Boston and Los Angeles April 11, 2023 — MediaBridge Capital Advisors has announced that it served as the exclusive investment advisor to 5th Kind in its recent sale to Sohonet. Both 5th Kind and Sohonet are based in Los Angeles.
5th Kind is one of the world’s leading enterprise digital asset management suppliers and was the first virtual production platform that combined modern asset management, seamless integrations, and real-time streaming and collaboration tools that could handle the types of 3D animation and visual effects that have become industry standards. Its customers include many of Hollywood’s leading studios and production companies.
The Sohonet Media Network is the largest and most established private, high-performance network for the M&E industry, connecting the leading studios, production and post-production facilities across the globe. Since 1995, Sohonet has combined innovative technologies with world-class managed services for professionals working across film, TV and advertising.
Ethan Jacks and Rob Levy, who managed the transaction for MediaBridge Capital Advisors, said: “We have watched 5th Kind, founded and led by Steve Cronan, become a premier cloud-based media collaboration platform vendor for the film and TV production industry. We are confident Sohonet, for whom we raised substantial growth capital several years ago, will expand 5th Kind’s media management solutions to include all segments of the filmmaking industry.”
“Content creation today is increasingly global, complex and data intensive,” said Chuck Parker, CEO of Sohonet. “As Sohonet becomes a creative-centric asset hub and workflow management platform, we are focused on connecting industry talent with the tools and resources they need to the many places that they now work – on set, on-prem facilities, at home, private, public or hybrid cloud infrastructure locations. As we integrate 5th Kind capabilities more deeply into Sohonet, we are excited and energised about the opportunity to provide the power of asset search, identification and workflow orchestration to our connected storytellers as they navigate and mitigate the complexity of today’s content creation workflows.”
At NAB 2023, the MediaBridge Capital Advisors Team – Ethan Jacks, John Bowen, Courtney Spencer and Rob Levy – will be available to meet to discuss M&A and growth capital opportunities in the media & entertainment marketplace.