North Sixth Group Bags Round Valued At $50M To Write New Page In 'Private Equity Playbook'

North Sixth Group, a family office operating company with interests in investments across media, marketing, technology, sports and entertainment, announced the closure Monday of a strategic equity investment led by growth equity, institutional investors and family offices.

As part of the development, Benzinga chatted with Matt Rizzetta, the chairman of NSG.

Context: Rizzetta founded North 6th Agency, a public relations agency named after the street to which his grandparents immigrated from southern Italy.

After nearly a decade of building relationships with entrepreneurs, as well as infrastructures around finance, sales, back office and recruiting activities, Rizzetta said he sought new opportunities.

He went on to structure N6A under a holding company — North Sixth Group or NSG — that would invest in deals sourced through existing networks.

“When we first started, it was really all barter where we were lending resources that we had access to, in exchange for equity to help grow the companies we were investing in,” he said.

“The first investment we made, ironically, was an Italian football club,” Ascoli FC, a Serie B team that won against Cosenza Calcio over the weekend.

Vision: “The vision is to build a next-generation private equity company with a Berkshire Hathaway Inc (NYSE: BRK-B) (NYSE: BRK-A) type model that has a diversified portfolio and with three core arms contributing to each investment.”

Those three contributing arms are as follows:

• Accelerator: Strategic growth services offered through NSG-owned companies and advisory networks, including PR, marketing, finance, admin, sales and strategy/advisory.
• Technology: In-house technology and IP with a focus on Metaverse and Web3.
• Capital: Capital markets, private equity and investment services to capitalize on deal flow access.

“I did not want to waste time with businesses I was not passionate about or founders and entrepreneurs I did not get excited about. The common thread in all of the investments we were making was that business units had to be focused on passion, purpose, and progress.”

At present, the firm has eight assets under the NSG umbrella.

Evolution: Given the success of investments, NSG naturally had asset allocators interested.

“A lot of the prospective companies we were looking to add to the portfolio share one thing in common, and that’s cash being a commodity. They wanted value,” he said.

“What happened was we started to take on investors at an asset-only level ... but we had never given up on the mothership, which was NSG.”

Ultimately, investors were interested in the entire portfolio of companies and this culminated in the closure of a strategic equity investment valued at $50 million.

Wavemaker Partners; GRLD Ventures; Infrastructure Group Inc; Geoff Judge, the president of Trio Three Equity and former board partner at iNovia Capital; the family offices of SpaceX executive Brian Bjelde; software executive Brian Rubin; as well as entrepreneurs David Milowitz and Morgan Harris are joining as limited partners. 

Harris, who is investing through his family office Mammoth Bay Ventures, will serve as founding partner and work with Rizzetta. Harris and Klay Media founder Mike Pollack will serve as strategic advisors.

“The investment provides each investor with equity ownership of the current NSG portfolio of assets as well growth capital for additional investments and the launch of new units that will be rolled out later this year,” Rizzetta said. 

Why It Matters: “Our model is built on us being accretive and adding strategic value.”

The vision for NSG going forward is to build a bigger, diversified portfolio of businesses, as well as add new business units.

“We’re going to be launching the financial services and capital markets arm of NSG,” Rizzetta said. “At the end of the day, we’re writing a new page in the private equity playbook, taking sort of this cash-plus-mindset approach.”