All right. Thank you, everybody. We'll get started with our next session. Thank you, everybody, for joining us. Up next, I'd like to welcome Doug Ostrover, Co-CEO of Blue Owl. Owl is one of the largest global alternative asset managers with nearly $300 billion in assets under management, specializing in private credit, GP solutions, and real assets. Building on success over the course of 2025, Owl will continue to expand into some of the fastest growth areas of private markets, such as digital assets and alternative credit, which I'm sure we'll talk quite a bit about with Doug today. Thank you so much for joining us. Always a pleasure to have you here. So good to see you.
Thanks. Great to be here. What number am I for you today?
Today, 9. Over the last two days, 25? 6?
I got to figure out if I'm better off being one or nine.
No, this is good. You have me warmed up, so this is actually kind of perfect. Okay, so why don't we start with some of the priorities for you guys for 2026? Obviously, 2025 has been a busy year. This was definitely a bit of an execution year after a number of deals that you announced, really expanding the product set, expanding the capabilities, expanding your distribution reach. What's kind of on the to-do list and key priorities for 2026 for you?
Well, again, thanks for having me, and everybody, thanks for taking the time today. So I think you summed it up in your question, and that is, as I think about 2024, we were really focused on, let's diversify the business. 2025 was, let's integrate all those acquisitions and get synergies. And then 2026 now is just execution. So what are we trying to execute on? Well, one, things like margin. We've spent a lot of money, and not that you're going to see margins pop up 200 basis points in a quarter, but what we hope you'll see over time is a nice gradual uptick in margins, something we weren't focused on. We're also focused on FRE per share. Something else we weren't looking at, we were in growth mode, we are really focused on those two metrics. How do we get there? Well, clearly one is fundraising.
And as you know, we've got a bunch of flagship funds in the market. We're in the market with our real estate fund. We have on the cover. It's our triple net lease fund, $7.5 billion. If you remember when we first bought that business, they had just finished a $2.5 billion fund. Then we did five, $7.5 billion. Cautiously optimistic, we'll exceed that. We're finishing up GP stakes. Again, we'll have a lot more to say about that in the first quarter, but we want to get that wrapped up in the first six months. We have our digital infrastructure fund. Our last fund was $7 billion. Yeah, we're going to be back in the market, I believe, sometime in the second quarter. We'll talk in February about sizing of that fund, but I think it could be materially bigger.
On the alternative asset side, we're wrapping up our latest institutional fund. We have $2.5 billion on the cover. We'll hit that and hopefully hit the hard cap. On the wealth side, you and I were just talking a little bit about credit, and I'm sure we'll spend a lot of time talking about credit. Look, we'll talk about the resiliency and why we think that is just a core asset for almost all of our investors, so we're expecting continued growth there, but we're really excited about digital infrastructure. You saw we launched the new fund. It's the fastest we've ever gotten to just under $2 billion, and we have high aspirations for what we can do there, and then on the alternative credit side as well, a lot less competition than what we're seeing in direct lending.
We are fortunate to partner with the old Atalaya firm with a 20-year track record. We launched our wealth product there, got to a billion, and I think that could scale pretty quickly as well. One quick comment on just those two wealth products. In 2024, we were talking about acquisitions, and we did some in 2025, and digital infrastructure, I believe, closed in January of this year. One of the things we said when we're buying them is they're accretive day one. If we can scale them institutionally and get them into wealth, then we can make it really work for our shareholders, and you'll notice on those two funds, in under a year in each of them, we scaled it, we're in wealth, and they're poised to really grow, so excited about all of that.
Great. Now, lots to look forward to in the next year.
Oh, hey, one last thing I didn't mention that was a little out of our control. This was a number we missed on a little bit this year: deployment. I remember sitting up here with you. I think maybe I went seventh last year, but is that a bad thing that I'm moving backwards?
I don't know. We'll find out next year.
But I remember sitting up here with you and not just myself, but everybody who came up prior to me, we were all very bullish on the M&A environment. Deployment is very important for a lot of our funds. And while it was okay this year, it was definitely below expectations. And a combination of we earn fees when it's deployed and we generate some origination fees, it definitely came in less than what we are hoping. It feels like things are better. I don't want to go out on a limb again and project it, but that's the other variable that we're cautiously optimistic about.
