Ostra Capital checks side letters against fund terms in an afternoon

Every promise, in every letter

Ostra Capital manages four private credit funds. Each close brings dozens of side letters, and each one has to be checked against the fund documents and every promise already made to other investors.

The legal team kept that history in a spreadsheet. Checking a new side letter meant reading it against the spreadsheet line by line, and a busy close took most of a week.

Fund terms as a playbook

Ostra loaded its fund terms and its most-favored-nation commitments into a Proviso playbook. Each new side letter is checked against both, and every conflict is marked with the clause it collides with.

An afternoon per letter

The team now reviews a side letter in about three hours. The record of what was agreed lives with the playbook, not in a spreadsheet only one person understands.