Five Big Investments Made by Silver Lake Prior to Jio Platforms

Silver Lake, an American investment management company founded in 1999 focused on leveraged buyout and growth capital investments in technology-enabled and related industries, has today announced an investment of Rs 5,655.75 crore into Jio Platforms. This investment has lead to Jio Platforms holding an equity value of Rs 4.90 lakh crore and an enterprise value of Rs 5.15 lakh crore.

“Jio Platforms is one of the world’s most remarkable companies, led by an incredibly strong and entrepreneurial management team who are driving and actualizing a courageous vision. They have brought extraordinary engineering capabilities to bear on bringing the power of low-cost digital services to a mass consumer and small businesses population. The market potential they are addressing is enormous, and we are honored and pleased to have been invited to partner with Mukesh Ambani and the team at Reliance and Jio to help further the Jio mission,” said Egon Durban, Silver Lake Co-CEO and managing partner, on the development.

Before Jio Platforms, Silver Lake has made multi-billion dollar investments into several notable technology companies. Basically, the firm invests in fully-fledged technology organizations the way venture capitalists invest in start-ups. The company, since its inception, has made investments in over 40 companies through private investment in public equity (PIPE), leveraged buyout transactions, and minority growth investments.

Five Notable Investments made by Silver Lake

Twitter: In March 2020, Twitter announced that Silver Lake was investing $1 billion into its platforms. As part of the investment and the Cooperation Agreement, Egon Durban, co-CEO and managing partner of Silver Lake, and Jesse Cohn, partner at Elliott, were appointed to the Twitter Board of Directors.

Dell: In the year 2013, Dell was acquired by Michael Dell, Dell's founder and CEO, and Silver Lake Partners at a transaction valued at approximately $24.9 billion at the time. Dell stockholders received $13.75 in cash for each share of Dell common stock, plus payment of a special cash dividend of $0.13 per share to stockholders.

EMC: In 2015, Dell, together with its owners, Michael Dell, founder, chairman and chief executive officer of Dell, MSD Partners and Silver Lake acquired EMC Corporation for $33.15 per share, while maintaining VMware as a publicly-traded company.

Skype: In 2009 65 percent of Skype was acquired from eBay for $1.9 billion, valuing the business at $2.75 billion. The deal was made by Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.

Avaya: An American multinational technology company, which was formerly a unit of Lucent, was acquired by TGP Capital and Silver Lake at an $8.2 billion leveraged buyout.