Prath Reddy

Prath Reddy runs Percent, which is what you get when a debt capital markets banker decides that the private credit market should stop being the part of finance where the paperwork lives in someone's inbox.

Percent is a marketplace and infrastructure platform for private credit, headquartered on Chambers Street in New York, three blocks from the courthouse where a nontrivial share of credit disputes eventually end up. It handles origination, structuring, distribution, and secondary trading for corporate, asset-based, and blended-note deals aimed at accredited and institutional investors. It has been doing this since 2018. Reddy has been there the whole time.

On June 18, 2026, he moved from President to CEO. Nelson Chu, who started the company and had been its public face, stepped up to Executive Chairman of the Board. The organizational change was quiet: the co-founder who ran capital markets, compliance, credit, and business development for eight years took the top job. The co-founder who did the storytelling took the board seat. This is a fairly Wall Street thing to do.

Reddy is a CFA charterholder. He holds FINRA Series 7, 63, 79, and 24 - which is roughly the licensing bingo card for someone who is legally allowed to sell you a private security, supervise the people who sell it to you, and run the broker-dealer that clears it. He is, separately and simultaneously, CEO of Percent Securities, LLC, the FINRA-registered broker-dealer subsidiary that makes the whole thing legal. If you are wondering how a startup gets to touch private debt without a bank charter, the answer is: hire this guy first.

The pitch for what Percent is trying to do is not complicated. Private credit is now something like a $3.5 trillion asset class. Most of the market still transacts the way it did in the 1990s, which is to say through relationships, PDFs, and phone calls. Reddy would like a lot of that to happen on a screen, with a data room, an offering memo, a standardized cash flow file, and eventually a secondary bid. He has said, in the polite phrasing of a person who used to work at UBS, that his focus is to "continue bringing public-market discipline to private credit." The subtext is that the discipline is not currently there.

Reddy studied business at Northeastern University, concentrating in finance. He then did the standard Wall Street apprenticeship: analyst and associate at Crédit Agricole Corporate and Investment Bank, executing investment-grade and high-yield bond financings for large corporates. The learning curve for a debt syndicate analyst is unglamorous - covenants, call schedules, deal comps, spreadsheet hygiene - and it is the curve that most banking startups skip.

He then went to UBS, where he became a Director in Debt Capital Markets. As a bookrunner on more than $100 billion of fixed-income securities for investment-grade U.S. corporate clients, he was one of the people who priced and syndicated the bonds that show up in your bond fund. The relevance to Percent is direct. In public bond markets, the pipes are boring and reliable. There are prospectuses, indentures, CUSIPs, prime brokers, and a secondary market that will quote you a price. In private credit, most of that stack has to be reconstructed one deal at a time.

In 2018, Nelson Chu recruited him as Percent's first hire. There is a certain confidence involved in leaving a director's chair at a bulge-bracket bank to be employee number one at a company that is, at that point, a thesis. Reddy did it. Then he stayed for eight years.

His remit at Percent, as President, covered the parts of the business that generate revenue and touch clients: capital markets, credit, compliance, and business development. In practice this meant he was the person who could stand up a broker-dealer, get it registered, pass the exams, and then use it to actually intermediate deals rather than merely showcase them. Percent Securities, LLC exists because Reddy exists. When you read that Percent has "facilitated billions in private credit transaction volume across primary issuance and secondary markets," what you are reading is the output of the machine he built.

The thesis Reddy has been building for since 2018 is that private credit will look more like the public bond market as it matures, and that whoever owns the standardization layer wins. That is a specific bet, and it has taken a specific form: a marketplace that runs origination end-to-end, a broker-dealer that can distribute, standardized deal documentation, and an emerging secondary trading capability. It is not a slick consumer app. It is plumbing.

Reddy's read on the current moment - his phrase is "a more demanding phase" - is worth taking at face value. Private credit had a good run through the zero-rate era, then a good run through the higher-for-longer era, and now sits at a point where defaults are ticking up, spreads are less generous, and institutional allocators are more willing to ask hard questions. This is a market that rewards discipline. It is also a market where the person who once priced investment-grade bonds for Fortune 500 issuers has a specific advantage: he knows what a properly documented, properly diligenced credit is supposed to look like, because he used to sell them for a living.

Percent's institutional presence is where he says he wants to expand. In practical terms that means bigger deal sizes, more asset managers as buyers, and deeper trading. Whether that works will depend on how many other people also decide that private credit ought to have standardized documentation and screens. Reddy's advantage is that he is already registered to sell it to them.