Apollo-backed Brightspeed seeks up to $3B from creditors for fibre

Brightspeed, a US fibre broadband provider owned by Apollo, is in talks with creditors to raise $2B to $3B of new money, Bloomberg reports. It has about $10B of debt, has warned about its survival, and may file for bankruptcy as soon as December.

Brightspeed, an Apollo-backed US fibre broadband provider, is in talks to raise $2B to $3B of new money from its creditors. That is according to Bloomberg, which cited people familiar with the matter on Friday. The amount, and whether the deal will go through a bankruptcy court, are still being worked out.

Brightspeed and Apollo declined to comment. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that the company could file for bankruptcy as soon as December, Light Reading reported.

Brightspeed has about $10B of debt and warned in September that it may not be able to continue as a going concern. Nearly all its debt trades at distressed levels: one $2.5B loan was quoted at about 17 cents on the dollar on Friday.

Brightspeed was formed in 2022, when Apollo bought Lumen’s local phone and broadband business in 20 states for $7.5B. It is spending heavily to bring fibre to mostly rural and suburban areas there. It passed 3 million fibre-ready locations in April, and fibre sales are up 16% from a year earlier.

It has been through this before. In 2024, Brightspeed cut $1.1B of debt and raised $3.7B of new capital in a deal with its lenders. This month, it named Shawn O’Donnell, a former senior managing director at FTI Consulting, as chief executive.

Apollo is better known in tech circles for its lending to AI, including a $36B debt deal it is arranging with Blackstone to buy chips for Anthropic. Lumen, meanwhile, has turned to AI customers, and this week agreed to sell AI networks with Microsoft.