Private Debt for Innovation-Led Companies

Aon IP Advantage Strategies

We believe that traditional investment platforms lack the expertise to value intangible assets. This can cause one of two market inefficiencies to occur:

1. Potentially missing critical inputs for potential investments
2. Invest in companies that are not differentiated by their underlying key asset – i.e., their intellectual property

Aon Advantage Funds LLC (AAF), through the investment vehicles that it manages, is changing the way innovation-led companies access capital by providing up to $200 million debt facilities that use intangible assets as the primary source of collateral.

The strategy focuses on directly originating 1st lien loans and other structured solutions with Aon’s minimally dilutive capital seeking to provide access to income production for our investors, often with a warrant component offering the potential for additional economic upside.

From a sourcing perspective, beyond Aon’s vast client reach and our network of 50,000+ Aon employees across 120+ countries, we target innovation-rich businesses in non-traditional tech and healthcare industry verticals using an in-house IP analytics and data platform known as the Aon IP-Genome®. This technology enables the Aon Advantage Funds Team to underwrite companies rich with intangible assets at speed and scale based on the competitive moats protecting their innovation and the assessment of the opportunity relative to the broader IP landscape that competes with the target portfolio company.

Aon’s IP Genome®

Aon’s data and analytics platform, the Aon IP Genome®, uses natural language processing on patent content from more than 15 patent and trademark offices globally, synthesizes this data, and assembles AI-powered analysis around more than 150 million global patents, categorizing them across 7,000+ markets, and cross-references this with additional data sources.

These advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning tools uniquely position Aon’s Intellectual Property Solutions (IPS) team to value IP in an objective and data-driven way, instantaneously and at an unparalleled scale.

Beyond its function as a world-leading IP Assessment tool, the Aon IP Genome® allows our originations team to identify innovative companies with certain revenue and equity profiles. The value-added insights into the IP portfolios allow us to source deals more efficiently and indicate our funding interest.

Experienced Partners in Asset Management and IP Strategy

The Aon Advantage Funds team of 20+ investment industry professionals has decades of combined experience underwriting and structuring complex credit transactions and managing billions in capital with top-tier credit, private equity, and venture capital firms.

As an extension to the AAF business, Aon’s IP Solutions team is composed of 200+ professionals with experience leading global IP teams at Fortune 100 companies, helping the team to better understand, underwrite, and value complex IP portfolios.

While Aon’s IPS team assesses the breadth, depth, and quality of a potential borrower’s IP portfolio, the AAF Portfolio Management team leverages its structuring experience to conduct its own fundamental analysis and identify various exit scenarios and liquidity options while tailoring covenants accordingly. These parallel processes enable the investment team to approach each opportunity through different lenses, blending various sources of domain expertise, which we believe leads to better decision-making and long-term portfolio performance.

Upon the successful completion of the diligence and assessment of a prospective borrower, AAF secures a first lien position and seeks to protect the loan by wrapping it with a Collateral Protection Insurance policy sourced by Aon and underwritten and insured by A/AA insurers.

Strategy Highlights*