Atwater invests in EQT-backed Freepik

Following the deal, Vania Schlogel, managing partner and founder of Atwater, will join the board of Freepik. She will support the management team, led by co-founders Joaquin Cuenca and Alejandro and Pablo Blanes, who will collectively retain a minority stake and continue to lead the business.

Headquartered in Los Angeles, Atwater is a private equity firm dedicated to investments across the media and entertainment industries.

The GP intends to work closely with EQT and the management to support Freepik's growth and expansion, primarily in the Asian market, while boosting the development of the company's proprietary content library, user experience, technology platform, and AI and tool integration capability.

EQT acquired a majority stake in Freepik from its founders and management team in May 2020. The deal gave the company an enterprise value of around €250m, equal to 21x its EBITDA, according to market sources.

The GP deployed capital from EQT Mid-Market Europe, which closed on its €1.6bn hard-cap in May 2017. The vehicle invests in companies operating in a wide range of sectors, with enterprise values of €100-300m. It targets primarily the Nordic, DACH and Benelux regions, but can also invest a portion of its capital in selected opportunities in the rest of Europe.

Company
Founded in 2010 and headquartered in Malaga, Freepik is a provider of digital visual content for the game design, social media and digital advertising segments.

The company operates under the Freepik, Flaticon and SlidesGo brands, offering a library of 10 million graphic resources, including icons, vectors, photos and templates to 32 million monthly visitors from 200 countries.

Freepik has 20 million registered users supported by a network of 450 in-house freelancer graphical designers and an external contributor base. It generated EBITDA of €12m from revenues of around €30m in 2019.

People
Atwater Capital – Vania Schlogel (founder, managing partner).

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• Topics
• Expansion
• Southern Europe
• Technology
• EQT
• Spain