QOMPLX, a cloud-native leader in risk analytics, and Tailwind Acquisition Corp. (NYSE: TWND), a special purpose acquisition company, today announced that they have entered into a definitive business combination agreement.
Upon closing of the transaction, the combined company (the “Company”) will operate as QOMPLX and plans to list under the symbol QPLX. The transaction reflects an estimated post-transaction equity value for QOMPLX of approximately $1.4 billion.
QOMPLX helps organizations make intelligent business decisions and better manage risk through its advanced, proprietary risk cloud. Its cloud-native platform rapidly ingests, transforms, and contextualizes large, complex, and disparate data sources in order to help organizations better quantify, model, and predict risk in areas including cybersecurity, insurance, and finance.
QOMPLX’s rapid growth has been fueled by its emergence as the global leader in Active Directory and identity security challenges currently plaguing enterprises and government agencies. Its core analytics platform combines inside-out with outside-in views on cyber risk posture alongside powerful streaming analytic detections and continuous monitoring across diverse data sources.
QOMPLX’s pro forma 2021 revenue is expected to be $141M. In 2020, the pro forma company’s go forward revenue base was $96M(E), and the core company had a 139% net revenue retention rate. QOMPLX’s rapid organic growth rate was 700%+ from FY19 to FY20. The combined business has more than 95 enterprise and government customers.
QOMPLX was co-founded by CEO Jason Crabtree and CTO Andrew Sellers. Jason is a former Special Advisor to the Commanding General of the U.S. Army Cyber Command, West Point graduate where he was selected as the First Captain of the Corps of Cadets, a Rhodes Scholar, and combat veteran who served in Afghanistan.
Andrew is a U.S. Air Force Academy valedictorian, Truman Scholar, and Iraq War veteran who originally met Jason during their respective graduate fellowships at the University of Oxford. Customers of QOMPLX include a number of the world’s leading technology, financial services, insurance, and professional services companies and the pro forma business extends their customer base into major government entities.
QOMPLX’s unique ability to detect catastrophic attacks on Active Directory and enterprise authentication events using its massively scalable unified analytics platform will continue to drive commercial expansion for cybersecurity operations.
The company also serves a more strategic role for clients, leveraging its unique technology platform to collect and process a combination of inside out and outside in data to power superior, and continuously updated, views of cybersecurity risk that better allow the data, operations, finance and risk teams in the enterprise to develop a shared sense of ground truth.
QOMPLX’s deep cybersecurity and insurance domain expertise allows cybersecurity and other telematics data to be leveraged in broader insurance underwriting, exposure management, loss mitigation and risk finance applications. Using technology to better specify risk transfer, model future possibilities, and enable data analytics across the insurance value chain, QOMPLX will lead the coming revolution of better real-time analysis of risk accumulation across portfolios in order to bring novel risk transfer products to market.
William P. Foley, II, Founder and Chairman of Cannae Holdings, said: “We are very excited to announce Tailwind’s transaction with QOMPLX and to invest additional capital into this portfolio company as it enters public markets.
Cybersecurity and risk management are increasingly fundamental in business and government. QOMPLX uses technology to drive more disciplined business decisions about risk with a financial lens. This is a highly scalable company with real and rapidly growing revenues with formidable domain expertise.”
“Today’s agreement furthers QOMPLX’s mission to help organizations get to “ground truth” in their cybersecurity and risk quantification, risk management and risk finance efforts. Andrew and I founded QOMPLX with the express goal of allowing organizations to make economically rational decisions about cybersecurity and other challenging risks.
Exceptional risk programs require continuous monitoring of real world data along with prospective modeling of future scenarios,” said Jason Crabtree, co-founder & CEO of QOMPLX.
“Reaching public markets via our partnership with Tailwind expedites QOMPLX’s ability to reach more customers globally and supports our continued development of the core technology platform for mission critical customer applications.
With the exceptional Sentar and Tyche domain experts joining QOMPLX, we are poised for growth fueled by extraordinary people, defensible technology, and a strong balance sheet.”
As part of the business combination, QOMPLX has also entered into definitive agreements to acquire two companies in the cybersecurity and insurance analytics industries to further extend QOMPLX’s leadership positioning as a global leader in risk:
- Sentar: Sentar is one of the fastest-growing cyber intelligence, analytics and operations solutions providers focused on the National Security sector. The acquisition of Sentar’s decades-long technical and national security sector experience gives QOMPLX greater leverage with cybersecurity and broader analytics offerings, including its premier Active Directory security and authentication attack detection and advanced security data fusion use cases. Sentar and QOMPLX have already begun to partner around industrial control systems security and continuous monitoring using shared expertise and QOMPLX software. The combined company will provide much needed technology and domain expert support to the challenging identity and authentication security gaps in the government as illustrated by Sunburst and SolarWinds.
- Tyche: Tyche’s core modeling platform focuses on the complex challenges facing insurers: pricing risks, modeling and reserving capital, and improving efficiency. It offers actuarial software that reduces time and costs framework for insurers and reinsurers to produce critical actionable data for critical commercial and regulatory decision-making. The modeling platform powers Tyche’s core flagship software offerings, which are Tyche Capital Model, Tyche Model Generator, and Tyche Pricing System. Tyche bolsters QOMPLX’s insurance analytics offerings and the combined business will offer more comprehensive insurance underwriting, pricing, risk modeling, capital modeling, and reserving functionality.
“QOMPLX has developed the most advanced cloud native software when it comes to identity attacks, privilege escalation, and lateral movement detection,” said Philip Krim, chairman of Tailwind Acquisition Corp. “These capabilities are now must have competencies for organizations of all sizes, and the demand for this has crossed a tipping point given recent events like SolarWinds which highlight the gaps in Active Directory and enterprise authentication.
QOMPLX is differentiated in its ability to link specific data, security controls, and simulations to financial risk. Jason and Andrew are world class founders who will lead QOMPLX to become the ‘go to’ Risk Cloud for organizations who realize data can quantify and reduce risk in critical areas like cybersecurity and business continuity.”
Transaction Overview
The transaction values QOMPLX at an estimated post-transaction equity value of $1.4 billion at $10.00 per share. It is anticipated that the combined company will receive approximately $280 million of gross proceeds from a fully committed common stock PIPE offering of $180 million, along with approximately $334 million cash held in trust, given approximately $200 million in cash acquisition costs, and assuming minimal redemptions by Tailwind’s existing public stockholders.
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The PIPE included participation from Cannae Holdings, Fidelity Management & Research Company LLC, Hedosophia and RenaissanceRe Ventures Ltd., a subsidiary of RenaissanceRe.
QOMPLX’s and Tailwind Acquisition Corp.’s boards of directors have unanimously approved the proposed business combination. Completion of the proposed business combination is expected in mid-2021, subject to approval by Tailwind’s stockholders and the satisfaction or waiver of other customary closing conditions identified in the Business Combination Agreement entered into by QOMPLX and Tailwind Acquisition Corp.
Advisors
Jefferies is serving as exclusive financial advisor, sole placement agent on the PIPE, and lead capital markets advisor to Tailwind. Piper Sandler is also serving as capital markets advisor to Tailwind.
Barclays is serving as exclusive financial advisor and capital markets advisor to QOMPLX. Mizuho and William Blair are also serving as capital markets advisors to QOMPLX.
Kirkland & Ellis LLP is acting as legal counsel to Tailwind Acquisition Corp. and King & Spalding LLP is acting as legal counsel to QOMPLX.
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