Yeah. I mean, for what it's worth, it's pretty consistent with what others across both the alt space, but also the banks and boutique have signaled about the M&A outlook for next year. So fingers crossed this time around actually kind of comes to fruition. Okay, let's talk about private credit and really want to zone in on performance. I think you guys and really the whole peer group have done a really good job outlining the merits of direct lending solution and private credit and kind of trying to dispel some of the kind of media headlines that are out there. But nonetheless, it's still really topical. And the way I want to zone in on that is really from the perspective of underlying portfolio company performance. We know what the non-accruals are. We obviously see the filings. We hear how you talk about the credit trends.
But when you look at the performance of the underlying credits, whether it's revenue growth, EBITDA growth, EBITDA margins, particularly in more tech-oriented software businesses, give us a sense of kind of how that's shaping up to maybe build some additional credibility about the credit trends.
Okay, so let me talk broadly about our funds, and then I'll finish up on software and maybe a little bit on, we were talking in some one-on-ones just about a GFC-type scenario, so look, I understand why there's some nervousness with private debt. It's grown a lot. There's been a lot of negative articles, and I'm glad you're asking the question, but I think the key is to kind of pull the curtain back and take a look at what's actually happening in the funds, and I would tell you, and I talked to some of our peers who are having a similar experience, and I'm sure they said this. Underlying performance is good, and so just some basic metrics of our book, our average company has about $275 million of EBITDA, so we play in upper middle market. These are good-sized businesses.
Our loan-to-value on a corporate credit is about 39%. Our loan-to-value on a software loan is about 30%. Our average position size is about 20 basis points. In terms of performance, have things slowed down a little bit versus a few quarters ago? Yes. Now, remember, where we invest, it's not really indicative of the U.S. economy because we don't do things like deep cyclicals, oil and gas, commodity chemicals, retail. We're looking for businesses that are much more annuity-like. And so we're seeing very few defaults. We're not adding names to the watch list. And as I said, a couple of quarters ago, probably seeing 8%-9% revenue and EBITDA growth. Now it's more maybe 1% to 1.5 points slower, 7.5%-8%, but still very, very robust.
So, most of the companies that we look at, worst case, we get quarterly, many quarterly financials, many I get monthly, and so I can look at our portfolio, and I can tell you with a high degree of certainty that for the next 18-24 months, and I can't go longer because it's hard to predict, but I can tell you with a high degree of certainty, the funds are going to perform really well, and that's because if you look at a company, companies, their earnings just don't go like this. You know, when you're looking at a business, when it's going through some sort of secular decline, it's slow, it trends down, and then over a period of a couple of years, so I see what's happening in the portfolio. I'm not seeing that.
And so I feel pretty good about where it's trending, what it looks like. People are saying, "Well, returns will be lower than they were a few years ago." No doubt. And by the way, we tell our investors, our goal in all of these funds, these are substitutes for what you can get in fixed income. And so we want to make roughly anywhere from 150-250 basis points spread versus the syndicated loan market. But I'll give you an idea. Today, and this is why I know Blackstone's redemptions came out. We don't have ours yet. I know the market reacted negatively. But think about, as an investor, if you want fixed income, where do you go? I was looking at one of the big high-income funds. I think it was Fidelity. It's yielding a 670. And we can generate 9%. That's unsecured.
We can generate 9% secured loans, so it just makes sense, and I think it's really compelling. Let me just jump to tech for a minute, so when we talk about our tech fund, we are talking about large-cap mission-critical software, large enterprise software where we have worked with these companies for years. There's no churn, and so the question is, where are these businesses heading? Now, if you just take a step back, the first reaction, the knee-jerk reaction is always, "AI, it's going to make these businesses obsolete." If you go out and talk to venture firms, the PE firms who invest in them, they would tell you that's just factually incorrect. The pricing model will have to change, and most likely, the ability to keep upselling will come down, so growth is going to compress.
