Will the 3rd Time be the Charm; Spireon Acquired by Vista-backed Solera
Yesterday, Solera Holdings announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Spireon from Greenbriar Equity Fund.
Solera said its strategic acquisition of Spireon will further strengthen its position as a leading provider of AI-powered software, services, and data assets to four critical pillars of the vehicle lifecycle, including:
— Vehicle claims
— Vehicle repair
— Vehicle solutions
— Fleet solutions
The name Spireon emerged as a company when in February 2011 Bertram Capital invested in ProconGPS (founded in 2002) to focus on the mobile resource management, fleet and vehicle finance space.
Over the years, the Spireon portfolio added ProconGPS, Enfotrace, DriveOK, Inilex, and PositionPlus.
In 2018, Bertram sold Spireon to Greenbriar Equity.
Greenbriar stabilized Spireon and grew the company to more than 4M connections. And in 2021, Spireon added then well-known LoJack brand to its roster of solutions.
And now, Greenbriar exits Spireon selling to Solera Holdings, LLC.
What many don’t realize is that Solera is part of Vista Equity’s Flagship portfolio and on top of that, Solera acquired Omnitracs and DealerSocket less than a year ago. Spireon has great reach with 13,000 dealers served and 4M connections.
So Spireon is ProCon to Bertram to Greenbriar to Vista via Solera.
Does Solera own Spireon, or is it a vehicle for Vista to be the 3rd PE to own Spireon??
Will the 3rd time be a charm?
For M2M/IoT, the tech bubble bursting in 2000 - 2002, was of course part of the overall tech meltdown. Truth was the result of the much hyped "wireless wave" never really happened, and building telematics companies was really hard. Was for the last 2 decades the space more of a niche play that grew reasonably well. Fast forward to 2021, and holy smokes was there incredible growth for players best positioned for volume and scale. Sprieon was already the 800 pound gorilla in their space rolling up many pioneering players along the way, meaning that during periods of less overall demand they were making bold moves to be optimally positioned for this wireless wave now hitting has hard as it did in 2021. They most certainly deserve what was certain to have been a high valuation. With other market leaders such as Fleetmatics having been acquired by Verizon, and Xirgo getting acquired by Sensata, is clear that telematics has hit the big time! Having worked directly for Stan Schwarz who was himself a pioneer yet sadly due to cancer did not live to see this day, it is wonderful to see so many wonderful people in the leading organizations along the way having their visions realized. Great news for the industry, as never before growth and scale are to follow the large investments being made as a result of today's unbelievable demand. My prediction is that Amazon and Google will also want a piece of this fast growing pie and the investors in Spireon and other market leaders will see fantastic performance.
I'm a little confused by the Solera/Omnitracs deal. Did Vista still own Omnitracs at that time? What percent of Solera is held by Vista?