Category: News

Victory Park Capital has announced a $25 million credit facility for Chicago-based AvantCredit, an online lending company offering loans between $1,000 and $10,000 to individuals. In addition to the credit facility, VPC also participated in AvantCredit’s Series A equity round led by August Capital.

PRESS RELEASE

Victory Park Capital (VPC), an asset management firm that specializes in direct credit and equity investing in middle- and lower-middle-market companies, announced a $25 million credit facility for Chicago-based AvantCredit, a leading online lending company offering loans between $1,000 and $10,000 to individuals. In addition to the credit facility, VPC also participated in AvantCredit’s Series A equity round led by August Capital.
“The team at AvantCredit has developed a robust suite of risk management processes that evaluate consumer credit and make highly competitive loans to underserved borrowers. We are excited to provide financing for AvantCredit as it expands its loan portfolio and meets the growing credit needs of consumers,” said Brendan Carroll , Co-Founder and Partner at Victory Park Capital. “As traditional banks remain hesitant to lend across consumer segments, we will see the growth of new and innovative credit solutions like AvantCredit.”
Launched in late 2012, AvantCredit provides customers with a new lending experience using state-of-the-art analytics methods and the highest data encryption security standards. Utilizing hundreds of distinct customer attributes including credit, social and meta data, the firm offers small businesses the highest approval likelihood with the lowest possible rates. The company is fully licensed and operating in 10 states. AvantCredit wrote its first loans in 2013 and within months has built up a loan portfolio of more than $4 million.
“This funding will allow us to grow our internal technology and analytics capabilities so that we can continue to offer our customers great online credit products that are lacking in today’s market,” said John Sun , Co-Founder and Chief Risk Officer of AvantCredit.
About Victory Park Capital (VPC)
Victory Park Capital is an alternative investment firm that provides private debt and equity financing solutions to middle-market and lower middle-market companies across a wide range of industries. The firm focuses on traditional and complex situations, and seeks to build long-term sustainable value in its portfolio companies. VPC’s focus on certainty and speed to close provides the companies it seeks to invest in with a high level of security throughout the relationship. For more information, visit: http://www.victoryparkcapital.com.
About AvantCredit.com
AvantCredit (Avant Credit Corporation and affiliates) was launched in late 2012 to change the way customers borrow and provide customers with a new and unique borrowing experience by offering fully-unsecured installment loans between $1,000 and $10,000. AvantCredit offers superb customer experience that is 100 percent online, offering privacy, flexibility and transparency to the consumer. AvantCredit’s unique combination of technology, analytics and customer service capability allows the Company to offer credit to borrowers with less-than-perfect credit at some of the lowest cost available online to the target audience. AvantCredit operates in 10 US states and is licensed and regulated on a state by state basis. Find out more at http://www.AvantCredit.com.
About August Capital
August Capital was founded in 1995 to invest in companies differentiated by technical innovation and entrepreneurial excellence. Today, August Capital’s eight investment professionals have more than a century of combined venture and operational experience. Together they manage $1.3 billion and have invested in more than 75 companies across the technology spectrum. From its inception, August Capital has funded an extraordinary group of entrepreneurs who have built significant, long-term value across the full range of information technologies. The companies that August Capital’s partners have backed represent an aggregate market capitalization of well over $250 billion, generate in excess of $75 billion in annual revenue and employ a quarter of a million people around the world. This success is a testament to the entrepreneurs themselves, as well as the fundamental technologies they have created. We are proud to have supported these entrepreneurs and their companies as they have grown and prospered. For more information, visit: http://www.augustcap.com/.
Contact: Amanda Moss
Phone: 312-240-3188
Email: [email protected]
SOURCE Victory Park Capital

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Partners Group and Perennius Capital Partners are to integrate all their investment and client service activities in Italy. Perennius Capital Partners has been Partners Group’s exclusive Italian partner since its foundation in 2007. Its Milan office will bring Partners Group’s total number of offices to 16 worldwide.

PRESS RELEASE

Partners Group, the global private markets investment manager, and Perennius Capital Partners today announce that they will integrate all their investment and client service activities in Italy. Perennius Capital Partners has been Partners Group’s exclusive Italian partner since its foundation in 2007. Its Milan office will bring Partners Group’s total number of offices to 16 around the globe.

Over the past six years, Perennius Capital Partners has, in a mutually exclusive partnership for Italy, offered tailor-made private markets investment solutions to Italian clients in response to the increased appetite observed amongst institutional investors. In addition, both Partners Group and Perennius Capital Partners have sourced and transacted on attractive investment opportunities in the region, such as the investment completed in one of the largest single operating solar power plant in Europe in the Rovigo province of northern Italy on behalf of their clients. Following the significant success of the two firm’s joint activities, merging all investment and client activities into one global platform is the logical next step for further enhancing the private markets solutions available to the Italian client base.

