ICG’s sale of Kee Safety to Inflexion and 65 Equity proves that a high-quality business, polished by successive private equity owners, will always command a good valuation, whatever the market conditions. Nicholas Neveling reports.
M&A markets have not been easy to navigate over the past two years, particularly for private equity firms looking to secure exits. Total European exit value almost halved in the three years between 2021 and 2024, according to law firm White & Case. While exit value has shown a year-on-year improvement through the first half of 2025, tariff dislocation and sticky inflation still make an uptick in the M&A backdrop a tricky one to call.
Despite these macroeconomic headwinds and complexities, ICG’s sale of Kee Safety to Inflexion and 65 Equity Partners, completed at the end of June 2025, clearly demonstrates that deals can be executed in choppy markets.
Steps to success
Kee Safety has been a fixture on private equity wishlists for more than 20 years. Established in 1934 in Cradley Heath in the Midlands, it has become a global leader in the provision of fall protection, safe-access solutions, ground safety, and safety equipment associated with working at height.
Barclays Ventures first backed the business in 2006, in a management buyout that valued Kee at what now seems a paltry £26m. The business has been in private equity hands ever since. In 2011 LDC acquired the company from Barclays Ventures for an undisclosed sum, selling to Dunedin in 2013 in a deal that valued Kee at £90m. In October 2017, Dunedin sold it to Investcorp in a £280m deal; Investcorp then sold to management and ICG in April 2021. The recent transaction with Inflexion and 65 Equity implies a £1.3bn valuation for the company.
Kee hits its budgets with military precision. PE firms are obviously going to be highly attracted to it
“Kee Safety is a well-oiled machine that hits its monthly and annual budgets with military precision. You can almost set your watch by it and private equity firms are obviously going to be highly attracted to a business with that kind of earnings predictability,” says Grant Thornton
partner Alex Hyde, who leads the firm’s Birmingham transaction advisory services team and has worked with Kee Safety for around 15 years. That includes the ICG deal with Inflexion and 65 Equity, where Grant Thornton provided financial and tax vendor due diligence.
Kee Safety’s high-quality earnings and strong position in the global fall-protection and safe-access market – which is worth an estimated $14bn and growing at more than 6% per annum – have ensured close tracking by potential private equity bidders, who know the business well and are prepared to deal as soon as its current backers are ready to exit.
“Inflexion had been tracking Kee Safety for over a decade, recognising it as a high-quality consolidator within industrial safety, one of our focus sub-sectors,” says Inflexion partner and head of industrials Richard Booth. “This built a strong relationship with the founder and chair, Chris Milburn, over the long term.”
Strong relationships enabled us to agree a compelling offer outside a formal process
Buy-and-build play
Kee Safety’s ability to grow and expand its geographic reach through acquisition is another big tick for private equity investors.
The business has made 54 acquisitions since that LDC investment almost 15 years ago. It has grown its sale footprint into 60 countries, spanning the US, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. What has differentiated Kee’s buy-and-build proposition has been its track record of integrating new acquisitions and the development of an internal M&A capability to drive this. The company’s acquisition strategy has been well-resourced and strategic, rather than trying to fill a bucket with opportunistic bolt-ons that might not work together under one umbrella.
“We were attracted by Kee Safety’s market-leading position in what is a large, fragmented market,” says Booth. “The business benefits from a proven M&A track record and a highly experienced chair and management team.”
Kee has been very deliberate in its deal targeting, seeking out deals that will either expand its product offering into new adjacent markets, such as ground safety, or enhance its distribution capability. The company has, for example, actively invested in installation companies. This ensures that when installers are on a job, they are using Kee Safety products rather than those provided by other suppliers, so the business supplements the revenue from the installation work with extra product-distribution volume.
“The business knows exactly what it is looking for when making acquisitions and it has sharpened its capability to be able to do acquisition due diligence internally. The company has developed an internal M&A machine. It knows what it is going to pay, what the synergies are and how the deal target will be integrated. Its track record of successful integration post-deal is exceptional,” Hyde says.
