Mercato Partners' Traverse Fund Portfolio Company Cradlepoint Acquired for $1.1B

The acquisition marks the second $1B+ exit for a Mercato Traverse fund company in 2020

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Sep 18, 2020, 12:06 ET

SALT LAKE CITY, Sept. 18, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Ericsson, a global leader in Information and Communication Technology (ICT), announced its acquisition of Cradlepoint, a Mercato Partners Traverse Fund III portfolio company for $1.1B.

This marks the second $1B-plus acquisition for a Mercato Partners Traverse Fund company and the third overall in 2020. The first came in April during the onset of the pandemic, as Salt Lake-based Galileo Financial Technologies was acquired by fintech giant SoFi for $1.2B. This announcement adds to a busy year for Mercato, which saw Utah-based Central Logic acquired by Rubicon Technology Partners in June.

This transaction highlights Mercato's Traverse Fund's strategy of seeking rare opportunities in underserved and overlooked markets and applying stage-specific guidance to help them achieve transformative growth. Over the past 11 years, the team has found, funded, and collaborated with high-growth companies to build long-term value and enable successful exits, serving our entrepreneurs, our investors, and our communities.

"We offer our sincere congratulations to George Mulhern and the entire team for successfully nurturing a vision of wireless interconnectivity in the Intermountain West," said Joe Kaiser, director at Traverse Fund. "Building a world-class technology company in the shadows of the Sawtooth Mountain Range in Idaho is a tribute to their determination and reinforces our belief at Traverse that innovation is not limited by location. We look forward to their integration with the global telecom power, Ericsson."

Founded in 2006 in Boise, Idaho, Cradlepoint is a pioneer in LTE and 5G cellular network technology, helping to create an agile, reliable, and pervasive Wireless WAN edge with a mission to enable customers to connect beyond the limits of wired networks. Ericsson is one of the largest providers of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to service providers. From its founding in 1876 in Sweden, Ericsson has grown to 100,000 employees worldwide and an intellectual property portfolio of over 54,000 patents. The emerging 5G deployment places Ericsson and Cradlepoint at the center of the next stage of the wireless revolution which promises to change the way consumers and organizations transmit, receive, and consume data.

For more information about Mercato, its funds, and portfolio companies, please visit: mercatopartners.com

About Traverse
Traverse is the growth fund at Mercato Partners, a multi-strategy investment firm which specializes in overlooked and underserved markets. Traverse leverages the breadth of its team's investing and entrepreneurial experience in these targeted geographies to provide both capital and operational guidance for rapidly scaling companies in the technology and branded consumer segments. For over a decade, Traverse has found, funded and collaborated with high-growth companies to help them achieve transformative growth and long term value for our investors. For more information, please visit www.traverse.mercatopartners.com.

About Cradlepoint
Cradlepoint is a global leader in cloud-delivered LTE and 5G wireless network edge solutions for branch, mobile, and IoT networks. Cradlepoint NetCloud, the personification of the company's Elastic Edge vision, is a subscription-based service with purpose-built endpoints that delivers a pervasive, secure, and software-defined Wireless WAN edge to connect people, places, and things over LTE and 5G cellular networks. More than 22,000 businesses and government agencies around the world rely on Cradlepoint to keep critical sites, points of commerce, field forces, vehicles, and IoT devices always connected and protected, including 75% of the world's top retailers, 50% of the Fortune 100, and first responder agencies in 25 of the largest US cities. Major service providers use Cradlepoint solutions as the foundation for innovative managed services. Founded in 2006, Cradlepoint is a privately held company headquartered in Boise, Idaho, with a development center in Silicon Valley and international offices in the UK and Australia.

About Ericsson
Ericsson enables communications service providers to capture the full value of connectivity. The company's portfolio spans Networks, Digital Services, Managed Services, and Emerging Business. It is designed to help our customers go digital, increase efficiency and find new revenue streams. Ericsson's innovation investments have delivered the benefits of mobility and mobile broadband to billions of people around the world. Ericsson stock is listed on Nasdaq Stockholm and on Nasdaq New York. www.ericsson.com

SOURCE Mercato Partners