In an environment where we have some compression in growth, what's the terminal value of the business? So our loans are at 30% loan-to-value. So we look at it and say, "We can absorb a reasonable amount of compression in enterprise value and still get our money back." I actually, I was just going through this with somebody in a one-on-one, so you'd bear with me. I found this kind of interesting. There's a software index, XSW. It's 140 large mid-cap and small-cap software and IT companies. Everything's equal weight. For the year, what do you think the index is up or down?
Down.
Down 3%. Now, given everything going on in AI, you would think it would be a lot worse, then there's one IGV, another ETF. What this one does, the top 10 software companies are 50% weighted, and so Palantir, Microsoft really skew it. This fund is up for the year, so what I decided to do was go look at the top drawdowns in software, so names like Salesforce, ServiceNow, Adobe, Workday. And what you would find is for these companies, and these are the biggest drawdowns, they're down on average about 30%, so let me describe a typical software deal for us. $1 billion enterprise value, $300 million of debt, $700 million of equity. Let's just say, and I just showed you most are flat, but let's just say it has a big drawdown like these funds, so instead of being worth $1 billion, it's now worth $700 million.
So now the cap stack would be $300 million of our debt and $400 million of equity. So our loan-to-value goes from 30% to 42%. I'd rather it be at 30%, but nobody would look at that and say, "Ugh, you're going to have a lot of defaults." The other thing is the average life of those loans is roughly two to two and a half years. So on our software book over a nine-year period, we have not lost a single dollar. And I would tell you, looking at the book today, again, we feel really good about it. The returns have been stellar, and I expect they'll continue to be quite good.
Great. That's really helpful, Connor. I appreciate spending time on that. Okay, let's turn our attention to maybe dynamics in the wealth channel. Super important growth engine for you guys. You've been there really from the beginning. You were there early. I think about $16 billion of inflows over the last 12 months. At a high level first, talk to us a little bit of how the footprint of your wealth channel has changed and sort of key priorities as you push further ahead into that world in 2026, both in terms of products and geographies.
All right. Thank you, everybody. We'll get started with our next session. Thank you, everybody, for joining us. Up next, I'd like to welcome Doug Ostrover, Co-CEO of Blue Owl. Owl is one of the largest global alternative asset managers with nearly $300 billion in assets under management, specializing in private credit, GP solutions, and real assets. Building on success over the course of 2025, Owl will continue to expand into some of the fastest growth areas of private markets, such as digital assets and alternative credit, which I'm sure we'll talk quite a bit about with Doug today. Thank you so much for joining us. Always a pleasure to have you here. So good to see you.
Thanks. Great to be here. What number am I for you today?
Today, 9. Over the last two days, 25? 6?
I got to figure out if I'm better off being one or nine.
No, this is good. You have me warmed up, so this is actually kind of perfect. Okay, so why don't we start with some of the priorities for you guys for 2026? Obviously, 2025 has been a busy year. This was definitely a bit of an execution year after a number of deals that you announced, really expanding the product set, expanding the capabilities, expanding your distribution reach. What's kind of on the to-do list and key priorities for 2026 for you?
Well, again, thanks for having me, and everybody, thanks for taking the time today. So I think you summed it up in your question, and that is, as I think about 2024, we were really focused on, let's diversify the business. 2025 was, let's integrate all those acquisitions and get synergies. And then 2026 now is just execution. So what are we trying to execute on? Well, one, things like margin. We've spent a lot of money, and not that you're going to see margins pop up 200 basis points in a quarter, but what we hope you'll see over time is a nice gradual uptick in margins, something we weren't focused on. We're also focused on FRE per share. Something else we weren't looking at, we were in growth mode, we are really focused on those two metrics. How do we get there? Well, clearly one is fundraising.
And as you know, we've got a bunch of flagship funds in the market. We're in the market with our real estate fund. We have on the cover. It's our triple net lease fund, $7.5 billion. If you remember when we first bought that business, they had just finished a $2.5 billion fund. Then we did five, $7.5 billion. Cautiously optimistic, we'll exceed that. We're finishing up GP stakes. Again, we'll have a lot more to say about that in the first quarter, but we want to get that wrapped up in the first six months. We have our digital infrastructure fund. Our last fund was $7 billion. Yeah, we're going to be back in the market, I believe, sometime in the second quarter. We'll talk in February about sizing of that fund, but I think it could be materially bigger.
