Zayo Group, a Boulder-based bandwidth provider, announced this week that it closed on a $14.3 billion deal with Digital Colony Partners and EQT Infrastructure IV Fund, making it a private company once again.
The company was founded in 2007 and went public in 2014, charging $19 a share. However, this acquisition was approved last July and stockholders were paid $35 a share as a result. Now Zayo is a privately held company and its common stock is no longer being traded on the New York Stock Exchange.
“We are excited to launch this new chapter of Zayo, as a private company under the ownership of a consortium led by two highly experienced infrastructure investors who have a deep understanding of our business and bring significant value to Zayo,” CEO Dan Caruso said in a statement. “This is a great outcome for the company, its former shareholders, our customers and employees, and our new ownership group. As a private company, we will have greater flexibility to pursue our long-term strategy and leverage our fiber to fuel global innovation for our customers.”
Zayo claims to have more than 130,000 miles of fiber optic cable running to thousands of buildings and data centers throughout North America and Europe, providing dark fiber, private data networks, wavelengths, Ethernet, dedicated Internet access and colocation services. Its customers vary from local organizations like Denver Public Schools to tech giants like Google, according to the Denver Post.
Caruso told the Denver Business Journal that, because Zayo is one of the only remaining large-scale fiber providers with infrastructure networking between the United States, Canada and Europe, the company received several offers from investors before Digital Colony and EQT. He thinks the switch to private will allow the company to grow even more.
“In our industry, fiber is very important,” Caruso said. “Zayo is the only independent fiber provider with a significant scale. We’re uniquely positioned to be an infrastructure provider with a significant fiber network, and we expect to go on a steady growth trajectory through growing the business organically and also start to do acquisitions at the pace we used to do a few years back.”
The company employs more than 3,000 people and about 1,100 of them work in its Denver and Boulder offices. Zayo representatives told Built In that the company plans to increase its headcount by about 10 percent this year.
