Thoma Bravo made headlines a couple of weeks ago after writing off $5.1bn of equity in Medallia, a company selling customer experience analysis software-as-a-service, in the second-largest private equity loss in history. At the risk of getting ourselves typecast, Alphaville thought we’d ignore this faceplant and instead trace what happened with the company’s debt and its debtors — as the Medallia situation offers an intriguing way to explore the private broader credit industry. And, while we’re there, we thought we’d also take a look at how private credit funds paid themselves for managing the position. Tl;dr: very well, thanks for asking! Diving down the BDC rabbit-hole One of the distinguishing features of private equity and private credit is the privacy afforded to portfolio companies. So while we don’t know for sure, we think that around $1.8bn of debt was raised to support Thoma Bravo’s Medallia acquisition, back in 2021. And we can see that a lot of this...
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Showing posts from July, 2026