North America Private Credit House: Blackstone
Setting the pace
As private credit pushes into large corporate transactions, Blackstone's expanding reach and precision-built solutions have enabled it to proactively tailor financing for borrowers in need of creative approaches. For its breadth across direct lending and investment-grade finance, Blackstone is IFR's North America Private Credit House of the Year.
In 2025, Blackstone demonstrated formidable breadth, proving just as adept at direct lending transactions and bespoke financings to large corporate borrowers, showcasing its muscle in assembling transactions with a variety of structures and counterparties.
One thing that sets Blackstone and its credit business apart, with US$508bn in assets under management, is its prowess as both an issuer and lender, said Jonathan Kaufman, global head of the capital markets division.
Through that business, Blackstone has strong relationships with other lenders, giving it exceptional visibility into the market. As a lender, the firm's ability to commit significant sums of capital to large-scale financings has helped it take prominent roles in high-profile transactions.
"To have that all under one roof is very unique in the market," Kaufman said.
In April, Blackstone was one of the lenders in IFR's North America Private Credit Loan of the Year: it co-led commitments for a US$4.2bn financing package supporting private equity firm Thoma Bravo's acquisition of several digital aviation solutions units, now known as Jeppesen ForeFlight, from aerospace company Boeing.
In January, the firm led a group of lenders, including Apollo Global Management and Blue Owl Capital, in providing a US$2.25bn term loan and US$500m delayed draw term loan as part of a US$5.25bn financing package for data analytics and AI software company Databricks. In September, Blackstone provided a US$700m delayed draw term loan for cloud storage hosting company Dropbox, for which the firm had previously led a US$2bn financing in December 2024.
The firm did not wait on private equity sponsors to amass dealflow. Blackstone's credit team was able to harness its deep knowledge of both sponsor-backed businesses and larger corporates through its private equity arm to identify potential transactions. As a result, roughly half the firm's direct lending transaction volume in 2025 has come through proactive sourcing rather than inbound enquiries from sponsors.
"If we didn't have that effort, if we didn't have that incumbency, if we didn't have the public side of our business, that number would be much, much lower," said Brad Marshall, Blackstone's global head of private credit strategies.
The firm has been similarly proactive in its efforts within investment-grade private credit. In 2025, Blackstone's infrastructure and asset-based credit team completed the three largest transactions in its history: an US$8.5bn financing for energy company Sempra Infrastructure's Port Arthur LNG Phase 2 natural gas liquefaction project, a US$5bn transaction for wireless telecommunications provider Rogers Communications, and a US$3.5bn financing backing an energy infrastructure joint venture for natural gas company EQT.
Blackstone proactively sourced the Rogers transaction, pitching the Canadian telecoms company on how it could finance its growth without piling on leverage and risking its investment-grade rating. The financing came in the form of a joint venture between Blackstone and Rogers that owns the telecom's wireless backhaul infrastructure in Ontario and Alberta. The financing is nominally equity – Blackstone has a 49.9% stake in the joint venture – but produces a steady stream of cash through a usage contract for the infrastructure.
Blackstone's market presence has also commanded respect in thorny financing situations. In January, the firm assembled a group of 25 direct lenders to put together a US$3.2bn financing package for work management software Smartsheet, which was acquired by Blackstone and Vista Equity Partners. The financing included a US$2.9bn annual recurring revenue loan, a category of lending that had recently drawn scrutiny after another ARR borrower backed by Vista – education technology company Pluralsight – was restructured. Blackstone's team was able to work through the qualms to get lenders onboard.
Scale does not mean simply throwing money around, Blackstone's investment team stresses. Its size gives it a front-row seat for the earliest conversations, offering time and space to propose financing options that best fit borrowers' needs. For Dropbox, for instance, the firm initially presented three options across the broadly syndicated market, direct lending and investment-grade private credit.
"Scale begets you opportunities to see a lot of different things," said Susan Weiss, managing director at Blackstone. "With the folks on our side who are taking advantage of those opportunities and innovating and being creative and coming up with new solutions, it really does make them differentiated."