The average cheque is the number a borrower needs and the one Claret did not publish, so it has to be backed out of the deployment figure. Thirty-two percent of the €575m headline is about €184m spread across 27 companies, near €6.8m each [1][3][1]. Work instead off the €440m of Fund IV commitments, setting the affiliated mandates aside, and the same 32% is about €141m, or €5.2m a company [2][2]. The longer record lands in the same band: more than €1.5bn lent across over 210 companies since 2013, roughly €7.1m a name [11][3].
That is the shape of the customer. A company that can absorb five to seven million and service it on a schedule gets an alternative to selling shares at a price the market, not the plan, is setting [15]. Comparing the two offers means going on what has been published, and that record stops short: fund terms, target returns and typical ticket size are all absent, as is the identity of the partners behind the €135m of discretionary mandates [12]. "Non-dilutive" describes the headline of the instrument rather than its cost, and coupon and covenants decide whether it is cheaper than the round it replaces.
Two of the five named portfolio companies, Cinclus Pharma and Inventiva, are clinical-stage drug developers [5]. The case TNW makes for growth debt in long-timeline sectors is lending against revenue instead of buying equity against a distant exit [16], and a clinical-stage developer has no revenue to lend against; the same report notes that the gap between funding and revenue is precisely what makes dilution expensive in life sciences [17]. The underwriting logic behind those two loans remains undisclosed.
The self-description as Europe's largest independent growth debt fund manager [6] rests on a comparison with a single lender that raised 2.2 times Fund IV and is no longer independent [7][4]. That comparison rests on a single competitor, not a survey of the field. Nothing published says how many independent lenders Europe still has, or at what size, and for a borrower needing more than single-digit millions, knowing that the biggest balance sheet now sits indoors is cold comfort.
Two questions settle this for a company reading the term sheet. Can the coupon be serviced out of the worst of its three plans rather than the base case, and is the equity retained worth more than the covenant signed to keep it. If the coupon only clears in the base case, the loan is a wager that the round it was meant to avoid happens anyway, at a valuation nobody in the room controls.
