Hunt Valve (www.huntvalve.com), a fluid power engineering company specialising in severe duty valves and components, has been acquired by May River Capital as part of the private equity firm’s broader strategy 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,” says May River Capital Partner Chip Grace.
“We are excited to partner with Brad Sterner as our platform leader and President/CEO of Hunt Valve,” adds May River Capital Partner Steve Griesemer. “Brad is a lean-process, results-oriented operating executive with a history of transforming engineering businesses in ways that deliver outstanding results.”
“We could not be more pleased to have Hunt Valve as our initial investment,” says Sterner. “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. It is a privilege to have the opportunity to work with the Hunt team, its customers and suppliers to accelerate the company’s profitable growth.”
May River Capital partnered on the investment with Bratenahl Capital, a Cleveland-based family office, other family offices as co-investors, and Maranon Capital, who provided mezzanine debt and an equity co-investment. Fifth Third Structured Finance Group provided senior debt financing.
