Context
Founded in 1999, Arturia designs and develops digital music production software and hardware for hobbyists, semi-professionals and professional musicians.
Arturia has built a complete music production software suite based on unmatched sound design capabilities and patented synthesizing algorithms and expanded its offering into controllers and embedded instruments, shaking up the traditional analogue synthesizer market.
Headquartered in Grenoble, France, the company operates worldwide (+90 countries) and has a strategic presence in Los Angeles, Mexico, London and Hong Kong to serve its 1.3m registered users.
After a successful LBO operation led by EMZ Partners in 2019, Arturia has continued to experience high growth (c.+40% revenue CAGR FY16-21) and achieved its four-year business plan in only two years, reaching c.EUR 55m in revenue in FY21, over 40% of which was generated in the US.
Shareholders were therefore considering a reinforcement of the company’s capital structure and a debt refinancing to further support its expansion through organic development and targeted acquisitions.
About EMZ Partners
Based in Paris and Munich, EMZ Partners is a specialist fund investing alongside founders, family shareholders and managers willing to acquire or consolidate the control of their capital, as an alternative to pure equity financing. Since its inception in 1999, EMZ Partners invested more than EUR 4 billion in French and German companies to support their strategy growth.
EMZ Partners is controlled by the management team and financed by French and European institutional investors.
About Arturia
Founded in 1999 and based in Grenoble, France, Arturia designs and manufactures hardware and software musical instruments, including software synthesizers, drum machines, analogue synthesizers, MIDI controllers, sequencers, mobile apps and more recently audio interfaces. The company, which has c.120 employees, focuses on innovation and strives to get hardware and software closer with cutting-edge products that offer the best of both worlds. Arturia’s products are commercialized worldwide leveraging a large international retail network of 1,400+ dealers and Arturia’s own website.
Deal Team
Should you want to know more about this transaction, you can contact one of the team members above
Bryan, Garnier & Co acts as Sole Financial Advisor to Arturia on its capital and debt reorganization led by its management team and EMZ Partners
Bryan, Garnier & Co acted as Sole Financial Advisor to Arturia in a capital and debt reorganization led by EMZ Partners and Crédit Agricole Sud Rhône Alpes.
Bryan, Garnier & Co assisted Arturia with valuation expertise and process intelligence, coordinated due diligence efforts and negotiated the transaction terms with EMZ Partners and Credit Agricole Sud Rhône Alpes representatives.
While reinforcing EMZ Partners’ position as reference minority shareholder, the transaction also enables Arturia to obtain a dedicated credit facility to finance targeted bolt-on acquisitions to strengthen its market share expansion and penetrate adjacent markets.
Having acted as lead senior lender in the previous LBO transaction, Crédit Agricole Sud Rhône Alpes confirmed its strong support for Arturia while arranging and coordinating the new senior credit facility.
In line with Arturia’s continued commitment to improve its social and environmental impact, the company has indexed a portion of its new credit facility’s pricing to ambitious ESG objectives.
Arturia’s growth in the coming years will be based on a “make or buy” strategy. It will continue to use enhanced technology to provide musicians with unique ways to make music, complementing this with planned investments in research and development as well as acquisitions and talent expansion.
This transaction marks Bryan, Garnier & Co’s unique ability to support SMEs over the long term and underlines its expertise in the audio tech space: it has advised Arturia on previous capital reorganization and worked with Devialet on a series of growth financing rounds that have raised a total of EUR 150m.
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