Where Mercury & Belcan see their latest acquisitions taking them

Two acquisitions caught our attention on Thursday that both highlight the narratives they are shaping about their role in the market.

Here are overviews of what these acquirers found and where they see the deals taking them.

Publicly-traded strategic deals again

Mercury Systems has acquired two businesses collectively known as Pentek for $65 million in a deal to expand the buyer’s lineup of ruggedized, commercial-off-the-shelf hardware offerings.

Pentek Technologies and Pentek Systems focus on software-defined radio and data acquisition boards, recording systems and subsystems for defense and commercial applications.

Andover, Massachusetts-headquartered Mercury said Thursday it expects the acquired businesses to generate approximately $20 million in revenue for its fiscal year ending July 1, 2022.

“Their capabilities add scale and breadth to Mercury’s existing mixed-signal product portfolio and deepen our penetration into our core radar, electronic warfare (EW), and signals intelligence markets,” Mercury CEO Mark Aslett said in a release.

“Like our previous acquisitions in the RF and microwave domain, the acquisition of Pentek doesn’t just provide important new capabilities for our customers; it also enables us to grow the size of our total addressable market.”

Some of those previous acquisitions include that of Delta Microwave in 2017 and Syntonic Microwave two years later, on top of Mercury’s long history of deals under the broad category of mission computing.

So did this private equity player

Belcan, an engineering and technical services company backed by AE Industrial Partners, has acquired Victor42 to further enter the special operations support and IT services areas of the federal market.

Terms of the deal announced Thursday were not disclosed. Belcan did cite some of Victor42’s federal customers as including Special Operations Command, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and Veterans Affairs Department.

Victor42 also works with other government contractors and technology companies such as IBM, Palantir, CACI International and Jacobs. Victor42’s geographic footprint covers six continents, according to Belcan.

For Belcan, this is that Cincinnati-headquartered company’s 17th acquisition with the support of AEI and comes seven months after its most recent government-focused purchase that was of IT modernization outfit Telesis Corp.

Belcan is one of several AEI platform investments in the government market alongside BigBear.ai, CDI, Gryphon Technologies and the soon-to-be publicly-traded space company Redwire.

In Victor42, Belcan sought a company that provides intelligence training to special operations forces and other customers that seek such services. The IT component includes analytical support and software services for intelligence and operations.

Kirkland & Ellis LLP served as legal adviser and PricewaterhouseCoopers was financial adviser to Belcan. Impresa Legal Group served as legal advisor to VICTOR42.