Private equity drives intell merger

A pair of private equity groups and company management join forces to merge two companies in an effort to pursue cloud and data analytics opportunities in the intelligence market.

Invertix Corp. and Near Infinity Corp. have merged with the backing of two private equity groups and company management.

Columbia Capital and Razor’s Edge Ventures teamed with the management teams of the two companies to make the combination happen. The new company is called Altamira Corp.

The value of the deal was not disclosed.

The two companies serve intelligence and national security customers with the design and development of cloud-based analytic and big data solutions.

The investment bank KippsDeSanto served as the advisor for Invertix, and in their analysis, the deal represents several key trends in the market:

  • Attractiveness of highly specialized capability sets; in this case, big data and cloud tools.
  • Focus on “hot lane” sectors of the market such as the intelligence community.
  • Being on the front-end large contracts with significant backlog and revenue visibility.
  • Knowledgeable financial buyers.

The management team of the new company is:

  • Art Hurtado, president and CEO. He is the co-founder of Invertix.
  • Wayne Cliburn, EVP and chief operating officer. He joined Invertix in May.
  • Chris D’Agostino, EVP and chief technology officer. He is the founder of Near Infinity.
  • Bryan Judd, EVP and chief financial officer. He held the same position at Invertix.
  • Craig Parisot, EVP and chief strategy officer.

“We’ve known for quite some time that we were putting together something special, and that by combining teams, we would be able to pursue even larger contracts and expand to support new customers,” Parisot said.