Seattle-based Getty Images is filing for bankruptcy and once again going private through a major restructuring deal with financial backing from the Getty and Koch families.
The media company, which manages a marketplace of stock and editorial visual media, has been saddled with debt for years, hampering strong revenue growth since 2021. Its stock had lost more than 99% of its value since going public a second time, falling from more than $33 in August 2022 to $0.02 in the past couple weeks.
Despite filing for bankruptcy, Getty said it doesn’t expect the restructuring will lead to layoffs. The company maintains its Seattle headquarters at 605 Fifth Ave. S., on one floor of an office building near Lumen Field. Getty has roughly 360 employees in Seattle, according to LinkedIn, and has been headquartered in the city for around 20 years.
Getty boasts the world’s largest privately owned photographic archives, with millions of images. Its customers include news outlets, corporations and entertainment companies. Getty’s editorial business, which includes news photos and videos, drove almost 38% of the company’s revenue last year. The company’s editorial line is growing faster than its larger creative business.
Artificial intelligence is stirring uncertainty for the company’s business model, especially among its creative customers, which pay for stock images. Increasingly, companies are able to turn to generative AI models to conjure images without having to pay for licensed media. But the technology is not the main driver behind Getty’s current financial woes, which follow a string of private equity owners and mounting debt.
Getty’s business depends on a network of more than 600,000 contributors to cover events around the globe.
The company said vendors will be unaffected and paid in full and there are no anticipated disruptions for customers or photographers.
As of June 30, the company reported that it had $2.1 billion of debt. Getty expects to commence its bankruptcy filing process in the coming weeks and finish its restructuring by the end of the year.
Holders of unsecured bonds will drop $270 million of outstanding debt as part of the restructuring. Secured lenders, representing roughly 89% of Getty’s secured bonds, will reduce interest costs and extend debt payback timelines.
The company will receive a new $533 million equity investment, Getty announced in a news release on Monday. Under the prepackaged bankruptcy deal, the Getty family and Koch Equity Development, an investment arm of the industrialist family's empire, will own 100% of Getty Images.
Getty’s restructuring deal comes three months after the company pulled the plug on its plans to merge with rival Shutterstock.
In January 2025, Getty announced it would buy Shutterstock for $3.7 billion, but the deal faced scrutiny from regulators in the United Kingdom. The Competition and Markets Authority, Britain’s antitrust watchdog, said last November that it was opening an in-depth merger investigation after initial inquiries raised concerns of higher prices and reduced competition if the merger went through.
The agency’s condition for approval was that Getty would have to sell Shutterstock’s editorial business to an approved buyer, a point that Getty ultimately wouldn’t agree to. Getty said, because of this, it was scrapping the plan, according to a regulatory filing in July.
Getty’s financial problems have dogged the company over the last few months. S&P Global downgraded the company’s rating to a lowly CCC in September after a missed interest payment, with the rating reflecting Getty’s “thinning liquidity” in the face of high interest payments on debt.
The company also has more than $92 million worth of litigation payments after a judge ruled in favor of investors who said Getty had not allowed them to claim public stocks at a fixed price from when Getty became publicly traded in 2022.
“That’s probably the main bad driver, is just the debt and the litigation payments,” said Brian Conneely, an analyst for S&P Global.
Conneely also said the proposed transaction with Shutterstock led to more debt for the company as they had to issue additional debt and repay it after the merger was off.
With litigation payments looming and loans maturing, Getty had about $50 million in cash halfway through 2026 and a $30 million revolver availability, which Conneely likens to a credit card. The company fully drew that revolver this year, which was due in September of next year.
Because of Getty’s dwindling cash and the amount it owed over the next two years, Conneely wrote in a research update note with his colleague Thomas Hartman that the company was at risk of entering a restructuring or transaction within the next year that they viewed as tantamount to default.
Aside from its restructuring, Getty going private means it will no longer be publicly traded on the stock market. The New York Stock Exchange, which Getty shares had been trading on since 2022, already commenced a delisting process for the stock at the end of September due to an abnormally low selling price,” according to NYSE Regulation.
Getty was founded in London by the Getty Oil heir Mark Getty in 1995 and South African businessman Jonathan Klein. The company was traded on the Nasdaq beginning in the late 1990s. It went private in 2008, after it was purchased by the private equity firm Hellman & Friedman.
In 2021, Getty announced it was going public again through a special-purpose acquisition company deal, in which private investors pool money to create a shell corporation to trade publicly. These so-called SPAC deals boomed in the pandemic years.
Through the deal, Getty merged with a firm with financial backing from private equity firms CC Capital and Neuberger Berman. Getty began trading publicly again on July 25, 2022, but dropped 2% on its first day, according to S&P Global data.
Getty’s restructuring is the kind of deal that could help return it to healthier financial footing. Though analysts would view a bankruptcy similarly to a default, it will ease some of the stress on Getty’s balance sheet.
“They do have some strengths in the business,” Conneely said.
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