Private equity money found another metro fiber home this morning, as Ridgemont Equity Partners has announced a deal to acquire a majority stake in Cross River Fiber. The company’s current management, led by CEO Vincenzo Clemente, will continue to hold a substantial stake in the company, and will keep on doing what they’ve been doing — just with more resources to do it with.
Cross River has made its name building and operating specialty fiber routes in northeastern New Jersey, optimizing the latency between key data centers by leveraging the local knowledge brought to the table by its management team. The financial vertical’s hunger for low latency fiber connections gave them their initial niche to serve. The next step is to move into new markets and take advantage of opportunities in other verticals.
That takes capital to invest, and hence Ridgemont’s entrance today. They are no strangers to the capital needs of the fiber business of course, having made a similar move into Unite Private Networks out in the Midwest a few years ago. UPN has expanded quite aggressively since then of course. Ridgemont has also been an investor in past periods with Fibertech, Lightower, and Veroxity amongst others.
Financial terms of the transaction were, unsurprisingly, not provided. But CoBank and Webster Bank are supplying debt funding for the transaction and future expansion plans, while Bank Street Group advised Cross River on the transaction.
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Categories: Mergers and Acquisitions · Metro fiber
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Ridgemont owns UPN also. I’m not sure they were ever in Conterra.
You are right, I had a memory short circuit with court square — corrected.