In early April 2026, Fox Ridge Capital LLC officially launched with a mission to deliver achievement-focused financing solutions to small and mid-sized organizations. The new equipment finance company is led by Chief Executive Officer Tom Depping, an industry veteran with a distinguished track record of founding and scaling successful small-ticket equipment finance companies, including First Sierra/Sierra Cities and Ascentium.
Joining Depping is Chief Financial Officer Dawn Gillette, who oversees the company's financial strategy and key operational functions as Fox Ridge Capital builds its national business lending platform. Gillette brings more than three decades of executive leadership experience spanning banking, specialty finance, and fintech, with extensive expertise in building commercial finance businesses, managing risk and leveraging technology to drive sustainable growth.
Equipment Finance Advisor Publisher Michael Toglia recently spoke with Depping and Gillette to discuss the company's vision, growth strategy, and its newly secured $150 million revolving securitization facility. For a newly launched organization, obtaining a financing facility of this scale represents a significant milestone and provides a strong foundation for the company's continued expansion in the equipment finance market.
Michael Toglia: Securing a $150 million Revolving Securitization Facility so early in Fox Ridge Capital's lifecycle is a significant milestone for a newly launched entity. A facility of this scale is certainly a vote of confidence from institutional investors in your management team's historic performance with Ascentium and First Sierra. From a financial strategy perspective, how does the revolving nature of this facility accelerate your go-to-market timeline, and what message does this early institutional backing send to the equipment vendors and small business borrowers you are actively targeting?
Dawn Gillette:Closing a facility of this size so early (six months from start) is about the quality of the leadership team and the proven durability of what this team has built before. Institutional capital doesn't underwrite a launch narrative; it underwrites a track record, and ours spans multiple credit cycles and two prior platforms that scaled responsibly. It is also about the incredible partnership of the BMO team who worked with us to close this facility for Fox Ridge in just nine short weeks.
The revolving structure matters. Rather than originating against a finite pool and pausing to refinance, we can fund, replenish, and redeploy capital continuously as receivables season and we build additional funding sources. That gives us committed, repeatable funding capacity from the outset. In practical terms, it lets us say "yes" with speed and consistency—two things vendors and borrowers value more than almost anything else.
The message to the market is straightforward: Tom Depping has four decades of starting and building small ticket equipment finance companies. First Sierra / Sierra Cities and Ascentium were both startups that scaled into two of the largest equipment finance companies covering three decades. Investors tend to underwrite success. Success is much more than growing fast. To be truly successful over many decades one must also provide investors with a high level of credit quality and technology driven operational excellence. That is what our banks have underwritten – Fox Ridge is well and deeply capitalized as being a long-term, dependable partner. Vendors want a financing partner they can build their sales process around and borrowers want certainty of execution. This facility is evidence that sophisticated institutional investors expect us to be here through the cycle.
Toglia: You have reunited with LKCM Headwater Investments, a partner dating back over 20 years. How are you balancing this equity backing with the newly announced $150 million Revolving Securitization Facility referenced in question 1? How does this overall strategy optimize your cost of capital?
Tom Depping: Reuniting with LKCM Headwater is meaningful to us both personally and strategically—and reuniting is exactly the right word for what we're doing at Fox Ridge. We're bringing back together the very best in the business: our leadership team, our funding sources, and our equity partners, all to build the best commercial lender in the market. A relationship measured in decades means LKCM Headwater already understands how this team builds and goes to market, how we manage risk, and how we behave when markets get difficult. That alignment and discipline remove a lot of the friction newer partnerships have to work through. Repeatable success creates a lot of confidence equity.
The two forms of capital do different jobs. Equity is long term capital that funds the platform itself - people, technology, infrastructure as well as the equity we hold in our own originations. Our securitization facilities, of which our BMO facility is our first, provide efficient leverage against a specific, performing asset base. Pairing committed equity with revolving debt facilities empower all aspects of Fox Ridge Capital’s trajectory.
While optimizing durable cost of capital is a long-term, never-ending journey, our strategy is designed to empower our sales teams with ‘long term established lender’ cost of capital from our start.
Toglia: Fox Ridge Capital places an emphasis on a "differentiated technology platform" that leverages AI and automation to match the fast pace of today’s businesses. At the same time, you emphasize a "relationship-based approach" and a culture of collaboration. From both an operational and go-to-market standpoint, how do you prevent automation from diluting the relationship model, and where exactly does AI sit in your underwriting and collateral valuation process to ensure both speed and risk mitigation?
