Aon plc (NYSE: AON), a leading global professional services firm providing a broad range of risk, retirement and health solutions, today announced the expansion of its Intellectual Property (IP) Capital Markets Solution with the launch of Aon's flagship IP-focused private debt vehicle, the Aon IP Advantage Fund I.
As a first close of $400 million for its initial investors and co-investment partners, the Aon IP Advantage Fund I will make principal-insured senior term loans to Stage B+ companies with strong equity backing, established IP assets and established revenues.
'Aon is committed to helping clients navigate an increasingly complex world. The launch of the IP Advantage Fund is yet another milestone in leveraging Aon's industry-leading, proprietary IP valuation technology to create a new alternative financing mechanism for IP-rich companies,' said Lewis Lee, CEO, Aon's IP solutions. 'Intellectual property assets are the foundation of today's global innovation-driven economy, and Aon is innovating proprietary solutions to help companies create enterprise value by better understanding and leveraging the value of their IP assets and using those assets to access growth capital.'
The IP Advantage Fund I is designed to unlock enterprise value in innovation-led companies that are rich in IP assets, by collateralizing their IP for access to non-dilutive term financing.
'As a new source of capital for growing innovative companies, the IP Advantage Fund I aims to deliver to its Limited Partners superior risk-adjusted returns, by leveraging proprietary borrower sourcing algorithms, IP valuation technology and pioneering IP collateral protection insurance,' said Matthew Farrar, Chief Strategy Officer of Aon's IP solutions and Head of Capital Markets. 'There has been significant interest in the IP Advantage Fund by both traditional yield as well as absolute return seekers of uncorrelated and orthogonal performance streams, seeking to access the intersection of Innovation and ESG-aware companies with a senior insured position in the capital stack.'
The Fund is the latest in a series of ground-breaking offerings from Aon's New Ventures Group to help clients rethink how they can create, leverage and realize enterprise value from IP assets. These IP-centric offerings help companies realize their full value potential, through financing, transactions or risk transfer, with the IP Advantage Fund Portfolio Management Team - led by Randy Sidhu, senior managing director for Aon - currently underwriting an advanced deal pipeline of more than $1.4 billion.
Aon is targeting a final close of $1 billion for Fund I + co-investment vehicle by mid-2022, which will form a series of IP-enabled debt Funds as a programmatic and strategic buildout of IP-backed deals.
Aon's IP solutions, part of Aon's New Ventures Group (NVG), is a global leader in assessing and valuing IP assets, leveraging a proprietary, industry-defining IP analytics platform. In 2020, Aon launched its IP Capital Markets Solution, which is focused on leveraging IP assets to serve as collateral in an insurance-enabled debt structure for growth capital that avoids dilution, and its Quality of Intellectual Property (QoIP) Solution, is designed to articulate the quality of IP assets to help companies realize the full value in M&A or financing transactions.
NVG, which comprises a team of senior leaders, was formed in the fourth quarter of 2018 to help realize the full potential of the Aon United growth strategy. The NVG focuses on the rapid incubation and delivery of new high-impact sources of value for clients.
Learn more about how Aon is continuing to innovate at scale to meet client needs in, 'Helping Clients Navigate an Increasingly Complex World.'
About Aon
Aon plc (NYSE: AON) is a leading global professional services firm providing a broad range of risk, retirement and health solutions. Our 50,000 colleagues in 120 countries empower results for clients by using proprietary data and analytics to deliver insights that reduce volatility and improve performance.
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