Creative Automation Company Celtra Announces Majority Investment by Symphony Technology Group (STG)

Celtra Technologies, Inc. (“Celtra”), the Creative Automation company, announced today it has signed a definitive agreement to receive a majority investment from Symphony Technology Group ("STG"), a private equity partner to market-leading companies in data, software, and analytics. The STG backing will help Celtra grow in partnership with Celtra's founders and management team. Celtra, a profitable company since 2017, is expected to generate over $50M in revenue in 2021, growing by over 25% year over year. STG's investment comes on the back of Celtra winning more than 40 new enterprise customers in the recent year, and the expansion of Celtra's Creative Automation solutions from media businesses into brands and agencies.

“Celtra’s vision was always to empower better creativity in the most scalable way. Over the last ten years, we've grown Celtra by providing the most advanced creative platform for leading media and adtech companies. Now, the creative industry is on the cusp of a revolution: just as programmatic transformed media and ad buying, we will now see the same wave take over creative execution and workflows in the next three years,” said Miha Mikek, Celtra Founder and CEO. “We are thrilled to partner with STG to bring our vision to life and grow the company to the next stage.”

Celtra has always believed scaling marketing creativity is transformative - for businesses and culture. Today, Celtra makes enterprise software solutions that help businesses stay creative at scale and transform creative work across people, data, and media. What started as a creative technology for media companies is now also a solution for brands and agencies looking to drive creative excellence and automate the production of omnichannel creative for an increasingly complex digital landscape.

“Celtra is Unilever's global partner for Creative Automation,” said Nathan Cook, Global Director of Brand Communications Excellence at Unilever. “Celtra’s software and solutions have helped us transform how Unilever brands and agencies create, activate, and re-use digital media and commerce assets across our markets. Moving from manual processes with fixed design to modular and automated digital creative production has made our workflow faster, our digital creative more effective whilst also driving cost-savings across the organization.”

"Celtra is a superb product organization, building creative automation solutions that enable great ad creative to have omnichannel impact at scale but without sacrificing quality or brand governance concerns. They have tremendous customer successes and terrific growth potential," said J.T. Treadwell, Managing Director, STG. "We believe that they are helping customers conquer the challenge of scaling creative communication and production to empower addressability of content, while simultaneously raising the quality of the result. We are very excited to be partnering with Miha, Maja, Matevz, and the rest of the high-quality team - to build the market leader in this emerging sector."

The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2021. Miha Mikek will remain as Chief Executive Officer, alongside Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, Matevz Klanjsek, and Co-Founder and Chief Financial Officer, Maja Mikek. Softbank Capital, an early investor in Celtra, will remain invested in the company.

In addition to Softbank Capital, Celtra was backed by leading investors including Fairhaven Capital, GrandBanks Capital, WPP, and Unilever Ventures.

GCA Advisors, LLC was Celtra’s exclusive financial advisor in connection with the transaction. Goodwin Procter LLP acted as Celtra’s legal advisor.

About Celtra

At Celtra, we believe scaling marketing creativity is transformative - for businesses, and for culture. So we’re transforming creative work - across people, data, and media. Today, Celtra makes enterprise software solutions that help businesses stay creative at scale. Our customers include companies recognized as the most creative companies in the world, including adidas, NBCU, WarnerMedia, Unilever, Spotify, and Shopify. Learn how to stay creative at www.celtra.com

About STG

Symphony Technology Group (STG) is a private equity partner to market leading companies in data, software, and analytics. The firm brings expertise, flexibility, and resources to build strategic value and unlock the potential of innovative companies. Partnering to build customer-centric, market leading portfolio companies, STG seeks to create sustainable foundations for growth that bring value to the companies with which it partners. The firm is dedicated to transforming and building outstanding technology companies in partnership with leading management teams. STG’s expansive portfolio has consisted of more than 35 global companies. For more information, please visit www.stgpartners.com

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