Park 56

As the holidays approach, we at Park 56 would like to thank our clients and partners for the great cooperation in 2024 and for the fantastic results we achieved together. We wish everyone a wonderful festive season and a prosperous 2025! Carsten Buhr Christopher Radloff George Johnson Jason Hoyt, PhD Peter Binfield Julia Neumann Victoria Engelhardt Chris Jones Anca Babor Stefan Fraedrich Iris Herzberg Harm van Maanen Tracey Armstrong Emily Sheahan Saskia Wools Arthur Weijers Erik Fontein Katharine Szamuely

A few weeks ago, we shared that the Dutch M&A community nominated the De Gruyter Brill merger for Best Dutch Mid-Cap Deal of the Year 2024, along with four other transactions. Last night, in a ceremony in the beautiful Beurs van Berlage in downtown Amsterdam, we won the award – the De Gruyter Brill deal is now officially the Best Dutch Mid-Cap Deal of the Year 2024! The jury praised the transaction's clear strategic rationale, the flawless deal execution including the delisting of the Brill shares, and the creative way cross-border complexities and financing were approached – a tribute to the hard work by all parties involved! Carsten Buhr, Christopher Radloff, Pablo Dominguez Andersen, Stibbe, Bjorn van der Klip, Marc Habermehl, Marjolein Coppes, Erik Fontein, PwC, Alexander Paffenholz, Markus Oeken, EY, Patrick Gageur, Paul Trettin, WilmerHale, Dr. Oliver Fleischmann, Rudolf Haesen, LSP Lindemann Schwennicke & Partner PartGmbB

Many congratulations to the winner, Knowledge Gate Group, and runner-ups, Prof. Valmed® - validated medical information GmbH and Clear Skies 👏🏻 #VesaliusInnovationAward

Information Age Publishing is a social science publisher of books and journals based in North Carolina, with particular strengths in the areas of Education, Management and Psychology. Last Friday, IAP was acquired by Emerald Publishing, a leading academic publisher headquartered in the UK with a strong social science portfolio. The acquisition allows Emerald to enhance its author footprint in North America and will provide a good home to IAP’s high-quality academic resources and its vibrant community of series editors and authors. For us at Park 56, it has been an honour to support Founder and CEO George Johnson with the transaction, and we would like to thank him for the trust in us. We are also very pleased to congratulate the Emerald team (with Vicky Williams, Simon Cox FCA CIPD, Amy Jones, Tony Roche, Emma Tregenza, Thomas Bennett, Anthony Laverick and many others) as well as their sponsor Cambridge Information Group on this great enhancement of the portfolio! It has been a real pleasure to work on this transaction with everyone.

The 2024 "Dotcoms to Watch" session at the Academic Publishing in Europe (#APE24) conference earlier this year, hosted by Park 56's Martijn Roelandse on behalf of STM featured innovative startups tackling key challenges in scholarly publishing. Presenters from Clear Skies, Global Campus, Ludenso, Signals, and Visual Abstract addressed topics such as research integrity, combating papermills, peer reviewer identification and matchmaking, and graphical abstracts. Their extended presentations are now available in IOS Press' Information Services & Use. Many thanks to Berlin Institute for Scholarly Publishing (BISP) for organising the event and to Astrid Engelen-Visser for spearheading the publication of the forthcoming issue. Enjoy exploring them! https://lnkd.in/edEu-wPV

Last week the Dutch M&A Awards nominated the De Gruyter Brill merger for Best Dutch Mid-Cap Deal of the Year 2024. A tribute to all of the hard work by all parties involved and a great recognition of this landmark transaction! Park 56 acted as financial advisor to the De Gruyter Board and shareholders. https://lnkd.in/e6Qgdwa5

A few weeks ago, Paul Peters invited me onto his "Midnight at the Casablanca" podcast. I hesitated. What could I tell that would be of relevance to listeners of Paul's podcast? Yes, here at Park 56 my colleagues, Koen Gulen and Martijn Roelandse and I have done deals in the academic space, but also in other areas and as a trusted advisor to companies in the media & technology industry, I actually prefer to operate discreetly and play a role behind the scenes. This allows clients to take me into their confidence and being most effective for them. Banging the drums in mergers and acquisitions conversations is not productive; these conversations are not about us, but about the future of the company and its staff, so they need to be approached with great care and professionalism and with an open eye for the interests of all stakeholders. Paul assured me that his audience would be thrilled to hear more about M&A in general, and the recent history of Springer specifically, from someone who, at the time, sat at the table and was involved in the decision-making process — how Britney Spears, unexpectedly, set the consolidation in academic publishing in motion, the merger between Kluwer Academic Publishing and BertelsmannSpringer now 20 years ago, the lukewarm, initial, response from the market to the acquisition of BioMedCentral in 2008 which turned out to be a massive success, the different rounds of private equity and the impact of the credit crisis, up to the merger with Macmillan Science & Education leading to Springer Nature in 2015 and how we dealt with cultural differences. I am not sure if anyone will really be "thrilled", but I hope there may be a few new insights and some useful lessons for you as listener. Thanks for having me on the show, Paul!

Last month, anvajo, a Dresden-based technology company, raised EUR 7.5m in financing from a strategic investor, alongside EUR 2.0m from existing investors, enabling the business to further develop and commercialize “the world's most compact universal platform for fluid analysis”, the fluidlab. After having successfully supported the anvajo team in the 2022 Series A process, we were very pleased that the company's founder, Stefan Fraedrich, asked us at Park 56 to advise on this process as well. Based on anvajo's major achievements to date (which combine miniaturized spectrometry with a digital microscope and a lot of AI), we are confident that anvajo’s solutions for laboratory diagnostics will bring accessible, user-centric lab testing to everyone, everywhere. We wish the team a lot of success!

We congratulate the finalists of the 2024 #VesaliusInnovationAward - Clear Skies, Prophy, Signals, Prof. Valmed® - validated medical information GmbH, and Knowledge Gate Group - and, as a proud sponsor, we hope the award helps them to realise their next bold move.

See you in Frankfurt.