CaptionMax
Hennepin Partners Advises Captionmax on its Sale to 3Play Media
Minneapolis, MN – Hennepin Partners announced it has successfully advised Captionmax on its acquisition by 3Play Media, a portfolio company of Riverside Partners.
Based in Minneapolis with additional offices in Los Angeles, New York City, and Calgary, Captionmax is a trusted leader in media accessibility, providing high-quality live and recorded captioning, localization, and audio description services. In addition to its strong presence in the broadcast end-market, Captionmax has established relationships in the enterprise, education, and streaming media markets. The Company recently acquired NCC, which has continued to operate with its market-leading captioning brand serving major Canadian broadcasters, government, corporate, and not-for-profit organizations.
“We are thrilled to support the combination of 3Play Media and Captionmax,” said David Del Papa, a General Partner at Riverside Partners. “The union brings together two well-known industry players with complementary solutions.”
Over the course of Riverside Partners’ investment in 3Play Media, the Company has significantly grown and continued to invest in its video accessibility platform. The acquisition of Captionmax is the latest chapter in this growth. It expands the Company’s geographic footprint across North America and accelerates its recent entry into live captioning.
“We are excited to join the 3Play team,” Truck Morrison, CEO of Captionmax, said. “We’ve been impressed with their rapid growth, demonstrated scale, and focus on technology. And, with the continued growth of the video market, we look forward to building the premier media accessibility platform together.”
“We founded 3Play Media over a decade ago as a proprietary platform marrying technology with people to meet the growing and evolving inclusion needs of our customers,” said Chris Antunes, Co-CEO of 3Play Media. “The acquisition of Captionmax will allow us to serve our combined customers better with a broader set of solutions and even greater scale.”
“Captionmax has maintained its strong position in the market by consistently delivering high-quality solutions,” said Josh Miller, Co-CEO of 3Play Media. “As a combined organization we will build upon this solid foundation by offering our customers more options while continuing to deliver the peace of mind and enterprise experience our customers require.”
“We knew exactly what we wanted in an advisor, and Hennepin Partners delivered,” Truck Morrison added. “We wanted to ensure our unique story in a rather unique market was well understood, and they did an incredible job of helping us get out of the day-to-day to tell that story during this process. They also knew that market position and the right cultural fit was going to play a role in our ultimate decision. The Hennepin Partners team – led by Jim, Anders, Zach, and Ross – brought 3Play and Riverside to the table, creating a great outcome for Captionmax employees and its shareholders. I would recommend Hennepin Partners without reservation.”
Hennepin Partners served as financial advisor and Fredrikson & Byron P.A. served as legal counsel to Captionmax on this transaction. Choate, Hall & Stewart LLP served as legal counsel to 3Play Media.
About Captionmax
Captionmax along with its subsidiary National Captioning Canada is a leading full-service provider of media accessibility solutions. Captionmax provides live and pre-recorded captioning, audio description, and localization solutions to media broadcasters, content creators and distributors, corporations, and governments across the United States and Canada. For more information, visit www.captionmax.com and https://natcapcan.ca/.
About 3Play Media
3Play Media is a cloud-based video accessibility platform with solutions for closed captioning, live captioning, audio description, and translation/subtitling. 3Play Media combines machine learning (ML), proprietary data sets, and automatic speech recognition (ASR) with human review to provide quick and highly accurate accessibility solutions at scale. Customers span multiple end-markets, including media & entertainment, corporate, higher education, and government/nonprofit. For more information, visit www.3playmedia.com.
About Riverside Partners
Founded in 1989, Riverside Partners is a middle market private equity firm with total capital commitments of $1.6 billion raised since inception. The firm focuses on growth-oriented companies in the technology and healthcare industries. Riverside Partners is particularly experienced at partnering with founders, owners, and management teams and brings substantial domain expertise and operating experience to its portfolio companies. For more information, visit www.riversidepartners.com.