Defense Tech Firm RedLattice to Merge With Bold Eagle SPAC

Private equity-backed cyber defense technology firm RedLattice said it’s going public via a merger with blank-check company Bold Eagle Acquisition Corp.

The deal values RedLattice at about $1.25 billion including debt before the transaction, according to a statement Monday confirming an earlier Bloomberg News report.

Aerospace- and defense-focused private equity firm AE Industrial Partners, which bought a majority stake in RedLattice in 2023, will be the company’s biggest shareholder after the deal closes.

“We believe RedLattice is the category leader in operational cyber intelligence with unmatched technical capabilities,” said Kirk Konert, managing partner at AE Industrial Partners.

RedLattice Chief Executive Officer Andy Boyd, a former director of the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence, will lead the combined company.

Based in Chantilly, Virginia, RedLattice is a global defense tech company that services the intelligence community, law enforcement and military organizations. It provides cyber intelligence tools used by the US government and its allies, according to the company’s website.

In 2024, AE Industrial Partners bought Israeli security company Paragon in a deal worth up to $900 million to merge it with RedLattice, Bloomberg News reported at the time.

Paragon, co-founded by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in 2019, provides tools designed to help law enforcement and intelligence agencies gather messages sent using encrypted services on phones. US Immigration and Custom Enforcement struck a $2 million deal in 2024 to buy Paragon tools, a deal that was stopped by the Biden administration but reactivated last year by the Trump administration.

Some of the proceeds of the deal will go toward funding a cash earn-out from the Paragon deal, according to the statement.

“We only sell, in the US context, to the US federal government, intelligence community, military and federal law enforcement,” Boyd said in an interview.

Boyd said the company does vulnerability research and turns it into products used by customers that have legal authority to go against adversaries using phones, computers and network devices.

“Our biggest selling product has the capability where law enforcement users can actually enter the warrant into the program and put the warrant begin and expiration date so that the tool can’t be used for a particular target beyond the warrant period,” Boyd said.

He said the company also sells to US allies, including European and East Asian nation states and democracies that go through a strict vetting process. The company’s work doesn’t have commercial applications, Boyd added.

Bold Eagle raised $250 million in its initial public offering in 2024 and is run by CEO Eli Baker and co-chairmen Harry Sloan and Jeff Sagansky. Sloan and Sagansky were behind the special purpose acquisition company that merged with DraftKings in 2019. Bold Eagle’s shares closed Friday at $10.71 giving the SPAC a market value of about $617 million.

The RedLattice deal is expected to provide up to about $610 million of gross proceeds, including $335 million of committed capital from new and existing investors, plus as much as $275 million from Bold Eagle’s trust account.

Investment firm Loomis Sayles will anchor $275 million in convertible notes.

SPAC sponsors have closed 34 mergers so far this year, a sharp drop from the rush of activity at the height of 2021, when roughly 200 blank-check firms completed deals, according to data compiled by SPAC Research.

The Eagle Equity Partners team has closed eight SPAC deals with mostly positive share performance, the SPAC Research data show. DraftKings and Target Hospitality Corp. are the standouts, with shares more than doubling from their $10 IPO price. Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings Inc., though, has lost more than 95% of its value while Skillz Inc., which re-branded and was restructured as Firy Inc., has saddled long-term holders with similar losses.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. advised Bold Eagle, while Jefferies Financial Group Inc. advised RedLattice.