Mercury Systems announced the acquisitions of The Athena Group Inc. and Syntonic Microwave LLC. The all cash price for both companies was $46 million. The acquisitions are not expected to have a material impact on Mercury’s financial results for the fourth quarter or full 2019 fiscal year.
A privately-held company based in Gainesville, Florida, The Athena Group provides cryptographic and countermeasure IP for securing defense computing systems. A leader in differential power analysis (DPA) technology, the company offers a complete portfolio of provable DPA-resistant solutions. Athena’s patented technologies meet mandated Department of Defense requirements and mitigate reverse engineering attempts on mission-critical systems. Embedded in millions of ASIC and next-generation FPGA devices, the solutions are designed to solve the toughest security problems, enabling applications such as artificial intelligence, mobile communications and cloud computing.
Based in Campbell, California, privately-held Syntonic Microwave supplies advanced synthesizers, wideband phase coherent tuners and microwave converters optimized for signals intelligence (SIGINT) and electronic intelligence (ELINT) applications, with frequency coverage to 40 GHz and 2 GHz instantaneous bandwidth. To address the rapidly evolving needs across the defense industry, the entire Syntonic product portfolio was designed for modularity, configurability and rapid prototyping, to meet the performance needs of next-generation electronic warfare (EW) applications.
“The acquisitions of Athena and Syntonic represent continued milestones for our market and content expansion strategy. Mercury has a long history of collaboration with Athena in protecting critical defense systems deployed across surface, subsurface, ground and airborne platforms. Athena’s technologies expand our BuiltSECURE™ security IP portfolio and extend our leadership in secure embedded computing, positioning us well to capitalize on DoD program protection security requirements for domestic and foreign military sales.
“Similarly, we believe Syntonic’s deep domain expertise in agile RF technology will expand and enhance our position as the preeminent supplier of high performance, SWaP-optimized EW subsystems, while enabling us to further penetrate the SIGINT and ELINT markets with additional Mercury content. The acquisition of Syntonic gives our defense prime customers and government agencies access to highly differentiated sensor processing capability, thereby advancing our national interests through domination of the electromagnetic spectrum.
“In summary, similar to previous acquisitions, the acquisitions of Athena and Syntonic continue to enable us to grow the size of our total addressable market and reinforce our strategy of becoming the leading provider of secure and safety-critical processing subsystems for aerospace and defense applications. We are very pleased to welcome the Athena and Syntonic teams to the Mercury family,” — Mark Aslett, Mercury’s president and CEO
Both transactions are subject to net working capital and net debt adjustments. The acquisitions were funded through Mercury’s existing revolving credit facility.