BDT & MSD BDC Management

BDT & MSD BDC Management

BDT & MSD BDC Management is the investment adviser to the BDT & MSD BDC, a publicly registered business development company that extends the merchant-banking philosophy of BDT Capital Partners into private credit. The entity was formed following the 2023 merger of BDT Capital Partners and MSD Partners, Michael Dell’s family office, creating a combined merchant banking platform intimately connected to the balance sheets, operating networks, and long-duration capital of some of the world's most prominent families and founders (per the firm's official communications, 2023). The BDC provides senior secured, unitranche, and junior capital loans primarily to upper-middle-market companies in North America where the firm's founder relationships and sector expertise can surface opportunities conventional lenders miss. BDT & MSD's historical portfolio spans consumer, business services, industrials, and technology-enabled sectors. The credit strategy favors companies with durable competitive advantages — often those already known to the BDT & MSD ecosystem through decades of advisory and minority equity relationships — and structures investments with meaningful covenant protections and equity co-investment rights. Specific deployment metrics are not publicly broken out for the BDC vehicle. The BDT & MSD platform operates from Chicago and New York, with investment professionals who collectively manage over $50 billion in combined assets across private equity, credit, and real estate strategies for the merged entity (per Bloomberg, 2023). The 2023 merger with MSD Partners integrated Michael Dell's family capital and its own credit arm, MSD Credit Opportunity Funds, alongside Byron Trott's family-advised merchant bank. In October 2023 the combined firm appointed former Goldman Sachs investment banking co-head Gregg Lemkau as Co-CEO alongside Trott (per the firm, October 2023). The structural differentiator is the capital source itself. BDT & MSD BDC draws from a permanent-capital ecosystem of multigenerational families and founders — not just fee-paying LPs — which shapes both the investment horizon and the sourcing pipeline. Borrowers gain access to credit from a lender whose principals have personal, decades-long relationships with the gatekeepers at some of the world's largest private fortunes, a dynamic that creates a fundamentally different underwriting conversation than a conventional credit fund.