Mezzanine, with structure-aware discipline

Cash plus PIK is not one number. Interest schedules combine cash coupon, PIK accrual and step-ups. Effective yield needs to be computed and tracked continuously, not estimated.

Equity kickers are half the return. Warrants, equity co-invest and success fees frequently drive most of the return. They need to be tracked alongside the debt, not separately.

Intercreditor is the risk. Payment blocks, standstills and enforcement rights under intercreditor agreements determine what happens in stress. They need to be encoded, not remembered.

Covenants are hybrid. Mezzanine covenants often combine debt maintenance covenants with quasi-equity provisions. Monitoring needs to cover both.

Mezzanine is one of the platform's 68 native asset classes and is scored on its own rubric rather than through a sub-asset overlay. Twelve of the 68 native classes work this way: the deal population is structurally homogeneous enough that a single criteria set, document checklist and key term schema covers it without slicing further.

That keeps intake simple. Every mezzanine opportunity is asked the same questions, extracted against the same key term fields, and compared against the same rubric, so the scoring is directly comparable across your whole mezzanine book from the first deal onwards.

Every mezzanine opportunity that moves through Reuben AI leaves a structured record rather than a folder of documents and a memo. The rubric score is stored with the criteria that produced it, each extracted key term is stored with the clause and page it came from, and every flag is stored with the reason it fired and who cleared it.

The practical effect is that the investment committee paper, the LP report line and the audit trail are all reading the same underlying record. When an LP asks in year three why a mezzanine position was underwritten the way it was, the answer is retrieved, not reconstructed.

Mezzanine sits as a core allocation for Private Credit mandates, and is adjacent or opportunistic for 6 of the other fund types the platform serves.

That matters operationally because most funds do not hold mezzanine alone. The moment a portfolio spans more than one asset class, comparability becomes the constraint: a position scored on a bespoke mezzanine spreadsheet cannot be ranked against a position scored somewhere else. Running mezzanine on the same rubric engine as the rest of the book removes that break.

Reporting inherits the same property. Portfolio monitoring, valuation cadence, capital account movement and LP reporting all draw from the single stored record, so a mezzanine position appears in the quarterly pack on the same basis as every other holding, with the same evidence behind it.