Who owns Avaya? Ownership structure explained (2026)

Avaya is one of the oldest names in business telephony. Its phone systems and contact center software still run customer service operations at banks, airlines, hospitals, and government agencies around the world. Yet the company behind that brand has changed hands more often than almost any other enterprise software business of its size.

In 25 years, Avaya has been a public spin-off, a private equity buyout, a bankrupt company, a relisted stock, a bankrupt company again, and finally a private business controlled by the investors who used to be its lenders. Each change moved control to a different kind of owner with different goals.

This article breaks down who owns Avaya today, how its creditors ended up in charge, and why that structure matters for the company, its customers, and its investors.

Avaya began life in 2000, when Lucent Technologies spun off its enterprise communications business as a standalone company. The business traced its roots to the telephone equipment arm of AT&T, which is why Avaya inherited a huge installed base of corporate phone systems on day one. It is headquartered in Morristown, New Jersey.

The company sells software and services for contact centers, unified communications, and customer experience management. Its products run on customers' own servers, in private clouds, or in hybrid setups, which lets large enterprises move to the cloud at their own pace rather than rip out systems that already work. Recent launches include Avaya Infinity, a contact center platform, and Avaya Nexus.

Since its 2023 restructuring, Avaya has narrowed its focus to roughly its top 1,500 global enterprise accounts and walked away from smaller customers and some product lines, including SIP trunking and communication APIs. According to Fitch Ratings, Avaya had about 30,000 customers at the end of fiscal 2025, earned about 77% of revenue from recurring contracts, and generated about 43% of revenue outside the United States.

Because Avaya is private, it no longer publishes full financial statements. Its last widely reported annual figure as a public company was revenue of $2.97 billion in fiscal 2021. Fitch expected revenue to decline by a high-single-digit percentage in fiscal 2026 as the company exits some regions and loses unified communications customers, before stabilizing in fiscal 2027.

Avaya is a private company. Its parent entity, Avaya Holdings Corp., sits above the operating company, Avaya LLC. Neither has publicly traded shares.

Ownership passed to Avaya's creditors through the prepackaged Chapter 11 case it filed on February 14, 2023. Under the plan, the company's first lien lenders and certain noteholders exchanged their claims for equity in the reorganized business, while holders of the old common stock received no recovery. Avaya announced before emergence that it would be "a private company backed by its existing lenders," naming Apollo Global Management and Brigade Capital Management as the lead institutions.

Avaya has no founder shareholders. It was created as a corporate spin-off rather than started by entrepreneurs, so no founding family or early team holds a stake. Every earlier layer of equity has since been erased. The 2007 private equity owners lost their equity in the 2017 bankruptcy, and the public shareholders who bought in after the 2017 relisting lost theirs in 2023.

Management and directors may hold equity or incentive awards in the reorganized company, as is common after a restructuring, but Avaya has not disclosed the size of any management equity pool.

Avaya has never raised venture capital. Its capital events are spin-offs, buyouts, and restructuring financings.

Apollo Global Management is the most visible owner. In March 2023, Austria's competition authority published a merger notice stating that funds managed by Apollo affiliates intended to acquire a non-controlling minority stake of more than 25% in Avaya Holdings Corp. Apollo co-led the $500 million new-money term loan that funded the bankruptcy case, and two Apollo private equity partners, Robert Kalsow-Ramos and Aaron Miller, joined the post-emergence board. Apollo's exact current percentage has not been disclosed.

Brigade Capital Management, a New York credit investment firm, is the other named anchor. It co-led the debtor-in-possession financing with Apollo, and its co-founder and chief investment officer, Donald E. Morgan III, took a seat on the board in May 2023. Brigade's stake size is not public.

Other first lien lenders hold the rest of the equity. More than 90% of Avaya's secured lenders signed the restructuring support agreement, and ownership was distributed pro rata to those creditors and to rights offering participants. Avaya has never published a full shareholder list, so the names and weights of the smaller holders are unknown.

RingCentral is a former investor, not a current one. It paid Avaya $500 million in 2019 as part of a deal that made it the exclusive provider of Avaya Cloud Office: $125 million bought Avaya preferred stock, and $375 million, paid mostly in RingCentral shares, was an advance on future fees and licensing rights. The 2023 plan cancelled RingCentral's preferred stock without any recovery, though Avaya continued as a sales agent for the product.

Avaya has no announced plan to relist or sell itself. That said, creditor owners rarely intend to hold a company forever. Their typical exits are a sale to a strategic buyer, a sale to a private equity firm, or a new listing once the business has stabilized. Trade press coverage in August 2026 noted that Jeff Clarke's record of preparing sponsor-backed companies for a sale or major restructuring fits that pattern, but no transaction has been confirmed.

Patrick Bartels chairs the board of directors. He is managing member of Redan Advisors and joined the board when Avaya emerged from bankruptcy in May 2023. He announced Clarke's appointment in August 2026.

Jeff Clarke is chief executive officer, named on August 3, 2026. He joined from Insurity, an insurance software company where he was CEO, and previously ran Doxim, Travelport, and Kodak, where he led the company after its own Chapter 11 case. Earlier in his career he was chief operating officer of CA Technologies, an executive vice president at Hewlett-Packard, and chief financial officer of Compaq.

Patrick Dennis is executive chair. He chaired the board from the May 2023 emergence, became CEO on September 1, 2024, and handed the CEO role to Clarke in August 2026. He previously ran Venafi, ExtraHop, Aspect Software, and Guidance Software.