On the alternative asset side, we're wrapping up our latest institutional fund. We have $2.5 billion on the cover. We'll hit that and hopefully hit the hard cap. On the wealth side, you and I were just talking a little bit about credit, and I'm sure we'll spend a lot of time talking about credit. Look, we'll talk about the resiliency and why we think that is just a core asset for almost all of our investors, so we're expecting continued growth there, but we're really excited about digital infrastructure. You saw we launched the new fund. It's the fastest we've ever gotten to just under $2 billion, and we have high aspirations for what we can do there, and then on the alternative credit side as well, a lot less competition than what we're seeing in direct lending.
We are fortunate to partner with the old Atalaya firm with a 20-year track record. We launched our wealth product there, got to a billion, and I think that could scale pretty quickly as well. One quick comment on just those two wealth products. In 2024, we were talking about acquisitions, and we did some in 2025, and digital infrastructure, I believe, closed in January of this year. One of the things we said when we're buying them is they're accretive day one. If we can scale them institutionally and get them into wealth, then we can make it really work for our shareholders, and you'll notice on those two funds, in under a year in each of them, we scaled it, we're in wealth, and they're poised to really grow, so excited about all of that.
Great. Now, lots to look forward to in the next year.
Oh, hey, one last thing I didn't mention that was a little out of our control. This was a number we missed on a little bit this year: deployment. I remember sitting up here with you. I think maybe I went seventh last year, but is that a bad thing that I'm moving backwards?
I don't know. We'll find out next year.
But I remember sitting up here with you and not just myself, but everybody who came up prior to me, we were all very bullish on the M&A environment. Deployment is very important for a lot of our funds. And while it was okay this year, it was definitely below expectations. And a combination of we earn fees when it's deployed and we generate some origination fees, it definitely came in less than what we are hoping. It feels like things are better. I don't want to go out on a limb again and project it, but that's the other variable that we're cautiously optimistic about.
Yeah. I mean, for what it's worth, it's pretty consistent with what others across both the alt space, but also the banks and boutique have signaled about the M&A outlook for next year. So fingers crossed this time around actually kind of comes to fruition. Okay, let's talk about private credit and really want to zone in on performance. I think you guys and really the whole peer group have done a really good job outlining the merits of direct lending solution and private credit and kind of trying to dispel some of the kind of media headlines that are out there. But nonetheless, it's still really topical. And the way I want to zone in on that is really from the perspective of underlying portfolio company performance. We know what the non-accruals are. We obviously see the filings. We hear how you talk about the credit trends.
But when you look at the performance of the underlying credits, whether it's revenue growth, EBITDA growth, EBITDA margins, particularly in more tech-oriented software businesses, give us a sense of kind of how that's shaping up to maybe build some additional credibility about the credit trends.
Okay, so let me talk broadly about our funds, and then I'll finish up on software and maybe a little bit on, we were talking in some one-on-ones just about a GFC-type scenario, so look, I understand why there's some nervousness with private debt. It's grown a lot. There's been a lot of negative articles, and I'm glad you're asking the question, but I think the key is to kind of pull the curtain back and take a look at what's actually happening in the funds, and I would tell you, and I talked to some of our peers who are having a similar experience, and I'm sure they said this. Underlying performance is good, and so just some basic metrics of our book, our average company has about $275 million of EBITDA, so we play in upper middle market. These are good-sized businesses.
Our loan-to-value on a corporate credit is about 39%. Our loan-to-value on a software loan is about 30%. Our average position size is about 20 basis points. In terms of performance, have things slowed down a little bit versus a few quarters ago? Yes. Now, remember, where we invest, it's not really indicative of the U.S. economy because we don't do things like deep cyclicals, oil and gas, commodity chemicals, retail. We're looking for businesses that are much more annuity-like. And so we're seeing very few defaults. We're not adding names to the watch list. And as I said, a couple of quarters ago, probably seeing 8%-9% revenue and EBITDA growth. Now it's more maybe 1% to 1.5 points slower, 7.5%-8%, but still very, very robust.
