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With its 1st acquisition, Pipe expands into media and entertainment

Nancy Dahlberg
Nancy Dahlberg
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Just nine months after its $250 million funding round, Pipe, the creator of the world’s first trading platform for recurring revenues, today announced that it has acquired London-based Purely Capital, a media and entertainment financing company. Terms of the deal were not announced.

At the same time, the Miami-based fintech company is launching a new Media & Entertainment division on the platform. The new division will help producers, rights owners, and distributors drive immediate up-front revenue from their long-term licensing contracts from investment-grade streaming services and broadcasters, including Amazon, Netflix and Disney.

“This acquisition is another big step to expand across industries and giving access to financing to all companies with some level of predictability in their revenue,” said Harry Hurst, CEO and co-founder of Pipe. “By acquiring Purely and forming a new division called Pipe Entertainment, we’ve brought on some amazing industry expertise and made the Pipe platform available to creators, producers, and rights holders in both the US and Europe.”

Media streaming is exploding right now, especially since the start of the pandemic, but the producers of that media often wait years as they get paid slowly over the course of a licensing agreement. That makes it very difficult to fund the next project and move on to the next thing, Hurst explained in an email. By Piping that licensed revenue (in the form of long-dated contracts), producers and rights holders can now get up-front capital in days and get back to what they do best, he said.

Founded in 2019 and launched in 2020, Pipe now serves a variety of businesses such as SaaS, D2C subscriptions, media companies, insurance, healthcare, VCs, and many more verticals with its platform. “We will continue to build and expand into more verticals and make Pipe the obvious alternative financing option for anyone with recurring revenue,” said Hurst, who signaled more acquisitions will likely be coming.

At the time of the funding announcement last May, the UK-born Hurst said a goal was expanding internationally, and one of its biggest achievements now has expanding into the UK market. “Being able to provide growth capital to founders back home in the UK has been a huge personal accomplishment for me.”

Pipe has raised a total of $316 million in venture capital, and after its $250 million raise in May it was valued at $2 billion. Pipe made over $1.2 billion in non-dilutive funding available to companies between the two markets. “Our global, remote-first team has grown to over 80 plumbers, as we call them today,” said Hurst, who moved to Miami in the fall of 2020.

 “We continue to double down on the Miami ecosystem and are looking forward to hosting our next company off-site in March.”

Follow Nancy Dahlberg on Twitter and email her at [email protected]

Nancy Dahlberg
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