M&A Moves: Following its own acquisition, Columbia-based SparkPost adds Taxi for Email

M&A Moves is a Technical.ly column where we highlight D.C.-area companies completing mergers and making acquisitions to scale their businesses. Have a submission? Email us at dc@technical.ly and tell us why it belongs in the roundup.

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More news from Columbia, Maryland’s SparkPost: The email intelligence platform acquired London’s Taxi for Email, an email design and productivity tool. Terms of the acquisition were not announced.

According to company reps, the acquisition means people can build emails within Taxi and then send with SparkPost. It will also help companies develop better, more designed emails at scale.

“The industry has long accepted that email production is hard and takes more time than it should, especially in larger, more complex companies,” said Rich Harris, SparkPost CEO in a statement. “By focusing on these pain points, Taxi for Email has made email production 80% faster, and enabled users to rapidly segment and personalize campaigns. The acquisition of Taxi for Email furthers our mission of re-defining the enterprise email category and unleashing the potential of email.”

Just last month, SparkPost itself was acquired by Dutch communications platform MessageBird for $600 million. In March, the company also landed a $180 million funding round and named Michelle Byrd as chief people officer (whew, you got all that?).

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Downtown D.C.’s SCVX is taking San Francisco’s Bright Machines public in a merger. The merge with SCVX, a special purpose acquisition company, will see the new firm valued at $1.6 billion.

The deal is expected to close in the second half of 2021, and the new company will operate as Bright Machines. Investment firm Strategic Cyber Ventures launched SCVX in January of 2020 with the intention of acquiring a major cybersecurity vendor.

Mike Doniger, CEO of SCVX, said that Bright Machines is dramatically improving the speed of smart production lines and even programmable factories later down the line.

“Geopolitical tensions and the increasing threat of cyberattacks on manufacturing facilities are making it even more important for companies to minimize their supply chain risks and prepare for a world of distributed manufacturing,” Doniger said. “The momentum we have seen from Bright Machines in the nascent but critical space of software-defined manufacturing proves the strength of their solution and strategy.”

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Private equity firm Arlington Capital Partners has completed an acquisition of Berwyn, Pennsylvania aerospace company Triumph Group. The business will now operate independently under the name Qarbon Aerospace.

Founded in 1993, Triumph designs, engineers, manufactures and repairs aerospace and defense systems. Former executive vice president of Triumph Group Pete Wick was named the new CEO of Qarbon.

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Tysons, Virginia-based Integrity Management Consulting announced an acquisition of Fairfax-based federal systems engineering firm MHM Innovations for an undisclosed amount.

Integrity, which has grown over 30 percent annually for the past several years, said the that the acquisition will further help its expansion plans, moving it into the national security and intelligence markets. Of note are two contracts to leverage for expansion, an exclusive geospatial technical support services blanket purchase agreement with the Department of Homeland Security and a $950 million indefinite quantity supply agreement with the United States Special Operations Command SOF Core Services Support.

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Bethesda, Maryland-based Fidelis Cybersecurity acquired San Francisco’s CloudPassage, a cloud security and compliance company. Terms were not revealed, but Fidelis said the acquisition would help with its goal of unifying endpoint, network, cloud and deception into a single platform.

In November, the company named previous Accenture Security lead and Invincea founder Anup Ghosh as CEO. At the time, Ghosh said he would focus on company growth.