Silver Lake, American private equity firm, has said it will buy about 1.15% stake in Jio Platforms, weeks after Facebook invested $5.7 billion in the digital arm of Mukesh Ambani-owned Reliance Industries Ltd.
Silver Lake announced on Monday it will be investing Rs 5,655.75 crore (about $746.8 million) in Jio Platforms, giving it a valuation of $65 billion, a 12.5% premium to the value implied by the Facebook investment.
Here are key things to know about Silver Lake:
* Silver Lake, which has approximately $40 billion in combined assets and committed capital, was launched in 1999 as a specialist firm focused on technology company investments.
* The portfolio of investments of the Menlo Park-headquartered PE firm collectively generates revenues of more than $204 billion annually.
* For Silver Lake, this is the second investment in an Indian firm. It had invested in Bengaluru-based commodity trading and risk management software firm Eka Software in 2013.
* It has invested in dozens of tech firms over the years. They include video game engine maker Unity, Skype, consultancy firm Gartner, Alibaba’s Ant Financial, and Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi Chuxing, several of it in recent weeks.
* Its portfolio also includes Airbnb, Motorola Solutions and City Football Group.
* Silver Lake sold Skype to Microsoft for $8.5 billion in 2011 in one of the most successful private equity exits in history.
* Silver Lake has invested in Expedia, Twitter (in which it invested $1 billion), Airbnb, Waymo, the self-driving unit of
Alphabet Inc, and ServiceMax this year. ServiceMax is a cloud-based provider of software used in inventory and workforce management.