 The growth of bond financing for Euro-area non-financial corporates is the main motivation for this study. The causes of this aggregate growth are well understood. Several macro trends have been favorable to bond financing, such as difficulties with loans applied during the Euro-crisis, loose monetary policy and falling interest rates, as well as institutional reforms such as bankruptcy laws. This paper contributes to the big question of what are the implications for firms and financial stability. Europe is particularly interesting to study, since its financial system has historically been bank-based. Thus, the question of how the transition towards more capital market funding looks like is important. In this paper, we look at the cross-section of firms and present new stylized facts for new and smaller issuers. We start the analysis by documenting that the growth of bond financing has reached well beyond the largest firms. And then we ask the following questions. What kind of issuers enter the bond market? Which investors provide the new funds and what happens in bad times? We show that firms that enter recently the bond market are smaller in size, have higher level of leverage and are less profitable compared to historical issuers. Next, we look at the composition of the bond investors across different types of issuers. If you just look at the aggregate, you would see that a large share of corporate bonds, over 40%, is held by buy and hold investors, such as insurance companies and pension funds, as well as the ECB. However, the picture looks very different if you compare the smallest with the largest issuers. For the smaller issuers, insurance companies and pension funds hold only a very small share of their bonds, while the ECB almost zero. Naturally, the question that comes up is the following. Might the firm investor matching reinforce fragility? We contribute to this question by looking at what happens in the bond market turmoil in the spring of 2020. In particular, we focus on weaker and smaller issuers and look on how they were affected along two dimensions. First, the bond investor sell-off, and second, the bond versus bank debt financing. In the last two decades, there was a clear policy discussion to encourage firms to enter the bond market and diversify their sources of financing. However, our findings imply that policymakers may need to direct efforts in mitigating potential new risks behind this expansion. In particular, the bottom of the bond market that consists by weaker and smaller issuers looks very different compared to the top of the market. Thus, it seems important to pay attention at the composition of bond issuers and investors.