Carlyle and Epic snap up visual effects company powering Billie Eilish shows

Billy Eilish performs at the Grammy Awards

Credit: Getty

US private equity firm Carlyle Group has scooped up a British visual effects company that builds immersive sets for film studios and musicians including Katy Perry, Billie Eilish and Dave.

The $246bn buyout fund has acquired Disguise, The Telegraph can reveal, a London-headquartered company that designs LED backdrops for live shows and film sets. The deal also sees Epic Games, the company behind the battle royale game Fortnite, take a minority stake in the business.

The technology is being used to phase out traditional green screens from film studios. Walls with LEDs are used to cover the background of film studios as live, realistic images and sets are broadcast from them.

Increasingly, studios are using these screens, combined with 3D imaging software, to capture virtual backdrops, rather than waiting for post production.

Disguise helps design and power these film sets. Its technology can be used for immersive experiences, in a process it calls “extended reality”, for live-streaming and video games. Last year, it also powered a virtual concert for Halloween within the video game Fortnite. 

Its  technology can be built into stages for live music performances. The company was known for working on live shows with U2 and more recently for performances such as rapper Dave’s Brits broadcast and Katy Perry on American Idol.

Carlyle buys Disguise from its previous owner, Livingbridge, as part of its £1.2bn European Technology Partners fund, under managing director Michael Wand, with a view to accelerate its growth. Financial terms of the deal were not immediately disclosed.

The company said it had seen booming demand for virtual production, even as live concerts were cancelled due to the pandemic.

Fernando Kufer, Disguise chief executive, said: “When the pandemic set in, we focused all our efforts on virtual production and extended reality to capture the market opportunity created by the disruption in traditional content production methods due to Covid. The partnership with Epic Games really propelled the business.

“What we are seeing is a rapid expansion of extended reality outside of film production and VFX, with corporate customers, video games, broadcasters, such as the US Open, education, immersive experiences and live streams.”

Disguise said it expects to turnover £40m in 2021.

It is just the latest visual effects company snapped up by Carlyle, which previously did deals with studios The Mill and The Foundry. 

It also represents another UK deal for Epic, the US video games company backed by China’s Tencent. Epic develops the Unreal video game engine, which can be combined with video effects technology from Disguise. This week, Epic disclosed it had snapped up UK games studio Mediatonic.