Smart building technology company Brivo reached an agreement to go public via special purpose acquisition with Crown PropTech Acquisitions. The SPAC deal values Brivo at $808 million.
Once the merger closes in early 2022, the combined company will operate as Brivo and is expected to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “BRVS.”
Steve Van Till, founder and CEO of Brivo, will lead the combined company. Brivo was founded in 1999 and sells SaaS building access management services and connected devices to enterprise and property owners.
Van Till told TechCrunch that the proptech boom has accelerated adoption of cloud-based technologies in the industry over the past five years. That has driven the company to be able to tout itself as “the single largest access control system in the world,” working with over 44,5000 customer accounts across over 300 million square feet of commercial property in 42 countries.
Brivo had been looking at both SPAC and IPO, and once it was in the private equity markets, “the SPAC offers came rolling in,” Van Till said.
He noted that the SPAC option yielded the company larger amounts of capital and was the more attractive option for what the company wanted to do in the long term, which included M&A opportunities. The company has already been dabbling in M&A, having acquired Parakeet, a keyless entry system company, in March 2020.
“The SPAC also gives us more access to capital, and from a customer perspective, more visibility,” Van Till said. “One of the markets we are moving into is the enterprise market, and we are dealing with other public companies as customers. Being a public company will enable them to see us as a peer.”
The SPAC company, Crown PropTech Acquisitions, raised $276 million in a February IPO. It is led by Richard Chera, chairman and CEO.
