First National Capital, a large independent providers of capital equipment and project financing in North America, structured a $10 million sale-leaseback program for an international data center company, releasing trapped equity from IT infrastructure deployed across multiple continents to fund the operator’s continued global expansion.
Rapid expansion into new markets had strained liquidity: each new location required substantial upfront capital, while the company’s balance sheet carried the leverage and elevated operating expenses characteristic of a business growing faster than its cash flow.
The collateral profile compounded the problem. The bulk of the company’s asset base — specialized IT equipment sourced from global vendors — sat outside the United States, in jurisdictions and configurations that conventional equipment lenders would not underwrite. Traditional lenders read the combination of growth-stage financials and cross-border collateral as a reason to decline. What the financials actually described was a company whose most accessible capital was already deployed inside its own racks.
First National structured a sale-leaseback releasing that equity from both domestic and international assets — accommodating multiple jurisdictions, global vendor arrangements and specialized IT equipment within a single program — without disrupting operations at any facility. The structure was built to recur rather than conclude: over several years, First National has provided ongoing support for the company’s capital expenditure program, funding successive expansion phases as the operator pivoted into higher-margin data center and technology services. The result is a capital framework that has scaled with the business — strengthening financial stability while fueling the global buildout that traditional lenders declined to touch.
“Sale-leaseback still gets read as a distress signal by people who have not looked at the math,” Philip Gronnerud, senior vice president and co-founder of First National Capital, said. “This company had hundreds of racks of productive, revenue-generating equipment on its balance sheet earning nothing as collateral because it sat in the wrong countries for a conventional credit committee. Releasing that equity was not a rescue. It was the cheapest expansion capital available to them — cheaper than equity, faster than a syndicated facility and structured so the equipment never stopped working for a single day. The constraint was never the company’s credit. It was finding a lender willing to underwrite assets where they actually are.”
