Bridge's $500m supplier fund bets on order-backed lending

Bridge, the Citi-backed lending platform spun out of the bank in 2023, has launched a $500m (£368.2m) direct lending fund for US retail suppliers, according to Alternative Credit Investor. The fund targets consumer packaged goods brands, supplying working capital against expected or confirmed orders, funding up to 100 per cent of production costs and structuring repayments around when brands receive payment. Bridge says it has deployed more than $800m since leaving Citi, including to DogSauce, a pet food 'super broth' meal topper now sold in Walmart, and describes the fund as a way to help these brands scale and keep products moving through the supply chain.

Because the fund will lend against expected or confirmed orders, underwriting has to distinguish a forecast from a signed purchase order, and Harte Thompson, co-founder and chief operating officer, frames the timing as the point where capital is hardest to find: when a brand is building inventory to fill an upcoming order. 'That's the moment capital is hardest to find, and when it's not there, good brands get pushed into expensive, opaque financing or dilutive equity raises just to fund routine production,' Thompson said in the report.

Bridge's underwriting is built around how major retailers buy. The credit decision leans on the retailer's purchasing pattern rather than a brand's balance sheet alone, putting the fund closer to purchase-order finance than the sponsor-backed unitranche that dominates private credit's headlines. The collateral is the order itself and the exit is the retailer's payment, not a refinancing or a sale—a different risk profile that makes the AI underwriting claim worth testing: whether order data from big-box buyers can predict repayment well enough to scale across many small brands.

The fund's modest size belies its strategic reach as a working-capital flank in a direct lending market that has spent the year resetting around asset sales and CLO resets; Bridge is not competing for leveraged buyout loans but for the working capital a brand would otherwise source from a factor or a dilutive equity raise. CLO resets have become private credit's liquidity valve; Bridge is building a different valve, one that turns the retail payment cycle into its own exit.

Citi's backing supplies the distribution and credibility that get suppliers to try a new lender, whatever the AI underwriting pitch. Watch the repayment data, not the fund size: the product only works if retailers pay on terms, and a $500m book is small enough that a few bad cycles would show up quickly.