Zeus Capital acted as sole lead financial adviser to Catalis on its successful £90 million sale to NorthEdge Capital

Zeus Capital acted as Lead Financial and Rule 3 Adviser to Catalis Plc (“Catalis” / the “Group”) in connection with its £90 million sale to NorthEdge Capital LLP (“NorthEdge”).

Catalis provides a range of services into the high growth, global video games market through three divisions: Curve Digital, Kujo and Testronic. Curve and Kujo combined provide award-winning publishing and development of independent video games across all major console and PC platforms with a catalogue of titles including Human: Fall Flat, which has sold in excess of 7 million copies to date. Testronic provides quality assurance services to the global games publishing and film and TV markets.

The business has experienced rapid expansion and now employs over 1,000 people across its headquarters in London and offices in Los Angeles, Warsaw, Santiago, Brighton, Croydon and Bangkok.

Zeus was appointed to advise Catalis on an IPO or private equity sell side, based on its gaming sector experience, its extensive knowledge of both private equity and public markets and its relationships with key stake holders.

Having first explored the IPO route, the Board decided to pursue a private equity solution, for which Zeus Capital ran a highly competitive sale process. The transaction delivered shareholders a cash offer at a 180% premium to the prevailing price when the shares were de-listed from the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and to the business the ongoing financial support from NorthEdge and Vespa Capital, who decided to reinvest.

Members of the Zeus Capital team included Richard Darlington, Jamie Peel, Ben Robertson, Mark Barrow, Alistair Donnelly, Ed Stevenson and Dan Bate.

This is a fantastic transaction for the UK video games sector, which continues to generate increasing interest from many types of investor. In a time of transformational change for the video games market, Catalis has stood out in recent years for its significant growth across its publishing and testing operations.

It has been a pleasure working with all the stakeholders on what has been an extremely complex takeover code transaction and we look forward to seeing Catalis continue its rapid growth under NorthEdge’s ownership.

Richard Darlington, Corporate Finance Director at Zeus Capital

We selected Zeus as our Corporate Adviser after a comprehensive search. Initially we embarked on an IPO, however market conditions at the end of 2018 made it difficult. Instead we were able to seamlessly turn to the private equity arena, where Zeus also have great expertise. Zeus skilfully guided us through a very complicated deal which was subject to numerous regulatory considerations in several jurisdictions.

We chose to work with NorthEdge because, among other things, of their stellar track record in the video games market and we are extremely excited about working with them as we continue with our rapid growth plans.

Dominic Wheatley CEO of Catalis