What was signed. Clearco, the Toronto ecommerce funder, announced a US$100 million asset-backed financing facility from Macquarie Group on August 18. The financing comes from Macquarie's New York-based Fixed Income and Currencies team, part of its Commodities and Global Markets business. Clearco says the facility lets it advance up to $10 million per customer on terms of 4 to 12 months, and that it "is expected to support approximately $900 million in funding to ecommerce brands over the next two years."1
What it replaces. A similarly sized asset-backed facility from Pollen Street Capital, signed in October 2023 as part of Clearco's recapitalization. CEO Andrew Curtis told The Globe and Mail the new facility is "approximately 50-per-cent cheaper" than the old one, which capped advances at US$4 million per client and 4 to 6 month terms.2
Why the counterparty matters. This is the company that rode a US$2 billion-plus valuation in 2021, then went through layoffs, market exits, founder departures, and a 2023 recapitalization that reset it near US$200 million. Headcount went from roughly 550 to under 100.3
Why it is your story. Clearco funds inventory, marketing, and purchase orders for ecommerce brands. That is the same working-capital lane MCA, revenue-based financing, factoring, and inventory finance compete in. A survivor of the sector's reset just got institutional capital at claimed half price, with tickets and terms that move it up-market.1 2
What Alternative Business Lenders Need to Know
What did Clearco actually sign?
A US$100 million asset-backed facility from Macquarie's Fixed Income and Currencies desk, the credit arm inside Commodities and Global Markets. The release is specific about what the money does: advances of up to $10 million per customer, terms of 4 to 12 months, funding "inventory, marketing, major purchase orders" for brands selling across DTC, wholesale, retail, marketplaces, and social commerce.1
Macquarie's Eli Nafski, a Senior Managing Director, framed the underwrite in one sentence: "Clearco combines deep ecommerce specialization with the disciplined underwriting required to serve this market at scale."1 Note what he is praising. Not growth. Discipline, specialization, and scale, in that order.
How is this different from the facility it replaces?
In October 2023, mid-recapitalization, Clearco closed an asset-backed facility of up to $100 million from Pollen Street Capital alongside a $60 million Series D led by Inovia Capital and Founders Circle Capital. That facility was "expected to support $850M of Clearco originations over the next two years."4
Put the two releases side by side and the capacity claim barely moves: $850 million promised then, roughly $900 million promised now. Both are projections, and projections are marketing. What actually changed is contractual: the per-client cap moves from US$4 million to US$10 million, the maximum term moves from 6 months to 12, and Curtis says the pricing is roughly half.2 1 A 2.5x larger ticket at double the duration is a different product, sold to a different merchant.
What did three years of turnaround buy?
The numbers Curtis put on the record: about 400 North American merchants funded, originations for the year ended June 30 about seven times 2023 levels, a loan-loss ratio under 1 percent, and fewer than 100 employees, down from roughly 550 at peak. Clearco also raised US$7.5 million in promissory notes this year, and Curtis says the company should break even by the fourth quarter. His words on the cheaper facility: it "is like flipping a switch" for profitability.2
The honest caveats belong next to the numbers. Clearco is private. The origination multiple, the loss ratio, and the break-even date are management statements to a reporter, not audited figures, and the actual facility pricing, advance rates, and covenants are not disclosed.2 But the direction of travel is documented by outsiders: BetaKit, which has covered the company through the whole arc, describes a peak valuation above US$2 billion in 2021 with SoftBank backing, a 2023 recapitalization around US$200 million, and a product rebuilt around fixed weekly payments instead of open-ended revenue shares.3 Curtis to BetaKit: "The name of the game since the recapitalization is, run the business lean, recognize that the market rewards disciplined operators."3
Where does this bite MCA and RBF funders?
At the ticket sizes and durations where specialist funders used to have the field to themselves. At a $4 million cap and 6-month maximum, Clearco competed with short-cycle advance products. At $10 million and 12 months, it overlaps larger inventory positions, longer purchase-order cycles, and the upper end of what most ecommerce-focused MCA and RBF shops write. And if the claimed 50 percent funding-cost reduction is even directionally right, some of it will be passed through to merchant pricing, because that is what a lender chasing 400-merchant concentration into a bigger book does with a cost advantage.2 1
The limit runs the other way too. Clearco's product is a structured advance against ecommerce receivables and inventory economics with fixed weekly payments, underwritten from platform data.3 Macquarie's appetite for that asset says nothing about appetite for unsecured, high-frequency advance paper on thin data. This deal does not mean the whole sector refinances cheaper. It means the data-rich, structured end of it does.
Is this one deal or a funding-market turn?
It is the second large institutional commitment to ecommerce merchant funding in three weeks. On July 30, Wayflyer announced a three-year forward-flow agreement under which Fortress funds will purchase up to $1.5 billion of Wayflyer-originated assets, part of what Wayflyer says positions it to deploy up to $4.5 billion over 24 months. Fortress's Bart Stankiewicz used almost the same vocabulary as Macquarie's Nafski: "a scaled, data-driven origination channel, with a track record of originating loans with strong credit performance."5
Two deals, two structures, one underwrite: the institutional money is buying performance history, not sector exposure. Demand for the product is not the question. In the Federal Reserve Banks' 2026 Report on Employer Firms, online lenders were the second most common place employer firms sought loans, lines, or cash advances, behind large banks, and 60 percent of firms that borrowed from one said actual borrowing costs came in higher than expected.6 The question institutional credit desks are answering deal by deal is which originators get to intermediate that demand with cheap money. Their answer, twice in one month: the ones that can show a tape.
What should a funding desk do before its next facility conversation?