The board named at emergence had nine members: Alan Masarek, Patrick Bartels, Patrick Dennis, Robert Kalsow-Ramos, Marylou Maco, Aaron Miller, Donald E. Morgan III, Tod Nielsen, and Jacqueline Woods. Masarek, the CEO who steered Avaya through the 2023 bankruptcy, retired in 2024. Avaya has not published a current full board roster, so it is not confirmed which of the other 2023 directors still serve. What is clear is that the owners hold board seats directly, with Apollo and Brigade represented at emergence.

Avaya's defining controversy is financial. The 2007 buyout loaded the company with debt, and the first Chapter 11 case in 2017 cut that burden by about $3 billion. The relaunched public company still carried roughly $3.4 billion of debt by 2023, and a second filing followed less than six years later. Serial bankruptcies are common enough among leveraged companies to have their own place in business failure statistics, but two cases in six years left a mark on customer and partner confidence that Avaya is still working to repair.

In August 2022, Avaya said it could not file its quarterly report on time, that its audit committee had opened internal investigations into its financial results and whistleblower matters, and that there was substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern. In November 2022 it disclosed that a whistleblower email sent to a board member had not been logged or passed to management or the outside auditor. A securities class action followed against former CEO Jim Chirico and former CFO Kieran McGrath on behalf of investors who bought shares in 2022, with an amended complaint filed in May 2024. On September 1, 2026, a federal judge in New York dismissed the amended complaint, finding it did not adequately allege fraudulent intent, but allowed the plaintiff to seek leave to file a second amended complaint by September 30, 2026. The case is not yet closed.

The 2017 reorganization terminated Avaya's pension plan for salaried employees. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation took it over on November 30, 2017, covering nearly 8,000 current and future retirees in a plan that was underfunded by $938 million, according to the PBGC. Under a settlement among Avaya, its first lien lenders, and the PBGC, the agency received $340 million in cash plus a small equity stake, while a separate Avaya plan covering about 7,000 participants stayed with the company. The deal was part of the price of getting out of bankruptcy, and it shifted part of the cost of the restructuring onto the federal pension insurer and salaried retirees.

Post-bankruptcy, Avaya has cut costs aggressively. Fitch reported that the company had implemented 98% of a $1 billion cost savings target, and UC Today reported an all-staff voluntary exit program. The company also withdrew from some regions, product lines, and customer segments. These cuts improved profitability, and Fitch projected an EBITDA margin of around 20% for fiscal 2025, a level an EBITDA calculator makes easy to test against peers. The trade-off is execution risk: fewer staff and a narrower customer base leave less room for error against cloud-native competitors. For anyone tracking Avaya as a vendor, these are the items worth logging in a supplier risk register.

Creditor ownership shapes how Avaya is run. Apollo, Brigade, and the other lenders did not buy Avaya because they wanted to own a phone and contact center company. They became owners because it was the best way to recover what they were owed. Their priority is protecting and eventually realizing the value of that position, which favors cash generation, cost discipline, and a clean path to a sale or listing over expensive, long-dated bets.

That explains much of Avaya's strategy since 2023. Focusing on its top 1,500 accounts protects the most valuable recurring revenue. Leaving small customers and low-margin products cuts cost. The choice of Jeff Clarke, an operator known for turnarounds at Kodak and elsewhere, signals a board that values discipline over rapid growth. The contrast with its main rivals is sharp. Avaya competes against widely held public companies such as Cisco, owned mostly by index funds, and against Zoom's founder-controlled share structure, both of which can fund long product cycles without answering to creditors.

For customers, the picture is mixed. Avaya is far less indebted than before, with roughly $800 million of term debt against more than $3 billion before 2023, and Fitch's upgrade reflects real progress. But the owners' eventual exit means another change of control is likely at some point, and large enterprises that run critical contact centers on Avaya will want to know who could own it next.

There is also a historical irony. Avaya's roots run back through Lucent to AT&T, and the rest of the Lucent lineage now sits inside Nokia after its Alcatel-Lucent deal. Avaya took a different road, passing from public investors to private equity to creditors, and its next owner will shape whether the brand survives as an independent company.

Avaya is privately owned by its former lenders, who received the company's equity when it emerged from Chapter 11 on May 1, 2023. Apollo Global Management and Brigade Capital Management lead the group. Apollo funds disclosed a plan to acquire a non-controlling stake of more than 25%. Exact current percentages are not public.

Jeff Clarke was named CEO on August 3, 2026. He succeeded Patrick Dennis, who had led the company since September 2024 and now serves as executive chair. Patrick Bartels chairs the board.

No. Avaya's stock was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange in February 2023, and the old shares were cancelled under the bankruptcy plan. The company has been private since May 2023 and has not announced plans to relist.

Avaya was not founded by individual entrepreneurs. Lucent Technologies spun it off in 2000 from its enterprise communications business, which itself descended from AT&T's telephone equipment operations.

Yes, twice. Avaya filed for Chapter 11 in January 2017 with about $6.3 billion of debt and emerged in December 2017. It filed again on February 14, 2023, cut its debt from about $3.4 billion to about $800 million, and emerged on May 1, 2023.

Avaya does not disclose a valuation, and with no public stock there is no market cap. The best public anchors are its debt, a term loan of about $837 million due in 2028 as of June 2025, and its 2007 buyout price of $8.2 billion, a figure that shows how much value was lost across two bankruptcies.