May River Capital has acquired Hunt Valve, a maker of valves and components used in severe duty applications in the fluid power industry.
Hunt Valve’s customers operate in the primary metals (steel, aluminum), energy (nuclear, hydro, oil & gas), and process chemicals sectors. The company’s products are also used in US Navy nuclear-powered vessels, including all submarines and aircraft carriers. Hunt Valve is led by President and CEO Brad Sterner who joined the company in November 2015. The company is headquartered southwest of Youngstown in Salem, OH (www.huntvalve.com).
“We could not be more pleased to have Hunt Valve as our initial investment,” said Mr. Sterner, who invested alongside May River in the buy of the company. “The company’s management team has done an outstanding job of building a great business serving a variety of industrial blue chip customers, along with naval boat contractors Electric Boat and Huntington Ingalls Industries, and the US Navy.”
May River Capital invests from $10 million to $40 million of equity in companies with revenues of at least $15 million and EBITDA between $3 million and $15 million. Sectors of interest include manufacturing, commercial services, supply chain and value-added distribution. Control investments are preferred but the firm will consider significant minority investments. May River was founded in January 2012 by Chip Grace, Dan Barlow and Steve Griesemer and is headquartered in Chicago (www.mayrivercapital.com).
May River will use the company as a platform to build a global fluidics engineering platform company. “Hunt Valve is our first step toward building a platform of engineered products, components and service businesses to solve the toughest fluidics application challenges for customers in the metals, energy, process, transportation, government and infrastructure market sectors,” said Mr. Grace.
Also co-investing on this transaction with May River was Bratenahl Capital (www.bratenahlcapital.com), a Cleveland-based family office led by Michael Howley, Managing Partner. Maranon Capital (www.maranoncapital.com) provided mezzanine debt and an also made an equity co-investment. The structured finance group of Fifth Third Bank (www.53.com) provided senior debt financing.
© 2016 Private Equity Professional • 2-8-16