Alessandro Poli, founder and managing partner of Perennius Capital Partners, comments “The entire management team of Perennius Capital Partners is very excited and feels honored to join the Partners Group platform. We are proud to have established our firm as the name of reference in the private markets industry in Italy with regards to performance, integrity and professional standing over the course of the past six years. We remain committed to further improving local services to our Italian clients while continuing to offer them broad access to the global private markets investment universe.”

Dr. Marcel Erni, Co-founder and Chief Investment Officer of Partners Group, adds “We look forward to successfully continuing to expand our activities in Italy for the benefit of our common client base, enabling them to invest through a global investment platform. We believe the Italian market continues to offer compelling opportunities in specialized sectors and believe that the Perennius team’s local network, access and investment expertise will ensure we continue to be able to identify and invest in the most attractive of these.”

The integration is expected to be completed in the coming months and remains subject to regulatory approval.

About Partners Group
Partners Group is a global private markets investment management firm with over EUR 28 billion in investment programs under management in private equity, private real estate, private infrastructure and private debt. The firm manages a broad range of customized portfolios for an international clientele of institutional investors. Partners Group is headquartered in Zug, Switzerland and has offices in San Francisco, New York, São Paulo, London, Guernsey, Paris, Luxembourg, Munich, Dubai, Singapore, Beijing, Seoul, Tokyo and Sydney. The firm employs over 600 people, is listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange (symbol: PGHN) with a market capitalization of over CHF 6 billion and a major ownership by its partners and employees.

Investor relations contact
Philip Sauer
Phone: +41 41 784 66 60
E-mail: [email protected]

Media relations contact
Dr. Anna Hollmann
Phone: +41 41 784 63 72
E-mail: [email protected]

The post Partners Group to Open Milan Office appeared first on peHUB.

Mobile VoIP provider Viber has broken new ground by releasingViber for Desktop 3.0 for Windows and Mac, extending its existing mobile service beyond the mobile-only Viber 3.0 app to desktops and laptops.

The new desktop build provides all the functionality currently enjoyed on the mobile app, including free voice calls, photo messaging, text chat and location-sharing with other Viber users, but also adds support for desktop-to-desktop video conferencing too.

It’s hard not to draw comparisons between Viber and other similar VOiP services, in particular Skype. However, there are key differences, particularly in the sign up and registration process. Viber users must install the mobile app first and register their mobile number, which is used to identify them on the Viber network.

The advantage of this approach is that finding other Viber users is simple — by granting the mobile app access to the phone’s address book, it can automatically detect other Viber users and make them immediately visible via the app’s Contacts screen.

This functionality is mirrored in the new desktop version — users must have first configured and registered the app using their mobile phone, then use this to log into the desktop version. A confirmation SMS is sent to the user’s phone, and then the desktop app is enabled as an extension of the mobile service, allowing users to seamlessly switch devices during calls and chats. This connection extends to the syncing of messages between mobile and desktop apps.

The desktop application functions in a similar way to the mobile app, albeit with an extended screen and interface. It’s also unique in providing video call capabilities using a compatible webcam — at the present time this feature is in beta, and restricted to desktop-to-desktop calls only.

While direct video conferencing isn’t yet available to mobile users, brand new versions of Viber 3.0 for iOS and Android have introduced video messaging capabilities, which work in a similar way to the video message feature recently added to Skype. Other new features include new stickers, support for transferring live calls between desktop and mobile, and improved voice engine promising better quality on all networks.

Viber may initially struggle to compete with more established services such as Skype, particularly if users struggle to persuade their contacts to switch or try the new service. However, with over 200 million users worldwide, it won’t be going anywhere any time soon.

Viber for Desktop 3.0.0.132799 is available now as a freeware download for PC and Macs with dual-core processors and 1GB RAM. PCs require Windows XP SP3 or later, while the Mac build requires OS X 10.7 (Lion) or later. Also available is Viber 3.0 for Android and iOS.

Launch a program, collect an email, visit a website — just about everything you do on a PC results in some kind of change to the files on your PC. And normally the low-level details of this won’t interest you in the slightest, but there will be occasional exceptions.

Maybe you think you’ve been infected by malware, for instance. Perhaps you’re wondering what an installation program is adding to your system. Or you might just want to know why your hard drive activity light is flashing, all the time. But whatever the reason,Check5 can help, by monitoring any folders of interest and showing you, in real time, exactly how their contents are changing.

To try this out you must first point the program at the folders you’d like to track. Click Folder Monitor > Add Folder to Monitor, and repeat the process for everything you’d like to watch. (Or just specify a root folder — C:\ , say – to monitor a full drive.)

