Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief
NextNav, a leader in next generation GPS, and Spartacus Acquisition Corporation (NASDAQ: TMTS, TMTSW, and TMTSU), a special purpose acquisition company, has announced their entry into a definitive merger agreement that will result in NextNav becoming a public company.
Upon closing of the business combination the combined company will be named NextNav Inc., and its common stock and warrants will be listed on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “NN” and “NNW”, respectively.
Gross proceeds of up to $408 million from the business combination are expected to be used to fuel growth in its current businesses, continue to build NextNav’s next generation GPS platform, expand products one of which is already deployed in 4,400 cities, and to expand its land-based radio
positioning and timing network.
The NextNav platform serves a $100 billion global total addressable market in public safety, e911, mass market consumer apps, eVTOLs, UAVs and autonomous vehicles, IoT and critical infrastructure,
and many other sectors. Beyond its technology and intellectual property, NextNav owns a one-of-a-kind portfolio of nationwide spectrum licenses for 2.4 billion MHz-PoPs of 900 MHz spectrum.
Gary Parsons, former Chairman of the Board of Sirius XM Radio, has served as Chairman of NextNav’s Board of Directors for the past 10 years and will continue in that role. Peter Aquino, Chairman of the Board and CEO ofSpartacus, will also join the NextNav Board of Directors upon closing of the business combination.
NextNav will continue to be led by Ganesh Pattabiraman, Co-Founder, CEO and President of NextNav, whose rich experience in building scalable location technologies using terrestrial and satellite-based technologies started in places such as Qualcomm and led to the creation of NextNav.
In addition, the full NextNav management team, including Co-Founder, Dr. Arun Raghupathy, as SVP of Engineering, Chris Gates as CFO, and David Knutson as SVP of Network Operations and Deployment, will continue to manage NextNav.
The transaction reflects a pro forma enterprise valuation for NextNav of approximately $900 million and a pro forma market capitalization of approximately $1.2 billion, assuming no SPAC redemptions.
PJT Partners is acting as sole financial advisor, and Hogan Lovells US LLP is acting as legal advisor to NextNav. B. Riley Securities is acting as sole financial and capital markets advisor to Spartacus. K&L Gates LLP is acting as legal counsel to Spartacus.
B. Riley Securities and PJT Partners are acting as joint placement agents with respect to the private placement. Kirkland & Ellis LLP is acting as placement agent counsel.
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