Treat your performance data as the collateral. Before the next warehouse or forward-flow conversation, have the static-pool loss curves by vintage, the concentration report by merchant and channel, the recovery series, and the servicing-transfer story in one place, reconciled, and ready for a third-party audit. Clearco spent three years generating exactly that record before Macquarie priced it, and the record, not the brand, is what repriced the capital.2 3 Funders who cannot produce that package will keep paying 2023 spreads in a market that has started writing 2026 ones for everyone who can.
Our Opinion
The most useful way to read this deal is as a price signal on discipline. In 2021, capital priced the story: growth, logos, a television founder, a $2 billion mark. That capital was nearly all destroyed. In 2026, capital is pricing the tape: seven times originations on sub-1 percent losses with 80 percent less headcount, and it is paying half the spread for it, if you take the CEO at his word.2 3
We would still hold two skepticisms. First, both of Clearco's facilities carried nearly identical two-year capacity projections, and the first one ended in a replacement, not a victory lap; treat the $900 million the way you treat any origination forecast.4 1
Second, undisclosed terms are part of this story's meaning: capital is available to the survivors, on terms nobody is publishing. The operators who will benefit from that opacity are the ones whose data rooms remove the lender's need to price blind. For everyone else, the 2022 repricing never actually ended.
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Headlines You Don’t Want to Miss
The SEC on August 18 charged former Tricolor CEO Daniel Chu, CFO Jerome Kollar, and Senior Director of Finance Ameryn Seibold over an alleged multi-year scheme to defraud investors "by double pledging hundreds of millions of dollars of subprime auto loans" across ABS offerings and lenders. The complaint, filed in the Southern District of New York, alleges Tricolor raised more than $1.9 billion through ABS while representing pledged loans as free of other liens and manipulating metrics to make defaulted loans look current; more than $945 million of principal was outstanding at the September 2025 bankruptcy. These are civil allegations, not findings. All three also face criminal charges announced in December 2025; Chu has pleaded not guilty to eight counts and his trial is set for January 2027. Representatives for the executives did not immediately respond to Reuters' request for comment.7 8 9 For any funder relying on originator lien certifications, this is the canonical argument for independent collateral verification at funding and again at securitization.
Private credit just took the junior slice of one of the AI build-out's biggest financings. Eagle Point Credit Management is the largest investor in a roughly $1.3 billion mezzanine loan for Nexus Data Centers' 2,900-acre, gas-powered campus in Hubbard, Texas, where Anthropic is the primary tenant; the loan sits inside a $16 billion project-finance package led by Morgan Stanley and others, and Google agreed to guarantee the senior debt.10 The backdrop is a market getting pickier as it gets bigger: Reuters reports lenders now treat local opposition, permitting, and power availability as underwriting inputs, with research firm Data Center Watch counting at least 75 projects worth about $130 billion facing local opposition in the first quarter of 2026, and some structures releasing construction draws only once permits and leases are in place.11 Equipment Finance News reports the same factors reaching hardware underwriting, from landlord posture to electricity costs and municipal pushback.12 For operators, two reads: the capital pool behind alternative lending is now also the mezzanine under AI infrastructure, and community, permit, and power risk are formally priced credit inputs, whoever the borrower is.
A policy fight over Federal Home Loan Bank access is rebuilding, and it is a cost-of-funds story for every nonbank lender. Nonbank mortgage companies, which now originate most US mortgages, cannot join the system because they lack a federal or state prudential regulator, and mortgage servicing rights are not eligible collateral for advances.13 14 The Congressional Research Service's updated FHLB report traces how membership has widened before, FIRREA opened it to all federally insured depositories in 1989 and Gramm-Leach-Bliley removed the 10 percent mortgage-asset test in 1999, and states plainly that extending membership to nonbanks "would require consideration by Congress."14 Depository competitors fund at advance rates; nonbanks fund at market spreads. Watch this one as a margin story, not a mortgage story.
Sources
1 Clearco via Yahoo Finance | Clearco Secures $100 Million Asset-Backed Financing Facility from Macquarie Group, August 18, 2026
2 The Globe and Mail | Clearco close to profitability, three years after painful recapitalization, August 18, 2026
3 BetaKit | Clearco secures $100 million USD for rescaling after difficult years, August 2026
4 Clearco via PR Newswire | Clearco Announces Recapitalization, Raises $60M Series D and Closes New Asset-Based Facility with Pollen Street Capital, October 4, 2023
5 Wayflyer via Yahoo Finance | Wayflyer and Fortress Announce $1.5 Billion Forward-Flow Agreement to Fund Small Businesses, July 30, 2026
6 Federal Reserve Banks | 2026 Report on Employer Firms, Findings from the 2025 Small Business Credit Survey, March 3, 2026
7 SEC | SEC Charges Former Executives With Fraud in Connection With $1.9 Billion Collapse of Subprime Auto Lender Tricolor, Release 2026-77, August 18, 2026
8 SEC | Litigation Release No. 26612, Daniel Chu, Jerome Kollar, Ameryn Seibold, August 18, 2026
9 Reuters via Yahoo Finance | US SEC sues former executives of collapsed auto lender Tricolor, August 18, 2026
10 Bloomberg via Yahoo Finance | Anthropic-Tied Data Center Inks $1.3 Billion Private Credit Loan, August 19, 2026
11 Reuters via AOL | Lenders scrutinize US data center financing as community opposition builds, August 10, 2026
12 Equipment Finance News | Landlords, electricity, municipal pushback weigh on data center lending, August 19, 2026
13 Legis1 | Federal Home Loan Bank System Faces Questions Over Who Gets Access, August 18, 2026
14 Congressional Research Service | R46499, The Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLB) System and Selected Policy Issues, updated July 14, 2026
