Scott Porter

Scott Porter is a Managing Director on the Investment Team at Brightwood Capital Advisors, LLC, where he also serves as Co-Head of Originations. He concentrates on two of the firm's five core verticals — Transportation & Logistics and Franchising — sourcing and leading senior debt financings for lower-middle-market companies. Brightwood, founded in 2010 by Sengal Selassie, is a minority-owned firm with a team of more than 50 employees managing in excess of $5 billion of assets, providing senior debt capital primarily to U.S. businesses with $5–$75 million of EBITDA.

Before joining Brightwood, Porter was a Partner at Uni-World Capital, a lower-middle-market buyout fund, where he spent over five years sourcing, executing, and managing private equity investments. Prior to that, he worked for nine years as a Partner at Cowen Capital Partners (CCP) alongside Brightwood co-founder Sengal Selassie — a long professional relationship that predates Brightwood. At CCP he contributed to business-development initiatives, including the firm's spinout from Société Générale and its subsequent IPO.

Porter began his career in Chase Securities' High Yield Corporate Finance Group, where he executed more than $3.5 billion in lead-managed and approximately $7.0 billion in co-managed transactions — a leveraged-finance pedigree that aligns naturally with his current debt-origination role. He holds a B.A., magna cum laude, from SUNY Binghamton University.

• Instrument: Senior secured debt / direct lending (and at times preferred equity facilities), not venture equity. Brightwood positions itself as a long-track-record private credit lender to the middle market.
• Company stage: Established, cash-generative businesses — typically $5–$75 million of EBITDA — rather than early-stage startups.
• Use of capital: Growth financing, acquisition financing/buy-and-build, and refinancings; deals frequently support private-equity- and independent-sponsor-backed platforms.
• Porter's personal verticals: Transportation & Logistics and Franchising; Brightwood firmwide also covers technology & telecommunications, healthcare, and business services.
• What makes him say yes (in his own words): On the I Love Produce financing, Porter said, *"We have great conviction in the team and the platform they've built, and we look forward to supporting their continued growth"* — signaling a focus on strong management teams and scalable, growth-oriented platforms.
• Geography: U.S.-focused.