Northbase Finance Secures $300 Million Oaktree Facility to Expand Equipment Financing

Key points

• Northbase Finance secured up to $300 million in revolving financing capacity from Oaktree.

• The capital will support equipment leases, rentals, progress-payment financing, and sale-leaseback transactions.

• Northbase says its managed portfolio has more than doubled over the past year.

• The platform focuses on essential equipment that can require specialized underwriting and customized structures.

Northbase Finance has closed a revolving credit facility with Oaktree Capital Management that could provide up to $300 million in financing capacity for equipment transactions across the United States and Canada.

The facility provides Northbase with additional capital to finance essential operating assets in power generation, natural gas compression, energy infrastructure, and broader industrial markets. It was arranged through Oaktree’s asset-backed finance strategy.

This is an up-to-$300 million revolving facility, not necessarily $300 million delivered to Northbase or deployed into equipment on the closing date.

What Northbase plans to finance

Northbase operates in segments of the equipment market where the assets and the financing requests attached to them do not always fit neatly within traditional lending programs.

Its target assets include power-generation equipment, natural-gas compression systems, processing equipment, CNG and LNG applications, energy infrastructure, cranes, forklifts, excavators, and other heavy industrial equipment.

The company finances new and currently deployed equipment through several structures, including:

• Capital and operating leases

• Equipment rentals

• Sale-leasebacks

• Construction and progress payments

• Other customized asset-backed arrangements

Northbase positions these products as alternatives for operators, manufacturers, equipment providers, and sponsors whose transactions may be too specialized, long-dated, or complex for a conventional bank or captive-finance program.

The new Oaktree facility should allow the company to consider larger transactions, longer financing periods, and a wider range of equipment types.

Portfolio growth creates demand for additional capital

Northbase reported that its managed portfolio has grown by more than 100% year over year. The company did not publicly disclose the portfolio’s current dollar value, so the percentage should not be interpreted as a specific origination or asset figure.

Still, doubling a managed portfolio helps explain the need for a larger, scalable capital arrangement. Specialty-finance companies must continually align their funding capacity with the volume and duration of the assets they originate.

A revolving facility is particularly useful for that purpose. As eligible transactions are added to the facility, and earlier balances are repaid, the available capital can generally be reused, subject to the agreement’s borrowing-base requirements and other conditions.

Specific pricing, advance rates, covenants, maturity, and initial utilization were not disclosed.

Why Oaktree’s involvement matters

Oaktree is one of the world’s largest alternative-investment managers, with approximately $224 billion in assets under management as of March 31, 2026. Its strategies span credit, equity, and real estate, including asset-backed finance.

For Northbase, Oaktree brings substantially more than the name recognition attached to a large institutional investor. The agreement connects a specialized equipment-finance originator with a global capital provider capable of supporting continued portfolio expansion.

For Oaktree, the transaction offers exposure to loans and leases supported by identifiable operating assets. That can provide a different risk profile from unsecured corporate credit, particularly when the assets are essential to a customer’s operations and retain measurable secondary-market value.

The partnership also continues a broader shift in private credit. Alternative managers are increasingly providing capital behind specialty-finance platforms rather than limiting themselves to directly negotiated corporate loans.

Northbase joins a much larger flow of institutional capital

The Oaktree facility also fits a broader capital-raising trend across commercial finance. Funder Intel’s report on commercial finance capital raises from 2023 through 2026 identified approximately $15.3 billion across 46 disclosed credit facilities, securitizations, forward-flow agreements, and other capital transactions. Northbase’s up-to-$300 million facility arrived shortly after that report was published and provides another example of institutional investors backing specialized non-bank originators. Although equipment finance differs from revenue-based financing and unsecured small-business lending, the capital strategy is similar: pair an experienced originator with scalable outside funding and use the underlying receivables or financed assets to support continued growth.