Golub Capital invests $5m in AI credit developer F2

Golub Capital has invested $5m in F2, an artificial intelligence developer that specialises in credit, and will use the firm's technology across its investment process, screening private credit investments, carrying out due diligence, underwriting deals and monitoring portfolios, drawing on Golub's own data.

David Golub, the manager's co-chief executive, said the partnership would let Golub embed its "proprietary knowledge, accumulated experience and investment judgement" into the systems that support how it invests and operates. That $5m, against more than $90bn of capital under management, is a small ticket carrying a large dependency: an engine that screens, underwrites and monitors is only as useful as the deal history it can read.

In the wider market, adoption has divided by size. Research by Alternative Credit Investor finds smaller firms moving into generative and agentic AI workflows while larger managers lag, held back by data and compliance concerns, and the most common uses so far run to data analysis, risk management and trading efficiency. Golub sits at the larger end of that population, so the partnership is one example rather than a verdict on the split; the constraint at the big end is as much what a manager will feed a model as what the model can do.

The investment also establishes the Global Credit AI Council, an invitation-only forum for senior executives from a small number of private markets firms, with David Golub as its inaugural chair. Its stated remit is discussion: emerging uses of AI, and how the industry is building the technology into its investment and operating processes. The manager paying for the technology also chairs the forum that discusses it, though the coverage does not say what the council will publish, how often it will meet, or what the $5m buys in equity terms.

The data feeding the models is Golub's own deal flow, and September brought a $496m rework of a 2020-vintage CLO and a $407.7m print through BNP Paribas, adding to a year in which the firm raised $20.5bn of capital, a record, the publication noted. More deals, more collateral and more monitoring work make for a better-trained engine, which is the argument for a cheque that is small next to the assets it sits beside. Whether it pays off is testable—diligence and monitoring either turn over faster or they don't—and the council's first session will show how much of the industry's AI practice gets written in public.