So, most of the companies that we look at, worst case, we get quarterly, many quarterly financials, many I get monthly, and so I can look at our portfolio, and I can tell you with a high degree of certainty that for the next 18-24 months, and I can't go longer because it's hard to predict, but I can tell you with a high degree of certainty, the funds are going to perform really well, and that's because if you look at a company, companies, their earnings just don't go like this. You know, when you're looking at a business, when it's going through some sort of secular decline, it's slow, it trends down, and then over a period of a couple of years, so I see what's happening in the portfolio. I'm not seeing that.
And so I feel pretty good about where it's trending, what it looks like. People are saying, "Well, returns will be lower than they were a few years ago." No doubt. And by the way, we tell our investors, our goal in all of these funds, these are substitutes for what you can get in fixed income. And so we want to make roughly anywhere from 150-250 basis points spread versus the syndicated loan market. But I'll give you an idea. Today, and this is why I know Blackstone's redemptions came out. We don't have ours yet. I know the market reacted negatively. But think about, as an investor, if you want fixed income, where do you go? I was looking at one of the big high-income funds. I think it was Fidelity. It's yielding a 670. And we can generate 9%. That's unsecured.
We can generate 9% secured loans, so it just makes sense, and I think it's really compelling. Let me just jump to tech for a minute, so when we talk about our tech fund, we are talking about large-cap mission-critical software, large enterprise software where we have worked with these companies for years. There's no churn, and so the question is, where are these businesses heading? Now, if you just take a step back, the first reaction, the knee-jerk reaction is always, "AI, it's going to make these businesses obsolete." If you go out and talk to venture firms, the PE firms who invest in them, they would tell you that's just factually incorrect. The pricing model will have to change, and most likely, the ability to keep upselling will come down, so growth is going to compress.
In an environment where we have some compression in growth, what's the terminal value of the business? So our loans are at 30% loan-to-value. So we look at it and say, "We can absorb a reasonable amount of compression in enterprise value and still get our money back." I actually, I was just going through this with somebody in a one-on-one, so you'd bear with me. I found this kind of interesting. There's a software index, XSW. It's 140 large mid-cap and small-cap software and IT companies. Everything's equal weight. For the year, what do you think the index is up or down?
Down.
Down 3%. Now, given everything going on in AI, you would think it would be a lot worse, then there's one IGV, another ETF. What this one does, the top 10 software companies are 50% weighted, and so Palantir, Microsoft really skew it. This fund is up for the year, so what I decided to do was go look at the top drawdowns in software, so names like Salesforce, ServiceNow, Adobe, Workday. And what you would find is for these companies, and these are the biggest drawdowns, they're down on average about 30%, so let me describe a typical software deal for us. $1 billion enterprise value, $300 million of debt, $700 million of equity. Let's just say, and I just showed you most are flat, but let's just say it has a big drawdown like these funds, so instead of being worth $1 billion, it's now worth $700 million.
So now the cap stack would be $300 million of our debt and $400 million of equity. So our loan-to-value goes from 30% to 42%. I'd rather it be at 30%, but nobody would look at that and say, "Ugh, you're going to have a lot of defaults." The other thing is the average life of those loans is roughly two to two and a half years. So on our software book over a nine-year period, we have not lost a single dollar. And I would tell you, looking at the book today, again, we feel really good about it. The returns have been stellar, and I expect they'll continue to be quite good.
Great. That's really helpful, Connor. I appreciate spending time on that. Okay, let's turn our attention to maybe dynamics in the wealth channel. Super important growth engine for you guys. You've been there really from the beginning. You were there early. I think about $16 billion of inflows over the last 12 months. At a high level first, talk to us a little bit of how the footprint of your wealth channel has changed and sort of key priorities as you push further ahead into that world in 2026, both in terms of products and geographies.
So it's pretty interesting. If you went back 10 years ago when we launched the firm, the credit business, almost all the major firms, what they were doing was they had an advisor-sub-advisor model in wealth. What that means is the big alternative manager was managing the capital, and they were outsourcing fundraising. And so when I launched our credit business, I looked at that and said, "I thought we could do it better, and the way to do it better was to bring it in-house." We probably started with Alan Kirshenbaum, CFO. He thought I was crazy at the time. We probably started with 40-50 people in that space. It took a long time to get it ramped up. We had one BDC we were marketing. Fast forward to today, to answer your question about where we are today, we have over 200 people.