Now just launch any program which creates, amends, deletes or renames files in any of those folders, and you’ll see its actions displayed in the main File List Grid: the file name, path, size, attributes, and created, modified and last access dates.

If your applications are generating a lot of activity then this can become hard to follow, but there are ways to improve the situation. Monitoring somewhere lower down the folder tree can help, for instance. And an Event Logging menu allows you to record only the event types which interest you: file creations, say.

Just in case this isn’t enough, Check5 also includes various batch file management tools which you can apply to the logged events. So if, say, you’ve recorded 500 files being created in a particular folder, then the program can rename all of those according to the rules you specify, in a single operation.

Well, that’s the theory, anyway. In practice we found this aspect of the program to be confusing and rather impractical, but if you need this kind of feature then it might (just about) come in useful.

We suspect that most people, though, will use Check5 solely for its file monitoring features. And that’s just fine, because these are good enough to justify installing the program, all on their own.

Photo Credit: S.john/Shutterstock

I was with a friend recently who has a pretty exciting Internet startup company. He has raised some money and might raise more, his product is in beta and it’s good. It solves a difficult technical problem many companies are struggling with. We argued a little over the name of the product. Of course I thought my suggested name was better or certainly cleverer, but then he said, “It doesn’t matter because we’ll probably sell the company before the product ever ships. It may never appear at all.”

His company will exit almost before it enters. This is happening a lot lately and we generally think it is a good thing but it’s not.

If, like me, you spend a lot of time around startups you know that one of the standard questions asked of founders is “what’s your exit strategy?” An exit is a so-called liquidity event — a transaction of some sort that turns company equity into spendable cash often making someone (hopefully the founders) rich enough for their children to have something to fight over.

Typical exits are Initial Public Offerings of shares or acquisitions, one company being bought by another. But this whole scenario isn’t exactly as it appears, because the person typically asking the exit question is an investor or a prospective investor and what he or she really wants to know is “what’s my exit strategy?”

How are you going to make me rich if I choose to invest in your company?

Were it not for demanding investors the exit question would be asked less often because it isn’t even an issue with many company founders who are already doing what they like and presumably making a good living at it.

The Lifers

What’s Larry Ellison‘s exit strategy?

Larry doesn’t have one.

Neither did Steve Jobs, Gordon Moore, Bob Noyce, Bill Hewlett, Dave Packard, or a thousand other company founders whose names don’t happen to be household words.

What’s Michael Dell’s exit strategy? Dell, who is trying to take his namesake company private, to de-exit, wants to climb back inside his corporate womb.

There was a time not long ago when exits happened primarily to appease early investors. The company would go public, money would change hands, but the same people who founded the company would still be running it. That’s how most of the name Silicon Valley firms came to be.

Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com has no exit strategy. Neither does Reed Hastings of NetFlix. You know Jeff Bezos at Amazon.com has no exit strategy.

But what about Jack Dorsey of Twitter or even Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook? I wonder about those companies. They just don’t have a sense of permanence to me.

And what about Bill Gates? In Accidental Empires I wrote that Gates wasn’t going anywhere, that running Microsoft was his life’s work. Yet he’s given up his corporate positions and moved on to philanthropy for the most part, despite this week’s effort to shore-up his fading fortune by claiming that iPad users are “frustrated.”

Yeah, right.

Bill Gates didn’t have an exit strategy until running Microsoft stopped being fun, so he found an exit. And I think the same can be said for any of these name founders, that they wanted to stay on the job as long as it remained fun.

Paradigm Pushed

But the new paradigm — the Instagram paradigm (zero to a billion in 12 months or less) — is different. This paradigm says that speed is everything and there is no permanence in business. It’s a paradigm pushed by earnings-crazed Wall Street analysts and non-founder public company CEOs who each work an average of four years before pulling their golden ripcords. In high tech this has led to startups being seen as bricks with which big companies are made bigger.

Sometimes thee bricks are made of technology, sometimes they are made simply of people.

Build or buy? The answer, whenever possible, is now buy-buy-buy because even if the cost of buying is higher the outcome seems to be more assured. My buddy with his startup has solved a problem being faced by other companies, really big companies, so it’s probably easier for one of those to buy his startup than to solve the problem themselves.

And there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this except it leads to a lot of people being where they aren’t really happy, working off multi-year pay-outs just counting the days until they can get out of the acquiring company that made them rich.

Even those who embrace the quick-and-dirty ethos of almost instant exits seem to do so  because they don’t know better. “What’s your exit strategy?” they’ve been asked a thousand times, so they not only have one, their papier-mâché startups are designed from the start with that exit in mind whether it’s the right thing to do or not.

I think this is sad and — even worse — I think it is leading to a lot of wasted talent. It cheats us of chances for greatness.

I wish more companies had no exit strategies at all.

Reprinted with permission

Photo Credit: Mopic/Shutterstock

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