NextNav goes public with Spartacus Acquisition Corp.

GPS company NextNav and Spartacus Acquisition Corp, a special-purpose acquisition company, has entered into a definitive merger agreement that will result in NextNav becoming a public company. The combined company will be named NextNav Inc. Its common stock and warrants will be listed on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “NN” and “NNW”, respectively.

Gross proceeds of up to $408 million from the business combination are expected to be used to fuel growth in its current businesses, continue to build NextNav’s next-generation GPS platform, expand products (one of which is already deployed in 4,400 cities), and to expand its land-based radio positioning and timing network.

The NextNav platform serves a $100 billion global total addressable market in public safety, E911, mass-market consumer apps, eVTOLs, UAVs and autonomous vehicles, internet of things (IoT), critical infrastructure and other sectors. Beyond its technology and intellectual property, NextNav owns a portfolio of nationwide spectrum licenses for 2.4 billion MHz-PoPs of 900 MHz spectrum.

Gary Parsons, former chairman of the board of Sirius XM Radio, has served as chairman of NextNav’s board of directors for the past 10 years and will continue in that role. Peter Aquino, chairman of the board and CEO of Spartacus, will also join the NextNav board upon closing of the business combination. Aquino has led several companies through fiber and wireless operations and network deployments, and the development of overlay technologies designed to drive new revenue streams.

NextNav will continue to be led by Ganesh Pattabiraman, the company’s co-founder, CEO and president. Pattabiraman, who started at Qualcomm, has experience in building scalable location technologies using terrestrial and satellite-based technologies,

In addition, the full NextNav management team — co-founder Arun Raghupathy, SVP of Engineering; Chris Gates, CFO; and David Knutson, SVP of Network Operations and Deployment — will continue to manage NextNav.

Hogan Lovells is advising NextNav with corporate and finance partner Randy Segal and partners Adam Brown, John Duke, and Jessica Bisignano leading the team. Senior associates Michael Rogers and Liz Banks, and associate Chelsea Shrader assisted as well.