We're obviously heavily weighted here in the U.S., Canada, all throughout Europe, Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, building out a team in the Middle East, basically everywhere in the world. We think it's still very early days. We have five products in the market, and we'd like to have more, and I think one of the negatives for our business is that we're a younger firm. We are very focused on having few products and being a market leader in everything we do, but that means we can only have so many products in market. Whereas some of the bigger alternative managers who have a much broader suite of products, they can launch more, so I'm pleased with how we're positioned.
I think most importantly, I was mentioning to you, if you look at the alternative asset-backed business, if you look at the data center business, why were we able to launch these funds so quickly in a crowded marketplace? The reason is we've been at it for 10 years. We have a lot of credibility in the marketplace. We have a lot of the advisors who know and like us. And most importantly, we've delivered on exactly what we said we would do. And so that allows us to get into the market and quickly execute. In terms of what else we'll bring to market, too early to say.
But I just want you to know we don't sit in a vacuum and say, "Hey, we want to bring X to market." What we do is we start early with the big wirehouses and the big power users at these firms about, "Hey, we think there's an opportunity in X. What do you think?" So we start building a consensus really early on, and that gives us the comfort that whatever it is we're going to be able to do or the product we go after, that we can launch it into those wealth channels.
Great. All right. Let's double-click on a couple of things that you guys hear on the ground. You mentioned, obviously, non-traded BDCs. The market continues to be hyper-focused on that whole subsector of this whole wealth ecosystem, just given how much it's grown, right? I mean, it's been a big driver for not just you guys, but for a lot of the firms in the alt space with the wealth product and direct lending. Sales, as of December 1, have clearly slowed down for you guys and for your peers now that we've seen a couple of larger ones in terms of December 1 subscriptions. Perhaps not surprising, given the barrage of headlines in the last two to three months.
What do you hear on the ground from financial advisors in terms of kind of their level of concern and whether or not this is likely to be just a new norm, and maybe it's because lower rates, tighter spreads, headlines, and now we're kind of a new, slightly lower paradigm for growth in that part of the business, or there are reasons to be optimistic and think this is just going to be a blip and it will kind of reaccelerate from here?
Well, it's really hard for me to pinpoint exactly what's going on because we have hundreds of thousands of people in those funds. And of course, we're talking to the biggest advisors constantly, but it's hard to get to everyone. So I'll just give you just my view from 30,000 feet. And that is when we went through COVID, we had bigger redemptions and less money coming in. When SVB went bankrupt, when we had tariffs, whenever there's blip or nervousness in the markets, we see things accelerate in terms of redemptions and inflows slow down. And I think this is no different this time. But let me just share with you where we spend a lot of time with advisors, with the home offices. What do we talk about? What we talk about is, "I know there's been negative press.
Let us give you the actual math of what happens in something like a GFC, and if you go and look, the syndicated loan market, I had a direct lending book, and I didn't experience this, but the stat is 12% defaults that year, and if you have 12% defaults, and we would expect much higher recoveries than this, but let's say it's $0.50 recoveries. Remember, we're investing, let's call it at 40% loan-to-value. So if you get $0.50, that company is recovering 20% of the purchase price. So let's use 50. 12% defaults, $0.50, that's 6% loss. We use a turn of leverage. That's 12 points of loss. But we have about 10 points of income. So it's somewhere between 2, 3, 4, maybe 5% loss in a very diversified, well-run, senior-secured loan fund. The equity market in 2008 was down 38%.
So I just keep coming back that we'll have these periods where things will tick up. There'll be nervousness. But at the end of the day, we believe we're providing higher income than investors can find anywhere else in the market. And if you run it well, we can really protect the downside. And so I think it will remain a core part of everybody's portfolio. There will be periods where inflows accelerate, and we're probably in one of those periods where it's going to slow down, and we're going to see some outflows, but I'm still pretty bullish about it. And I can tell you, speaking to the leadership of the big wirehouses, they're also pretty excited still.
