Houlihan Lokey Advises AgriBriefing

Houlihan Lokey is pleased to announce that AgriBriefing, a Horizon Capital investment, has been acquired by Mintec, a portfolio company of Five Arrows and Synova, who hold a significant minority investment.

AgriBriefing is the world's most trusted source of agribusiness intelligence and the leading global provider of agricultural commodity pricing benchmarks, analytics, and market data. Headquartered in London, with offices in the US and France, the company comprises multiple global brands with a combined heritage of more than 200 years specialising in agri-food supply chains through its products and proprietary data. Market leaders like Urner Barry, the original agri-food PRA founded in 1857 and the leading provider of North American protein price benchmarks across 4,100 proprietary prices, enable the protein industry to conduct business more effectively.

The combination of AgriBriefing and Mintec establishes a global market leader focused on the agri-food and FMCG end markets, offering a unique portfolio of feed-to-food commodity prices, forecasts, cost-modeling tools, and fundamental market data, serving more than 5,000 customers in 50 countries. Through its diverse brands, the combined group will have a strengthened financial profile, product offering, and customer base along with:

• The largest portfolio of agri-food commodity data assets spanning 650 commodities across 21,000 time series, including benchmarks globally.
• A growing footprint in North America, Europe, and Asia, with the US being its largest and fastest-growing market.
• An increased capacity to deliver market insight, price intelligence, and analytics across supply chains for procurement, risk management, and financial services.

Horizon Capital is a private equity investor specialising in technology and business services. The firm was established by senior investment professionals who identified a significant market opportunity to invest in businesses in these sectors valued up to £50 million. The partnership prides itself on its approach to helping business owners and managers realise their ambitions. Buy and-build is at the heart of every Horizon Capital investment and the firm is a market leader in supporting companies pursuing this strategy.

Mintec enables the world's largest food and manufacturing brands to implement more efficient and sustainable procurement strategies; all delivered through its innovative SaaS platform, Mintec Analytics, which delivers proprietary market prices and analysis for more than 16,000 food ingredients and associated materials. Its data and solutions empower customers to better understand prices, analyse their spending, and negotiate confidently with suppliers.

Five Arrows is the alternative assets arm of Rothschild & Co and has €23 billion of assets under management with offices in Paris, London, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Luxembourg. With more than €9 billion of assets under management, the corporate private equity business of Five Arrows is focused on backing companies with highly defensible market positions; strong management teams; business models with high visibility of organic unit volume growth and strong unit economics; and multiple operational levers that can be used to unlock latent value. Sectors are limited to data and software, technology-enabled business services, and healthcare.

Houlihan Lokey served as the exclusive financial advisor to Horizon Capital and AgriBriefing and assisted in initiating, structuring, and negotiating the transaction on their behalf. This transaction further enhances Houlihan Lokey’s Data & Analytics team's extensive track record in the natural resources and commodities data, analytics, and software sector with more than 45 transactions completed over the past 15 years. Recently closed transactions in the sector include the sale of Mintec to Five Arrows, the sale of Kynetec to Paine Schwartz Partners, the sale of StormGeo to AlfaLaval, the sale of Aurora Energy Research to CGE Partners, the sale of Tecnon OrbiChem to Forest2Market/Fisher International Inc., and the sale of RigData from S&P Global Platts to Drillinginfo.