Applied Insight Acquires Maryland Cyber Firm

Maryland cybersecurity company Bridge Inc. has been acquired by technology solutions provider Applied Insight LLC.

The acquisition of the Hanover-based firm was announced today, though terms of the deal were not disclosed. Baird acted as exclusive financial adviser to Bridges on the transaction.

News of the deal came to light 12 months and five days after Applied Insight announced that it had acquired cloud integrator Digital Age Experts LLC, which is based in Reston, Virginia.

Bridges was founded in 2000 and specializes in cybersecurity, network engineering, and big data analytics for the intelligence community. To Applied Insight, the company is expected to bring complementary capabilities in network security, cross-domain solutions, and analytics development using artificial intelligence.

“We are excited to join the Applied Insight team to expand opportunities for our employees and bring the latest technologies to our customers,” said Bridges CEO Chuck Faughnan.

“Together we can leverage our unique machine learning and artificial intelligence analytics and deep network engineering experience to deliver new cyber products and end-to-end security for our customers’ hybrid-cloud infrastructures.”

The CEO of Applied Insight, Dede Dascalu, said that this latest M&A deal would allow the company to broaden the scope of the intelligence-sector work it is already undertaking.

“When we look for things like this, we look for complementary capabilities,” Dascalu said in a call with Washington Business Journal. 

“We’re establishing ourselves as a pretty good and solid mid-tier contender, and we want to have other acquisitions essentially amplify what we have and complementary capabilities was one of the points.”

The acquisition will increase Applied Insight’s workforce to over 700 employees. Integrating the workforces may be smoothed by the existence of a shared history.

“We know the Bridges team well from years of partnering together,” said Dascalu. “They share our commitment to the national security mission and have experience delivering successful innovations to intelligence customers. We’re honored to have the team on board.”

Applied Insight’s acquisition is backed by The Acacia Group, a team of operational investors with a long track record in the United States technology and services markets.