AE Industrial adds new government tech investment

On the same day that publicly-traded PAE announced an acquisition, one of the government services market’s more active private equity buyers has revealed the latest deal of its own.

AE Industrial Partners said Monday it has completed the acquisition of PCI, a provider of technology and professional services to defense and intelligence agencies. Terms of the transaction were undisclosed, but PCI says on its website it had at least 300 employees as of 2018 and operates in 14 states and internationally.

Columbia, Maryland-based PCI was founded in 2008 and touts its offerings as including cybersecurity, computer network operations, cloud computing, systems engineering, enterprise IT and data analytics.

PCI’s portfolio of contract vehicles includes the Army’s RS3 program and Homeland Security Department’s EAGLE II, the latter of which through the company touts as having migrated a major program to the Amazon Web Services cloud environment.

Along with AWS, the company also counts as commercial industry partnerships its work with Microsoft for Office 365 migrations and Elastic for prototyping efforts.

"With the backing of AEI, we will have the resources to invest in the technology and talent required to meet the growing needs of our customers," PCI CEO Sean Battle said in a release.

For AEI, this is the investment group’s 13th total transaction completed so far this year and ninth platform investment in its second $1.36 billion fund that closed in 2018.

This year’s activity for AEI has included the deals to form Redwire and the acquisition of majority ownership in NuWave Solutions.

Kirkland & Ellis LLP acted as legal adviser and Ernst & Young LLP served as financial advisor to AEI.

Miles & Stockbridge P.C. was legal adviser to PCI with Aronson Capital Partners being the financial adviser.