Arcadia Capital × Outbound Empire: €720K in fees across 10 deals in 10 months.
Arcadia Capital is a Paris-based private debt fund providing non-dilutive growth financing to European SMEs between €2M and €20M in revenue. In 10 months of cold outreach to founders and CFOs, we sourced 10 signed deals generating €720K in arrangement fees for Arcadia — at an average loan ticket of €490K — for a fund with no prior brand recognition outside its existing LP network.
Arcadia.
Clément R. · Founding Partner, Arcadia Capital
Deals closed
10
Founder and CFO-level at growth-stage European SMEs
Fees generated
€720K
Arrangement fees earned across 10 borrower contracts
Reply rate
9.1%
To "no dilution" founder-targeted sequences
Avg loan ticket
€490K
Non-dilutive growth financing, 36-month term, no equity stake
Founders hate being sold to.
Private debt is a hard product to distribute via outbound. Founders have been conditioned to distrust unsolicited financing offers. Every email that mentions "growth capital" or "flexible financing" gets filed next to the LinkedIn messages from junior associates at PE firms asking for "a quick 15-minute call."
Arcadia had a genuinely different product. €500K to €2M in non-dilutive growth debt, at 36-month terms, with no equity kicker, no board seat, and no reporting burden beyond quarterly P&L. For founders who had outgrown bank credit but didn't want to raise a Series A, it was exactly the right instrument. The problem was positioning — and reach.
Clément and his two partners had deployed capital in their first fund through warm introductions from accountants and lawyers. But warm intro pipelines are slow, inconsistent, and capped. To deploy their second fund on schedule, they needed a systematic deal flow engine. The brief: reach 40 qualified founders per month with a message that doesn't feel like a pitch — and convert 2–3 to signed deals each quarter.
Outbound Empire as the deal flow engine
We started June 2025. Our positioning pivot was immediate: stop talking about the fund, start talking about the founder's problem. Every email led with a specific growth inflection point — a hiring spike, a new market, a contract win — that made the case for non-dilutive capital without ever naming it as such.
01
Weeks 1 – 3
Growth signal targeting
Identified 1,620 founders and CFOs at European B2B SMEs with €2–20M revenue and signals of recent growth acceleration: new hires, geographic expansion, contract announcements, or raised bank credit rejected. Prioritised companies 6–18 months post-Series A equivalent.
02
Weeks 3 – 6
"Grow without giving up equity"
The core copy was four words: grow without giving equity. Every email showed a specific use case — hiring 4 engineers, opening a Berlin office, bridging a 90-day enterprise contract gap — and explained how €700K in debt could do what a €2M round would have done at 3x the dilution cost.
03
Weeks 6 – 24
Term sheet in the email
Qualified replies received a conditional indicative term sheet within 48 hours — not a deck, not a call request. A 1-page document with the rate, term, and conditions. Reply-to-term-sheet-review conversion: 61%. Most founders had never seen a non-dilutive offer structured this clearly.
04
Months 5 – 10
Portfolio referral network
Each signed borrower was invited to a quarterly "Arcadia portfolio founders" dinner. The social proof of 8 funded founders at the same table generated 3 additional deals from peer referrals — deals that had zero outbound cost and closed in an average of 14 days.
10 deals, €720K in fees, 10 months.
Capital deployed over time
€0 → €720K
Cumulative arrangement fees from outbound-sourced deals. First deal closed in month 3.
Deals closed
0 → 10
Average ticket: €490K. All founder or CFO-level decisions. Shortest close: 14 days from first reply.
Reply rate progression
4.4% → 9.1%
Growth signal targeting and "no equity" positioning doubled reply rates from cold outbound baseline.
Cost per deal
€38K → €18K
As the portfolio referral network activated, deal acquisition cost dropped 48% — against a €490K average ticket and 4.2% net interest yield.
Why it worked
Founders reply to their own problems, not to financial products. Every email named a specific growth moment the founder was likely experiencing — and showed the capital solution before naming the instrument. By the time they replied, they were already thinking about the use case, not the pitch.
The term sheet replaced the discovery call. Sending a conditional indicative term sheet within 48 hours of a positive reply was radical in private debt. It showed founders exactly what the offer was — no vague "let's explore" language. Founders who reviewed the term sheet closed at 61%, versus an industry average of under 10% for first-touch conversion.
The portfolio dinner was the best marketing Arcadia ever ran. Eight funded founders around a table, talking about what the capital allowed them to do — hiring, expansion, the deal that wouldn't have happened otherwise. Two referral deals came directly from that room. Cost: one dinner.
"I had raised a Seed and was about to raise a Series A I didn't actually want to raise. Arcadia's email arrived at exactly the right moment. Six days after replying, I had €480K in my account and still owned 100% of my company. I've referred two other founders to them since."
Pierre-Antoine M. · Founder & CEO, B2B SaaS company, Bordeaux
Ready to become one?
20 minutes. No pitch deck. We look at your market, show you the playbook, and tell you if we can help.