Depping: Much of our differentiation is that our team uses technology, but technology isn’t controlling us. The connections we make through collaboration drive our client-centric model. We don’t strictly use a rigid tech model – we personally understand our customers and transactions driving our ecosystem and the client’s journey. We are leaning into a hybrid model which is to be more agile than a tech-only model - forcing clients and equipment providers through a restrictive framework. Many companies building or rebuilding today tend to automate to the point of losing personal relationships and we are here to be a collaborative ally. Tech makes us swift and intelligent human decisions make us agile.
Gillette: Technology, including AI, empowers our people with better and more useful data, enables our people to spend their time where relationships are actually built, where human judgment adds the most value and where value is created.
Our philosophy is that AI and automation should handle the parts of the process that are high-volume and low-judgment—intake, data aggregation, document verification, preliminary structuring, and portfolio monitoring. AI should compile information and deliver it to people in a manner that is useful, timely and powerful; so, they can make better decisions. These tools and processes are being designed and leveraged to empower our teams to focus on our vendors, our customers, and our partners – to deliver for them.
Toglia: Fox Ridge’s leadership team has a strong track record, having taken both First Sierra Financial and Ascentium Capital to $1 billion in originations within their first five years. However, the commercial finance landscape is different today and includes new private credit entrants taking significant market share from traditional equipment finance providers including banks, bank-owned equipment finance companies, and independents. Please explain Fox Ridge’s go-to-market strategy and how you will replicate or exceed that rapid scale in light of the expanding competitive landscape?
Gillette: Private credit has brought new capital and new competitors into equipment finance; it also provides new funding capital and the opportunity for new types of partnerships. More broadly, the private credit story, specifically the recent stumbles, reminds us of the importance of leadership, expertise, and quality execution in building long term, durable, successful market leading lending firms.
More capital in the market doesn't diminish the value of what actually wins in this business – speed, consistency, vendor relationships, and credit discipline. If anything, a more crowded field rewards the platforms that execute better, and execution is exactly what this team has done twice before.
Depping: On replicating the scale we reached at past organizations: we're not starting over. We're starting with the same leadership, the relationships that leadership has maintained over 20-plus years, committed institutional funding, and a technology stack that lets a leaner team originate more efficiently than was possible in prior eras. We'd rather grow deliberately and hold credit quality than chase volume for its own sake. I view the entrance of private credit as an opportunity for Fox Ridge. We are unique in that we are one of the few independents that is a true originator and not an intake shop. Our models have also been proven over many decades and survived many credit cycles. This provides private credit partners with a high level of confidence and allows us to provide a better product to our customers and sales team.
Toglia: Fox Ridge Capital has issued numerous personnel announcements. As you continue to grow your team across credit, funding, operations and sales, what are the primary friction points you foresee in scaling your operations to support the dollar volumes you anticipate, and how is your capital structure aligned to support this significant investment in human capital and proprietary technology as you build your portfolio?
Depping: We seem to be in a very good place with capital right now with a $150 million commitment from LKCM and we have closed on $165 million with BMO. We also have credit approval from two other banks for an additional $225 million. The most difficult part of scaling a business is having the right people in place. We are very fortunate to have a team that has done this before – it is not our first rodeo. The addition of AI tools in the hands of an experienced team makes this easier than in our past endeavors.
Gillette: The hardest part of scaling a finance platform is rarely the capital – it’s operational integrity as volume grows. The friction points we watch most closely are maintaining underwriting discipline as origination volume increases, keeping funding and operations workflows fast without letting controls slip, and preserving culture as we add people across the platform.
Over the past six months we have built the frame of our business, the initial technology stack, thoughtful, detailed policies and procedures, our full operational framework, leadership team and, as you have highlighted, our capital base – both from an equity and debt capacity perspective. This platform is built to scale, to absorb growth without a linear increase in manual work or a degradation in decision quality.
Our capital structure is deliberately aligned to that build. Equity from a long-term partner like LKCM Headwater is what funds the investment in human capital and technology; the parts of the business that create the enduring competitive advantage. The revolving facility funds the receivables those people and systems produce. Structuring it that way means we can invest confidently in the team and the platform today, knowing our origination growth is supported by committed, purpose-built funding rather than being constrained by it.