HarbourView Equity Partners has secured $500 million in additional debt financing from investment giant KKR, secured via a private securitization backed by its music portfolio.
This latest transaction follows a previous $500 million in debt financing secured by HarbourView in March 2024, through a private securitization backed by its catalog of music royalties and led by KKR.
“We are thrilled to have KKR’s continued support as we further scale the firm,” HarbourView Founder and CEO Sherrese Clarke said. “This additional capital from KKR will help us accelerate our strategy to align with where the media, sports and entertainment markets are headed. We see a tremendous opportunity to continue investing in evergreen intellectual property, which we believe is historically uncorrelated to broader market volatility and forms a powerful diversification tool.”
“We are pleased to further support HarbourView and to invest in this well-diversified, scaled and high-quality portfolio through our High-Grade Asset-Based Finance strategy. Music IP is one of many areas of opportunity that we see for this strategy and an example of its breadth,” Avi Korn and Chris Mellia, Global co-heads of Asset-Based Finance at KKR, said.
KKR’s Asset-Based Finance (ABF) strategy focuses on privately originated and negotiated credit investments that are backed by large and diversified pools of financial and hard assets, offering diversification to traditional corporate credit and attractive risk-adjusted returns.
KKR’s ABF platform began investing in 2016 and now has approximately $74 billion in ABF assets under management globally across its High-Grade ABF and Opportunistic ABF strategies.
KKR has acquired over 70 music catalogs encompassing over 35,000 songs across both master recordings and publishing income streams. The company most recently made a deal to finance a slate of Hip Hop biopics in partnership with Will Smith’s Westbrook Studios, Flavor Unit and Jesse Collins Entertainment, starting with a Queen Latifah biopic. This followed an investment in Usher’s 2024 concert film “Rendezvous in Paris.”
The financing, solely structured by Barclays, further emphasizes HarbourView’s commitment to targeting the best execution for its growing LP base and comes on the heels of numerous major deals.
Barclays served as sole structuring advisor in this transaction. Barclays and KKR Capital Markets acted as placement agents, and Fifth Third Bank, National Association as passive placement agent.
