Celtx Announces its Acquisition by Backlight, a New Global Media Technology Company

St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador (April 12, 2022) - Celtx, the developer of the all-in-one workflow solution for scriptwriting, film project planning and management, and video game production, today announced it has been acquired by Backlight, a global media technology holding company backed by PSG. Earlier today, Backlight announced the acquisition of Celtx and four other visionary media technology companies, all serving media, entertainment and video-forward customers with cloud-based solutions that help improve every step of the media content lifecycle.

“Celtx is driven to help storytellers create some of the most engaging entertainment, video and gaming experiences possible,” stated Celtx co-founder and CEO Mark Kennedy. “We believe with Backlight's industry leadership, expertise, and resources behind us, Celtx will be able to further invest, innovate, and deliver valuable cloud-based story development tools for our customers.”

Best known as a leader in cloud-based ideation and screenwriting, Celtx provides a suite of development and pre-production planning software solutions, including scriptwriting, storyboarding, shot-planning, budgeting and production management tools, to studios, production houses, in-house production teams, agencies, film schools, and other independent media and entertainment companies. The company delivers an integrated production planning system, where otherwise the use of disparate point solutions and manual processes results in inefficiencies that cost video or game producers time and money. In addition, Celtx provides unique story development tools purpose-built for the gaming and virtual reality entertainment markets.

“We believe Celtx and their collaborative tool is a key part of our writing pipeline and has been a strong partner supporting our development needs,” says Zac Litton, CTO for Telltale, a leading narrative game development studio and publisher.

“Celtx represents one of the very first steps for creatives as they adapt their ideas and inspirations into a visual medium and it is the standard for cloud-based story development used by millions worldwide,” said Backlight CEO Ben Kaplan. “Mark and team have built a brand that is beloved by many writers, filmmakers, and creative teams and is a strong addition to Backlight's portfolio approach for dramatically improving the media and entertainment value chain.”

Celtx is joined by four other fast growing media tech companies that were also acquired by Backlight and received strategic growth investment from PSG. All five companies are operating as business units as part of Backlight.

Backlight Business Units:

• ftrack is the creator of ftrack Studio, cineSync, and ftrack Review, the Emmy and Academy Award-winning production tracking, interactive media review, and team collaboration platforms for the creative industries. ftrack's solutions are designed for producers, supervisors, artists, and pipeline developers to collaborate with anyone, anywhere.
• Iconik is a cloud-native, SaaS media management solution that is designed for users to share files from any storage, collaborate on video, and enrich media with AI for high searchability—all with great ease and the ability to scale to serve solo creators or large global teams.
• Wildmoka is a leading platform for the creation of live and near-live content in Sports, News and Entertainment. Its cloud-native Digital Media Factory aims to empower broadcasters and rights owners to produce and deliver content from any source, to any destination, in any format, at speed and at scale.
• Zype provides infrastructure for digital video, with a cloud-based platform to manage and distribute enterprise-grade video across the web, mobile, TV, and social media. Offering both developer-friendly tools such as customizable APIs as well as turnkey solutions for OTT apps and linear/FAST channels, Zype's SaaS solutions enable video creators or distributors to quickly build, launch and manage superior video products at scale.

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