Houlihan Lokey Advises Inflexion Private Equity

Houlihan Lokey is pleased to announce that Kynetec, a portfolio company of Inflexion Private Equity (Inflexion), has been acquired by Paine Schwartz Partners. Terms have not been disclosed.

Kynetec provides market research for the agriculture and animal health industries, helping companies around the world understand the dynamics of their marketplaces, turning research into business opportunities, and enabling clients to create winning strategies. Leveraging proprietary data sources and processing capabilities, the company offers customers a suite of data-driven reporting and tracking solutions as well as insight studies. Led by an experienced management team and based in Newbury, England, and St. Louis, Missouri, Kynetec has 400-plus customers in more than 80 countries.

Inflexion is a middle-market private equity firm investing in high-growth, entrepreneurial businesses with ambitious management teams and working in partnership with them to accelerate growth. The company’s flexible approach allows it to back both majority and minority investments, typically investing £10 million to £300 million of equity in each deal.

Paine Schwartz Partners is a private equity firm focused exclusively on investment opportunities in the fast-growing, dynamic global food and agribusiness sectors. The firm’s investment, operations, and finance professionals invest throughout cycles across the food and agribusiness value chain and bring a collaborative and active management approach to portfolio companies.

Houlihan Lokey served as the financial advisor to Inflexion and Kynetec and assisted in initiating, structuring, and negotiating the transaction on their behalf. This transaction further enhances Houlihan Lokey’s extensive track record in the natural resources data, analytics, and software sector with more than 40 transactions completed over the past 14 years. Recently closed deals in the sector include the sale of Aurora Energy Research to CGE Partners; the sale of Tecnon OrbiChem to Forest2Market/Fisher International Inc.; the sale of RigData from S&P Global Platts to Drillinginfo; the sale of Weather Decision Technologies to DTN; the sale of Poten & Partners to BGC; and the sale of RISI to Euromoney Institutional Investor. This transaction also highlights Houlihan Lokey’s ability to navigate challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic to deliver an outstanding result to the selling shareholders.