Grass Valley, a portfolio company of private equity firm Black Dragon Capital, has announced the completion of a US$220 million strategic refinancing led by investment funds managed by Morgan Stanley Private Credit.
The strategic refinancing will both strengthen the company’s balance sheet and refinance existing debt. The business says it will now accelerate its investment across the combined Grass Valley Media Universe (GVMU) integrated hardware and software solutions.
Financially, Grass Valley says it 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.
Operationally, in 2023, the company completed its planned business transformation, having simplified the organisational structure and made new appointments across the leadership team.
“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 Louis Hernandez Jr, chairman and CEO, Grass Valley. “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.”