Till debt do us part?
HSBC and Lloyds Bank jointly led a £600m debt package on the Kee Safety deal for Inflexion and 65 Equity Partners, who then syndicated the loan to several other lenders.
The nature of this package, with banks and private credit funds working together to land deals rather than competing head-to-head, shows how the competitive dynamic in the acquisition finance market has evolved. Despite still-elevated interest rates and macroeconomic risk, banks and private credit funds are replete with cash and eager to put it to work. And they now see partnerships as a key method for achieving this.
For the Kee deal, according to Bloomberg, a portion of the cash for Lloyds’ contribution to the financing package was supplied by Oaktree Capital, as part of a joint venture arrangement with the UK bank.
The Lloyds and Oaktree partnership came together in the summer of 2024. Oaktree provides tickets of up £175m, alongside capital from Lloyds, to finance buyouts and portfolio company refinancings.
Other similar alliances include Barclays teaming up with AGL to provide private loans to its clients, with backing from the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and Wells Fargo partnering with Centerbridge. Not a fund, but Oak Hill’s credit investment unit also joined forces with OneIM to provide loans to European borrowers.
Although such tie-ups are still relatively nascent, the relationship could be beneficial for both parties.
Debt funds – which are eager to deploy, but often lack the corporate relationships through which deals arrive – can offer banks debt fund capital in exchange for a boost to their deal pipelines.
Structural plans
In addition to Kee Safety’s earnings quality and proven buy-and-build capability, the structuring and execution of the transaction helped get it over the line.
The deal was not a rigidly controlled buyout, so all parties had the space to put together a bespoke structure that facilitated the sharing of upside and mitigation against downside risk.
ICG has retained a stake in the company, aligning its interests with those of the incoming investors and offering ongoing upside exposure to a high-quality asset. Management also retained a stake, deepening alignment between funders and the business.
Inflexion, meanwhile, took a minority stake, investing via its third minority stake-focused Partnership Capital Fund. This provided room for ICG and the management team to retain their stakes, and to bring in 65 Equity Partners, a fund backed by Singaporean sovereign wealth fund Temasek, to match Inflexion’s equal minority stake.
“The relationship with the Kee management team, combined with Inflexion’s flexible Partnership Capital minority offering, enabled us to work with 65 Equity to agree a compelling offer for the business outside a formal process,” says Booth. “65 Equity are like-minded growth investors and well aligned on the Kee growth strategy.”
Kee’s experience of going through five previous buyouts ensured that deal execution was seamless – a key lever for getting deals over the line in complex M&A market cycles. The team simply knew what it had to do.
“Kee has been doing deals for 15 years now, so they are very pragmatic when it comes to working with advisers. They have worked with the same pool of trusted advisers through this run, which fosters a positive spirit between advisers working on deals, because people know each other,” Hyde says. “The advisers all understand the business and understand that the management team places a high importance on delivery – there is no room for slippage, no excuse for prevarication. Everybody can hit the ground running from day one and knows what to focus on.”
Moving on up
The access-control and fall-protection industry remains highly fragmented, with room for ongoing consolidation. Growth projections are also positive, especially in emerging markets, where regulation and health and safety for workers working at height is aligning with the frameworks in developed economies, supporting sustained demand for safety equipment installation. “We are working with the management team to scale the business primarily through organic growth and global M&A in a market that is highly fragmented,” says Booth.
Dream teams
When private equity firms assess a prospective deal target, the quality of the management team is always a key focus area. In the case of Kee Safety, the management team is one of the company’s strongest selling points.
Two names that especially stand out – both of whom have been with Kee for more than 15 years – are Chris Milburn and Neil Russ.
Chairman Milburn, who was previously chief executive, has been a key figure throughout Kee’s private equity journey. Described as “really driven” and an “exceptional leader”, he has worked with all Kee’s private equity backers over the years and is regularly asked to offer his insight to other Inflexion portfolio companies.
Group FD Russ, who took over from John Ford in 2011, previously served as Kee’s European financial controller. He plays a critical role in M&A execution for the company.
