Debt refinancing in a touchy market

The private credit market grew rapidly, but 2026 has thrown it for a loop. According to Goldman Sachs, “several high-profile defaults, concerns about valuations, and exposure to a software industry vulnerable to AI disruption have fueled a surge in redemption requests.”

But that doesn’t mean dealmaking has slowed entirely, even with all the talk of the SaaS-pocalypse earlier this year. In June, AI travel and spend platform Perk announced a $300 million credit facility led by Neuberger Specialty Finance, Blue Owl Capital, Hercules Capital, and Liquidity. “The facility upsizes and replaces Perk’s 2024 credit facility on materially improved terms,” according to a Perk press release.

Perk CFO Roy Hefer acknowledged the debt deal was a “big thing that happened for us from a capitalization perspective.”

“The timing for us—this is Q1, Q2—was challenging, because again there was so much uncertainty about what’s happening to SaaS B2B. The deal teams were trying to get the deal through on their side, but…the backdrop was a lot of these big credit funds had actually downgraded their portfolio,” he said.

As a result, “you had very famous people talking about what’s happening to the credit market,” Hefer said. “There was a kind of a political situation where the deal teams couldn’t get the deal through because the investment committee just couldn’t pull the trigger. The timing was not right.”

Investor touchpoints. What’s the key to raising funds in a situation like that? “Fundraising is a long, long journey; it’s not something that you come to [in] March 2027: ‘Now I need to fundraise.’ You [have to] fundraise all the time,” Hefer said. “You have to maintain relationships with investors all the time, both with your existing ones, and constantly open new doors.”

And bugging investors weekly isn’t the way to go, either. “They don’t need 20 touchpoints…Anything between four, five, maybe up to seven [or] eight” connections with an investor before a CFO needs to ask for money will elicit better fundraising results, Hefer explained.

“If you’re thinking to yourself, ‘Why should I carve out two, three hours a week—maybe an hour to begin with—to talk to investors [when] there’s no deal on the table?’ I’m telling you, do it because it will pay out in the long term. One day you will reach out to that person and tell them, ‘Hey, now there’s a deal. Remember me?’”

IPO ahead. As for whether Perk will be going public, the company says it now has “a significant capital base.” What’s more, as someone who’s taken a company public twice before, Hefer believes “an IPO is never an objective per se.”

Instead, Perk is focused on reaching $1 billion in annual recurring revenue. (In June, the company said it crossed $300 million in annualized revenue in 2025.)

“There comes a natural point with scale, with time, with maturity, that people start to ask themselves, ‘Should we go public? Should we not?…every now and then this [IPO] question comes up, and right now it’s absolutely not [Perk’s] focus…It can really defocus you, and [it] shifts a lot of the focus to the short term instead of doing the right things for the long term,” Hefer explained.

As a public company, “you don’t always control your destiny, because you could be beating all your metrics, and the stock still goes down because of market and outside external factors, and I’ve been there. It’s not a fun place to be.”

Correction 10/01/2026: This piece has been updated to clarify Perk’s fundraising.