Celtra Technologies inks investment deal from Symphony Technology Group

Creative Automation company Celtra Technologies has signed a definitive agreement to receive a majority investment from Symphony Technology Group (STG), a private equity partner to market-leading companies in data, software, and analytics. The STG backing will help Celtra grow in partnership with Celtra's founders and management team. Celtra is expected to generate over US$50M in revenue in 2021, growing by over 25% year over year. STG's investment comes on the back of Celtra winning more than 40 new enterprise customers in the recent year, and the expansion of Celtra's Creative Automation solutions from media businesses into brands and agencies.

The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2021. Following the investment, Miha Mikek will remain as chief executive officer, alongside co-founder and chief product officer, Matevz Klanjsek, and co-founder and chief financial officer, Maja Mikek. Softbank Capital, an early investor in Celtra, will remain invested in the company. In addition to Softbank Capital, Celtra was backed by leading investors including Fairhaven Capital, GrandBanks Capital, WPP, and Unilever Ventures.

“Celtra’s vision was always to empower better creativity in the most scalable way. Over the last ten years, we've grown Celtra by providing the most advanced creative platform for leading media and adtech companies. Now, the creative industry is on the cusp of a revolution: just as programmatic transformed media and ad buying, we will now see the same wave take over creative execution and workflows in the next three years,” said Miha Mikek, Celtra founder and CEO. “We are thrilled to partner with STG to bring our vision to life and grow the company to the next stage.”

Celtra believes scaling marketing creativity is transformative - for businesses and culture. Today, Celtra makes enterprise software solutions that help businesses stay creative at scale and transform creative work across people, data, and media. What started as a creative technology for media companies is now also a solution for brands and agencies looking to drive creative excellence and automate the production of omnichannel creative for an increasingly complex digital landscape.

"Celtra is a superb product organisation, building creative automation solutions that enable great ad creative to have omnichannel impact at scale but without sacrificing quality or brand governance concerns. They have tremendous customer successes and terrific growth potential," said J.T. Treadwell, managing director, STG. "We believe that they are helping customers conquer the challenge of scaling creative communication and production to empower addressability of content, while simultaneously raising the quality of the result."