Yeah. Okay. Makes sense. All right. That's been a really nice part of the story, and it really does feel like it's accelerating without much of a macro help, and then low rates presumably make that even a little bit more interesting. So what are your expectations on the momentum in that product, both in terms of same-store sales on the existing platforms as well as some of the newer places where you're adding it still?
Yeah. I'm excited about where we're positioned there. I think we're the best-selling real estate fund. For those who don't know it, it's a triple-net lease fund. It's had great performance. We raised a lot of money in a fairly short period of time, and it feels like that's accelerating because we're expanding the number of platforms we're on, and most people have never looked at a triple-net lease fund, so there's a real education process there, so we're excited. Surprisingly, we have a very big backlog there, so we have the backlog to support the growth, and what's interesting is, and you know this better than anyone, there are not a lot of big pools focused on triple-net lease. There's a lot of small pools.
And so going out and being able to deliver large wholesale solutions, I don't want to say we're the only one because certainly a Blackstone real estate fund, other real estate funds can do it, but it's not their core competency. So yeah, I remain super excited about that, and I think we'll see a lot of growth there.
Great. Let's talk about some new things. And I know I asked you what are some new products you're planning to come to market with, but you just did come to market with two pretty sizable new launches. So both on the alt credit and most recently with respect to digital infrastructure product as well. Super exciting launch, almost $1.7 billion, $700 million of that in the wealth channel alone, give or take. Lessons learned so far and kind of how do you think about the trajectory for both of those over the next 12 to 18 months?
Well, look, I'm really excited about both. And so maybe what I'll do is just give you a couple of headlines on each. Direct lending, the data center business, you know this, I'm incredibly bullish on it. And I think it's important. We were talking about triple-net lease. Think about what we do in triple-net lease. We go to an investment-grade company. It's usually a BBB, BBB minus business. Could be Walgreens, could be Cracker Barrel. We've done stuff for Whirlpool, but a lot of disparity in terms of credit quality, good assets, but we expect to get paid. They're signing anywhere from 15-20-year leases with 3% escalators. And as you know, in our institutional fund, we've generated in excess of 20% returns in that product.
So now we're faced with an opportunity where instead of working with Walgreens, Cracker Barrel, firms like that, we can go to Microsoft, Meta, Google, Apple, the biggest companies in the world, sign the identical 20-year leases, get higher cap rates, same 3% escalators. And the way we look at it to our downside is even if the facilities are worth zero at the end of their lives, we can still make a teens return. So what we're asking investors to do is to say, "Oh, can Meta, Microsoft, Google, Apple pay their lease over a 20-year period?" I'm not saying it's impossible they won't pay, but it's highly improbable. These are some of the best companies in the world. Average credit rating is single A to double A. And the imbalance between demand and supply here, I've never seen a market like this. Think about this for a minute.
We're in a position where we are going out and solving problems for the biggest companies in the world. It shouldn't exist. I shouldn't be able to make those kinds of returns. And yet the demand for compute is here. The supply is here. And I would tell you, being in this space now, heavily active for the last year, I see that demand accelerating, and I don't see the supply increasing. So I think this arbitrage is going to exist for some time. I know we're running out of time. We are one of the market leaders, and there's a very interesting moat around this. To give you an idea, we have a thousand-person team, a thousand people that act as a GC building these facilities, and we have built 110 of them.
And so if you're walking into a hyperscaler and you have land and you have the ability to get power, they've worked with us. They know our terms. They know that we can deliver. And very few firms can do that. So I'm unbelievably excited about it, and I think it has the potential to really scale. I don't want to oversell it, though, in the sense that, like anything, when you launch something in wealth, the super users, the most sophisticated users come in quickly. Then we have to get out and get out in the branches. And this is why we have 200-odd people and start telling the story. So I expect we'll have nice flows, and we should expect it to accelerate. I'll just touch on alternative credit really quickly. Equally as excited there, in my view, a lot less competition than direct lending. Returns are higher.
