Montreal, Canada – March 21, 2024 – Grass Valley, the leading innovator for live production solutions, and a portfolio company of growth-driven private equity firm Black Dragon Capital, today announced the successful completion of a $220 million strategic refinancing led by certain investment funds managed by Morgan Stanley Private Credit. The strategic refinancing will both strengthen the company’s balance sheet and refinance existing debt, while further positioning Grass Valley to lead the reimagination of the future workflow for media through its Grass Valley Media Universe (GVMU) suite of solutions.
The refinancing serves to extend the momentum from an incredibly successful 2023, both operationally and financially, for Grass Valley. Operationally, the company completed its planned business transformation, having simplified the organizational structure, made key new appointments across the leadership team, optimized its global footprint, and focused the product portfolio to align with the changing media landscape. The business transformation allowed the company to further extend its significant investments in software and integrated hardware solutions as part of the most advanced cloud-native media platform in the industry. Through these investments customers are now realizing unmatched savings and workflow agility while producing the most watched content in the world.
Financially, the business delivered strong results in 2023. This included growing revenue, with its strongest year since 2020 for live production and networking infrastructure hardware, and a significant increase in recurring revenue with AMPP revenues nearly doubling over last year. In addition, earnings increased over 100% while the company hired nearly 200 employees globally and saw its patent portfolio expand significantly due to its continued investments in innovation.
“The media industry is still in the early stages of defining the future of live production workflows and this investment further allows Grass Valley to accelerate our market leadership in support of this industry-wide transition,” said Grass Valley’s Chairman and CEO, Louis Hernandez Jr. “With our surging performance from 2023, and now a stronger balance sheet, we intend to accelerate innovation across our entire portfolio, most notably in the AMPP ecosystem, as we begin to scale deployments across our global customer base.”
As media companies continue to navigate the disruptive forces impacting their businesses, they face mounting challenges to deliver operational efficiencies across the media supply chain. Grass Valley is helping to lead the future of live production solutions by enabling streamlined workflows through the Grass Valley Media Universe, which includes the AMPP open ecosystem delivering significant advantages with flexibility across on-prem, hybrid or cloud native deployment models. By completing this refinancing, Grass Valley will now accelerate its investment across the combined GVMU integrated hardware and software solutions, enabled by AMPP, further extending its leadership across live, networking, content production, and playout workflows.
“We are excited to partner with Grass Valley and its management team on this transaction,” said Peter Ma, Managing Director, Morgan Stanley Private Credit. “The flexibility embedded within our senior debt investment along with the Company’s leading market position, comprehensive product portfolio and positive operating momentum position the business for significant future success.”
Morgan Stanley Private Credit’s investment in Grass Valley was led by Managing Director Peter Ma, Executive Director Griffin Coakley and Vice President Chris Brown.
About Grass Valley
Grass Valley is the leading media technology provider for the media and entertainment industry. Trusted by the world’s top media brands, Grass Valley is empowering content producers to deliver great live experiences through best-in-class hardware and software solutions that improve efficiency and reduce costs.
Supporting customers across the globe, Grass Valley is at the forefront of groundbreaking media innovation and continues to create the future of live media production.
Headquartered in Montreal, Grass Valley has been engaged in the media technology business for over 60 years. For more information about Grass Valley, go to grassvalley.com.
About Black Dragon Capital
Black Dragon Capital℠ (BDC) is a multi-phased investment firm focused on advanced technologies in high growth segments that strengthen economic stability within communities. The firm was founded and led by a diverse team with a combination of intense operating experience, community impact focus, and a track record of successful investing. They work closely with entrepreneurs to build market leading companies using their proprietary Black Dragon Toolkit℠ and focus on high potential early stage, and mid-market technology companies in growth sectors disrupted by digitization.
For Black Dragon Capital Media inquiries:
Maria Florencia Viana
Media Relations
mviana@blackdragoncap.com
About Morgan Stanley Private Credit
Morgan Stanley Private Credit, part of Morgan Stanley Investment Management, is a private credit platform focused on direct lending and opportunistic private credit investment in North America and Western Europe. The Morgan Stanley Private Credit team invests across the capital structure, including senior secured term loans, unitranche loans, junior debt, structured equity and common equity co-investments. For further information, please visit the website:
