More than a decade after McGraw Hill was sold to the private equity firm Apollo Global Management LLC for $2.5 billion, Platinum Equity, which bought the company in 2021 for $4.5 billion, has filed a prospectus with the Securities & Exchange Commission to take the company public. According to the announcement, the initial public offering price is expected to be between $19.00 and $22.00 per share and MH intends to use the net proceeds of roughly $530 million from the offering to repay a portion of the outstanding borrowings under its term loan credit facility. If MH gets its asking price for the shares, the company would have a valuation of about $4 billion.

As the prospectus notes, much has changed in the educational landscape since MH was acquired by Apollo in 2013—most notably, the dramatic shift in the role technology plays in education and educational publishing, particularly in the higher education market. According to the prospectus, MH’s digital sales as a percentage of total revenue has increased from 31% in the year ended December 31, 2015 to 65% in the fiscal year ended March 31, 2025. (MH now operates on a fiscal year ending March 31.) Excluding K-12, where most students still use print materials, total digital revenue as a percentage of total MH’s revenue was approximately 82% for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2025.

MH’s K-12 segment, however, remains the company’s largest, accounting for 46% of revenue, $970.5 million, in fiscal 2025. The higher education segment represented 37% of sales, $782.6 million, in the last fiscal year. MH’s two other business areas, global professional, generated 7% ($149.6 million) of total sales, and its international operates represented 10% ($201.4 million).

To entice investors, the prospectus is replete with references to how MH is transforming its business models to keep pace “with our customers’ increasing adoption of digital learning solutions,” which, the prospectus noted, “provides a more predictable and stable long-term revenue model.” In the fiscal years ended March 31, 2025 and 2024, respectively, MH reported “it had approximately 26 million and 25 million Paid Digital Users,”—learners or educators who purchased a license to gain access to digital products—“and we recorded more than 19 billion learning interactions.”

The steady move to a more digitally-focused company helped MH increase sales in fiscal 2025 by 7%, to $2.10 billion, and its net loss was reduced to $85.8 million from $193.0 million in fiscal 2024. Adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) increased 10.6%, to $726.8 million.

MH’s growth model, the prospectus says, depends on investing heavily “in technology-enabled innovation,” including plans to expand revenue through “learning solutions that offer data-driven personalized learning experiences, interactive simulations, 3-D models, experiential learning activities and generative AI tools like our AI Reader.”

MH also used the prospectus to expand on its view of AI. “Learning is a fundamental social experience, and we believe AI should be used to augment the teacher-student connection, not replace it,” the prospectus says. “We view AI as a tailwind which advances our ability to personalize learning at scale by facilitating meaningful learning experiences and interactions through our learning solutions. Additionally, we are leveraging generative AI as a tool for educators, learners, and McGraw Hill to promote efficiency in content development.”

In the prospectus, MH said its AI work is guided by four key principles:

  • We practice unwavering adherence to the responsible use of data and remain steadfast in adhering to sound data privacy and security principles
  • We build technology that is trusted, accurate and effective to the learning process
  • Our teams ensure oversight, accountability and partnership and commit to rigorously tested solutions
  • Our focus is to provide AI to empower, protect and elevate educators and learners across the learning journey

The prospectus also includes a host of tidbits including that MH has about 4,200 employees worldwide—among them 1,500 salespeople—and that its CEO, Simon Allen, had a base salary of $1.1 million last year.