And again, there's an interesting moat you need, the expertise. For those who don't follow us as closely, we bought a business called Atalaya a little over a year ago, 20-year track record in the asset-backed space. When we brought them in, our goal, as I mentioned this year, was integration. First thing that I really wanted to focus on was they focused on just the stuff at the bottom of the cap stack where you can get a lot of yield. They were creating a massive amount of investment-grade product, but they had nowhere to go with it. And so I wanted to get that synergy with our insurance business. And so we have really executed on that. We are creating in every vertical you can imagine proprietary product, and I think that's going to really allow us to scale insurance. So that was one.
Two was, I wanted to get the institutional fundraise done I mentioned, and we're basically done with that, and then I wanted to get the retail fund done. To give you an idea of the myriad of product that we see, I think it came out publicly. We're working on a big transaction with SoFi. You should know these are basically prime loans we're buying, average FICO score of 750, nice subordination, really good alignment with SoFi, making, we believe, a very healthy return. We're working with somebody in the freight business. I think they're split rated between single and double A on helping them finance buying a new fleet of freighters with a 15-year lease, nice escalators, and then we're working with somebody who has rolled up the dental space, and we provide all the financing for dental equipment, so the TAM in this market is massive.
And we have a big team that has played in all of these areas, lots of expertise. And as I was saying, higher yields, less competition. So I think that has the potential to be a really big vertical as well.
Yeah. That's interesting. A couple of minutes left on the clock. I want to get to maybe some of the financial items. And you actually started with that. You gave us a lot to think about in terms of the fundraising outlook for 2026. But within that, you also talked about FRE margins and also FRE per share. We haven't heard you guys talk a lot about FRE margins in the past. Alan's smiling. But look, as you think about the trajectory of your investment spend, what do you feel like you have now, the ability to pull back? Where do you see the margins going over the next couple of years? And at the same token, we saw you guys do a small buyback. Presumably, that could also become a part of the growth algo at some point of time.
So how should we think about both of those elements of the story that could obviously enhance the EPS growth of the company?
Yeah. Well, first of all, I'll just reiterate that. We are very focused on margins now. Not that we ever let our margins get too low. They've always been high by industry standards. But we understand the marketplace wants to see us improving those margins. And I think we're very committed every quarter to making sure they're stepping up on their way to what I think we talked about a while back around 60%. We were less fixated on FRE per share. I know that's an important metric to the market. And we hope to have the same trends there where it's stepping up every single quarter. In terms of where we're taking the business, I think in February, we will be in a position to give really good guidance for 2026.
And then longer term, we're still standing behind what we gave at Investor Day, growing this business to somewhere around $3 billion of FRE. We still feel pretty confident about that. We know the levers we need to pull to get there. And so we're looking forward to getting after it in 2026.
Great. And then strategically, I'll end where we sort of started, where you were really busy diversifying the business a year ago. You've done a bunch of deals. You're in the process of really scaling them now. Anything else in the next 12-18 months that looks interesting where M&A could still make sense or the focus is really still like, "Let's just double down on what we built and grow that"?
Well, the focus definitely is on, "Let's focus on what we have and grow it." I am not exaggerating. A couple of times a week, we get a call from bankers, directly from alt managers about, "Hey, we would like to talk to you about joining the firm," and I'll just leave you with this thought, and that is, as we think about any acquisition, one, we're looking for things that will never be as good as the data center space, but where the demand is here and the supply is here, has to be a big market where we can come in and fill that void, and we want to become one of the market leaders, if not the market leader. We're also really focused on products that have high current income where we can protect the downside.
and the best products are like triple-net lease where we have that and we can get some unconstrained retail risk, so in that case, as I mentioned, earning an excess of a 20%, so I would just tell you the math side of it is easy. We know what we want. The culture side is the hardest piece, and the bar is really high there. As you said, we've made a bunch of acquisitions, so the focus right now is on taking care of business in-house, everything we bought. I know we're out of time. We have a bunch of organic things we're working on, so I think we have enough on our plate. I don't want to say it's impossible just because you know my DNA, but I'd say it's not anything we're really focused on right now.
Great. Okay, well, we'll leave it there, Doug. It's good to see you.
Thank you so much. Thank you.
Thanks for taking the time with us.