Visual effects company DNEG has announced plans to go public.
The company, which has studios in England, Canada, the United States and India, is merging with Sports Ventures Acquisition Corp., a publicly-traded special purpose acquisition company, that will result in DNEG becoming a public company.
The new company, which will retain the name DNEG, will be led by Namit Malhotra, DNEG’s chairman and CEO and is thought to have a combined worth of $1.7 billion.
DNEG has worked on the likes of Dune, Inception, Avengers: Endgame and Mission Impossible: Fallout, has received six Academy Awards for visual effects.
In 2019, DNEG announced plans to launch on the London Stock Exchange but that failed to happen.
“This transaction creates long-term stability for our teams while also allowing us to exploit the tailwinds in the media and entertainment industry and the explosion in demand for content, which are huge growth drivers for our company,” said Malhotra.
“I am excited to take the best of everything that makes our company so successful and to use it as a platform on which to build and innovate further. Leveraging our leading technology stack, DNEG is already making great strides into new growth areas such as gaming and content creation partnerships, and we are perfectly positioned to exploit massive new opportunities in the Metaverse and the convergence of all forms of content creation.”
The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2022.
