Castlelake Brand Guidelines: TPG Credit’s 2013 Rename, Aircraft Funds & Brookfield

An investment firm with a new name in 2013.

Castlelake is an investment firm, not an airline or an aircraft maker, and aviation is one part of what it does. Its website calls it “a global alternative investment firm” that specialises in asset-based private credit, and says it was founded in 2005. It describes experience in “the specialty finance, real assets and aviation private markets,” and its strategy page lists five areas: aviation leasing and lending, consumer finance, small and medium business finance, residential mortgages and commercial mortgages.

The name is younger than the firm. On 30 August 2013 the hedge-fund trade publication Hedgeweek reported that TPG Credit Management had changed its name to Castlelake. The firm, it said, had been founded in 2005 by Rory O’Neill in an alliance with TPG Capital, which acted as a silent minority partner. O’Neill, then managing partner and chief executive, told the publication that after eight years the timing was right for an identity that better represented the firm’s culture and strategies, that the new name showed its independence and ended confusion with TPG’s businesses, and that its governance, team, capital base and strategy were unchanged. At that point, Hedgeweek reported, it employed 53 professionals in offices in Minneapolis and London.

The firm has grown since. A September 2024 company announcement names O’Neill and Evan Carruthers as its co-founders, with O’Neill as executive chair and Carruthers as chief executive and chief investment officer. Its website now gives about 260 employees, including about 90 investment professionals, and counts eight offices; its contact page lists Minneapolis first, followed by New York, Dallas and London, with further offices in Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

Leases, loans and aircraft securities.

Aviation is where Castlelake looks most like a lessor. Its website describes that strategy as “on and off balance sheet finance to airlines and other aviation asset owners, including aircraft leasing and secured lending.” In its own announcements that has meant owning aircraft on operating leases, lending against aircraft and packaging leased aircraft into asset-backed securities. The company says it has used the public asset-backed market to finance pools of aircraft since 2014, and in February 2026 it announced the full repayment of one such deal, CLAS 2021-1, which it says covered 26 passenger aircraft and one freighter on operating leases to 11 lessees in ten countries.

In March 2025 the company announced the final close of Castlelake Aviation V, which it called its fifth and largest dedicated aviation fund, backed by pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and endowments. In August 2025 it launched Merit AirFinance, a separate aviation lending subsidiary with its own office and origination team, to provide debt to airlines and leasing companies; the business site Pulse 2.0 reported the launch on 16 August 2025.

The firm has also sold a leased fleet. On 16 September 2024 the trade publication AviTrader reported that Avolon, the Dublin lessor, had agreed to acquire Castlelake Aviation Limited, an entity managed by Castlelake, which at 31 March 2024 held 105 aircraft on lease, commitments for 13 new-technology aircraft, two leased engines and nine loans. On 17 January 2025 AviTrader reported that Avolon had completed the purchase, by then covering 106 aircraft on lease and commitments for ten new-technology aircraft.

Castlelake has invested in an airline, too. In October 2023, AviTrader reported, the Scandinavian carrier SAS chose a consortium led by Castlelake, with Air France-KLM, Lind Invest and the Danish state, as the winning bidder to fund its exit from US Chapter 11 proceedings. SAS left those proceedings in August 2024 with the four investors as its new owners, the publication reported. In July 2025 Air France-KLM announced plans to take a majority of SAS by buying the Castlelake and Lind Invest stakes, subject to approvals.

How lessors present themselves.

Aircraft lessors sell nothing to the travelling public. They buy commercial jets, lease them to airlines and sell them on, so their identities are built for airlines, lenders and investors rather than passengers. Their websites tend to open with a short line of figures — aircraft owned and managed, airline customers, countries — dated to the end of a reporting quarter, as Aircastle and Aviation Capital Group both do.

The aircraft themselves carry other companies’ colours. A lessor’s jet flies in its customer’s livery, so the photographs on lessors’ sites and in their press releases show airlines’ paint schemes rather than the lessor’s own. Aviation Capital Group announced in September 2026, for example, that it had delivered the first Boeing 737-8 in Trinity Airways’ new identity. Fleet pages list aircraft by type, and order-book pages count commitments from the manufacturers years ahead.

Customer pages are often walls of airline logos, sometimes grouped by region, and services pages explain the business in plain terms: operating leases, sale-and-leaseback deals in which a lessor buys an airline’s new aircraft and leases it back, trading in mid-life aircraft, and managing aircraft for other owners. Engines are a business of their own; trade reports describe lessors balancing engine use across their fleets, and some groups plan to expand into engine leasing.

Many of these companies are owned by banks, trading houses or investment firms, and their investor pages — results, fact sheets, credit ratings and bond reports — carry as much weight as the leasing pages. For the guides in this group we use navy, teal and silver tones with sans and serif stand-ins, an unofficial interpretation chosen for a finance-led sector; no company’s logo, livery or photograph is reproduced.

An investor first, a lessor second.

The ownership changed in 2024. On 17 September 2024 Castlelake and Brookfield Asset Management announced the completion of a strategic partnership in which Brookfield acquired a 51% stake in Castlelake’s fee-related earnings and Brookfield Wealth Solutions committed to invest in Castlelake’s funds and strategies. The announcement said Castlelake would continue to run its business independently, keep its governance and leadership structure, and retain majority ownership of its performance-related earnings. Castlelake’s website now describes the arrangement as a strategic partnership with Brookfield.

As a brand, Castlelake presents itself as an investor first. Its website leads with phrases such as “differentiated asset-based investors” and “creative capital solutions,” its announcements open with the same short description of the firm, and its news pages set aircraft securitisations beside mortgage and consumer-lending deals. The 2013 rename is its one documented brand decision: a single compound word, chosen, as O’Neill told Hedgeweek, to mark the firm’s independence from the TPG name.

For a design guide, Castlelake shows how an investment firm can carry an aviation identity without being a lessor alone: its aircraft sit inside funds, loans and securitisations rather than under one fleet name. Compare Avolon, which completed its purchase of Castlelake Aviation in January 2025, and Carlyle Aviation Partners, whose name ties it to the Carlyle investment firm. For this guide we use a lake blue, a reed green and a pale mist with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Castlelake’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.