James P. Gorman, Executive Chairman of Morgan Stanley | Columbia Business School
Morgan Stanley Investment Management has provided $125 million in senior debt financing to FreshBooks, a prominent provider of cloud-based accounting software for small businesses. The funds were managed by Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital and Morgan Stanley Private Credit. This investment aims to refinance existing debt and support FreshBooks' ongoing growth.
FreshBooks, based in Toronto, offers SaaS software tailored for service-based small and medium-sized businesses, primarily targeting the U.S. and Canadian markets. The platform facilitates various business operations, including invoicing, payment processing, time tracking, and payroll management.
Pete Chung from Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital and Ashwin Krishnan from Morgan Stanley Private Credit expressed their enthusiasm about partnering with FreshBooks. They stated: “We are pleased to be FreshBooks’ financing partner. We believe FreshBooks’ SaaS accounting software benefits from strong secular tailwinds, including increasing digital transformation and a shift to global e-invoicing and payments digitization. We believe FreshBooks has a tremendous market opportunity ahead of it and are confident that our growth credit and capital solutions teams are uniquely positioned to support FreshBooks in this important stage of its growth.”
Shaheen Javadizadeh, CEO at FreshBooks, shared his excitement about the partnership: “We’re thrilled to partner with Morgan Stanley’s Expansion Capital and Private Credit groups, who support our vision of empowering small business owners through technology. FreshBooks looks forward to leveraging their expertise in this next chapter of growth.”
The investment was led by Nick Nocito, Executive Director at Morgan Stanley.
Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital is known for targeting late-stage growth equity and credit investments across various high-growth sectors such as consumer technology and healthcare. Meanwhile, Morgan Stanley Private Credit focuses on direct lending and opportunistic private credit investments in North America and Western Europe.
Morgan Stanley Investment Management boasts over 1,400 investment professionals globally with $1.7 trillion in assets under management or supervision as of December 31, 2024. It aims to provide exceptional long-term investment performance across a diverse client base.
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