns through a diversified portfolio of directly originated senior loans to both sponsored and non-sponsored issuers.
The fund has already begun deploying capital, with a strong pipeline of opportunities and a well-developed investment portfolio, it said.
Matt Harvey, head of middle market direct lending for PGIM’s private capital business, said: “Much of the growth in direct lending in recent years has been in sponsor-backed deals. But that channel is no longer sufficient to achieve appropriate diversification and deployment targets for investors. In the US alone, there are around 200,000 middle -arket companies, and only about 10,000 are private equity owned.”
This means, he added, that more than 90% of the addressable market remains non-sponsored. “Our ability to capture both sponsored and non-sponsored channels is a differentiator and has been validated by our investors.”
Harvey continued: “Origination capability is the cornerstone of success in private credit as it underpins our ability to execute with discipline, benefiting from broader selectivity. In a market characterised by information asymmetry, direct bilateral origination at scale across the middle market – built over years – creates proprietary deal flow and underwriting advantages.”
As a long-term private credit market participant, PGIM has managed direct lending strategies for affiliate investors since 2000. Today, PGIM manages a range of strategies that span the direct lending market from the lower middle market (through PGIM’s partnership with Deerpath Capital); to the middle market, where the firm has strategies catering to high-net-worth and institutional clients; as well as the large-cap market segment.
In June 2024, PGIM confirmed it would bring together its fixed income and private credit businesses under a global capability spanning public and private markets, creating an industry-leading public and private fixed income team with a credit platform of nearly $1trn.
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