Oak Hill Capital Partners has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Oxford Networks, a fiber-optic bandwidth infrastructure services provider, the company said.
MVP Capital LLC served as Oxford´s exclusive financial advisor in connection with this transaction, and Citizens Capital Markets, Inc. served as financial advisor to Oak Hill. Paul Hastings LLP served as legal counsel to Oxford, and Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP served as legal counsel to Oak Hill.
TD Securities (USA) LLC is acting as sole bookrunner and joint lead arranger with Citizens Bank, N.A., Pacific Western Bank and Webster Bank, N.A. for the senior secured credit facilities. The second lien facility has been directly placed.
Under the terms of the agreement, Oak Hill will acquire the company from its current private equity owners, Novacap and Bank Street Capital Partners. At the closing of the transaction, Oak Hill said it intends to combine the operations of Oxford with FirstLight Fiber.
FirstLight is a Northeastern US fiber provider for which Oak Hill announced an agreement to acquire from its current owner, Riverside Partners, in March 2016, subject to prior regulatory approval. Novacap, BSCP and Riverside are expected to continue as minority partners alongside Oak Hill in the holding company for FirstLight and Oxford.
Upon completion of the Oxford and FirstLight transactions, the companies will operate in aggregate approximately 4,800 route miles of high-capacity fiber optic network and ten data centers, the majority of which are SOC 2-certified, in markets across New York and New England.
Oxford Networks is a technology solutions provider with a fiber optic network backbone spanning from Bangor to Boston, and high-security data centers located in Maine and New Hampshire. The company´s services and products include data center services, managed IT services, voice, Internet, and carrier services.
FirstLight Fiber provides fiber-optic data, Internet, data center and voice services to enterprise and carrier customers in New York and Northern New England with connectivity to Canada connecting 2,000 locations in service with an additional 14,000 locations serviceable by its 260,000 fiber mile network.
Oak Hill Capital Partners is a private equity firm managing funds with more than USD9.0 billion of initial capital commitments since inception from entrepreneurs, endowments, foundations, corporations, pension funds and global financial institutions.
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