M/C Partners Announces Sale of CSDVRS to Kinderhook Industries
Transaction Is Latest Successful Exit for M/C Partners
BOSTON, MA — March 19, 2015 — M/C Partners, a leading investor in communications services, today announced the sale of portfolio company, CSDVRS LLC, a provider of video relay services for the deaf and hearing-impaired, to Kinderhook Industries.
Based in Clearwater, Florida, CSDVRS provides Video Relay Service to assist deaf and hearing-impaired individuals to communicate with others through certified sign language interpreters.
M/C Partners invested $10 million in the company since 2006, when the firm collaborated with Providence Equity Partners to spin the company out of Communication Service for the Deaf (CSD), a non-profit organization based at the time in South Dakota.
“We are very proud of this tremendously successful exit, as it really exemplifies what we do as a private equity firm,” said Gillis Cashman, Managing Partner, M/C Partners. “We recognized an undermanaged asset in a fast-growing market that we felt had a strong opportunity for success. By making some strategic investments and bringing in a new management team, we were able to ‘out-innovate’ a large monopolistic competitor and more than quadruple CSDVRS’ revenue in a reasonably short period of time.”
Under M/C Partners’ leadership, CSDVRS became the first company to launch video relay service on a mobile video phone and as well as the first provider to launch a VRS call on an iPhone in 2010. The company was also the first to solve the challenges with corporate firewalls in order to provide VRS to businesses and government organizations.
“M/C played a significant role in the success of business providing not only strong financial support but also strategic insight the helped us develop services beyond the VRS market, said Sean Belanger, CEO of CSDVRS. “It was a true partnership.”
In the later stages of the investment, M/C Partners leveraged the video platform it had built and scaled into other markets, such as healthcare, where it provided video interpretive services to dramatically cut costs for hospitals that previously needed to have interpreters on-site. Through the CSDVRS technology, hospitals can now use an iPad to leverage certified language interpreters on-demand in a much more cost-effective manner.
The sale of CSDVRS is the latest in a series of successful exits for M/C Partners over the past couple years. Last year Zayo Group priced its IPO, Deutsche Telekom acquired GTS Central Europe, and in 2013, Baja Broadband was purchased by Telephone and Data Systems, Inc. [NYSE: TDS].
About M/C Partners
M/C Partners is a private equity firm focused exclusively on the communications, media, and information technology sectors. The firm has invested over $1.5 billion into nearly 100 companies in those sectors. Companies M/C has backed include Cavalier Telephone, Fusepoint, GTS Central Europe, ICG Communications, Involta, Legendary Pictures, Lightower, MetroPCS, NuVox, Open Mobile, and Zayo Group. The firm has strong institutional backing from the nation’s leading pension funds and endowments as well as a long track record of success. M/C Partners has offices in Boston and San Francisco. For more information, visit MCPartners.com.
Contact:
Neal Stein
Technology PR Solutions
321.473.7407
nealjstein@techprsolutions.com