Backlight, a media tech company, announced its launch and the acquisitions of five innovative and fast-growing media software businesses: ftrack, iconik, Celtx, Wildmoka, and Zype.
Backed by a $200m+ investment led by PSG, a leading growth equity firm partnering with middle-market software and technology-enabled services companies to help accelerate their growth, Backlight’s mission is to serve media, entertainment, and video-forward clients with cloud-based solutions that dramatically improve every step of the media content lifecycle.
How will Backlight use the investment?
The investment also intends to support Backlight’s pursuit of additional add-on acquisitions of technology platforms that serve the media content lifecycle.
“I believe the democratization of content creation, combined with the incredible growth and fragmentation of consumption, have created massive complexity and new opportunities for creatives and content owners,” said Ben Kaplan, president and CEO of Backlight.
“The market is demanding innovative, flexible, cloud-based solutions to modernize media workflows. With five incredible business units, each led by visionary CEOs delivering compelling, differentiated solutions, Backlight is well positioned to be a trusted partner for customers with mission-critical creative processes and video pipelines,” he further said.
Visual storytelling is created with the best possible tools. Backlight is supercharging its business with resources in talent, product development, innovation and infrastructure that will help their clients create the next great generation of content experiences for audiences.
What are Backlight’s business units?
- ftrack is the creator of ftrack Studio, cineSync, and ftrack Review, the Emmy and Academy Award-winning production tracking, interactive media review, and team collaboration platforms for the creative industries. ftrack’s solutions are designed for producers, supervisors, artists, and pipeline developers to collaborate with anyone.
- iconik is a cloud-native, SaaS media management solution designed for users to share files from any storage, collaborate on video, and enrich media with AI for high searchability—all with great ease and the ability to scale to serve solo creators or large global teams.
- Celtx is an all-in-one solution for writing, planning, and managing media production that is used by millions worldwide. Celtx provides pre-production planning software, including scriptwriting, storyboarding, shot-planning, and budgeting, to in-house production teams, agencies, film schools and universities, game studios, and media & entertainment firms.
- Wildmoka is a platform for the creation of live and near-live content in Sports, News, and Entertainment. It has won awards for its AutoReZone tech, which helps provide a mobile-first experience. This cloud-native Digital Media Factory helps broadcasters to produce and deliver content from any source, to any destination, in any format, and at scale.
- Zype’s tech provides the infrastructure for digital video with a cloud-based platform to distribute enterprise-grade video across the web, mobile, TV, and social media.
Offering both developer-friendly tools such as customizable APIs as well as turnkey solutions for OTT apps and linear/FAST channels, Zype’s SaaS solutions enable video creators or distributors to quickly build, launch, and manage superior video products at scale.
“There is a large market opportunity to improve the way content producers, owners and distributors create value, starting with the media and entertainment industry but extending to any enterprise investing in rich media and video,” said Matt Stone, managing director at PSG.
“Our investment in Backlight reflects our conviction in the market, the team, and a vision of a modern media production lifecycle, from ideation to monetization,” Matt Stone concluded.
