Antara Borrowed from Long Time Investor Corbin as Other Financing Dried Up

Gulati's fund pledged management fees, legal settlements and bank debt to get loans

After suffering two straight losing years and a wave of investor redemptions, Himanshu Gulati’s Antara Capital hedge fund was short on cash and long on investments that had become hard to sell.

That’s when a long-time backer turned into a lender of last resort.

Corbin Capital Partners LP, one of two founding investors at Antara, has made a series of loans to Gulati’s main fund since the second quarter of 2024. In return, Antara has turned over an array of assets to Corbin as collateral, including bank loans, stakes in legal settlements, and even a share of Antara’s management fees.

Only months earlier, Gulati had persuaded investors to let him lock down roughly $500 million of less-liquid assets, including those in his flagship Antara Capital Master Fund. By agreeing to delay their requests to pull money from the fund, investors would give Antara more time to divest these assets, the firm said, thereby avoiding a fire sale and ultimately generating higher returns.

At issue is whether Antara used the assets in this side pocket as the collateral for the loans, and if so, what the firm did with the proceeds from the borrowings. Another question revolves around the terms of the loans, which haven’t been made public. That makes it hard to tell whether Corbin is trying to help Antara work through its dilemma or is getting deals that could generate big profits even if the hedge fund defaults on the debt. Or both.