Beaverton computer maker CTL Inc. sold a controlling stake in the company to a private equity firm as the company gears up for its next chapter.
Seattle and San Francisco-based Columbia River Partners are the new owners and longtime president Erik Stromquist was promoted to CEO. Founder David Kim, who was CEO, will retire.
CTL has been on a growth trajectory for years driven by adoption of cloud-based computing and its close ties to the Google Chrome operating system. The company has been a long-time partner with Google and supplying Chromebooks to K-12 education customers.
The company has about 50 employees, mostly in Beaverton. It also has small teams in Europe and Singapore, said Stromquist.
The company doesn’t release revenue details, but Stromquist said it is approaching $100 million a year and sells hundreds of thousands of units a units a year. With its strong financial performance, he said the company has been fielding investment inquiries for years.
“We wanted to formalize that and retained D.A. Davidson to seek different partners,” said Stromquist.
Columbia River Partners was selected because of their commitment to growth and close ties to the Google ecosystem. The investor backs companies in North America that are in hardware, software, industrial and IT services markets. Investment criteria include earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization between $2 million and $15 million and enterprise value of up to $100 million.
CTL has been working in the Google hardware ecosystem since 2014, when it released its first education Chromebooks. That relationship had deepened and two years ago it started working with Logitech to build devices used in the Google Meet video conferencing platform.
With that project, the company was taken to even more countries and operates everywhere there are Google Meet customers, Stromquist said. CTL is now seeing its hardware, which runs the Chrome operating system, growing in enterprise customers.
“Under the leadership of Erik Stromquist and his management team, CTL has grown into a true market leader in Chrome hardware and services for both K-12 and the enterprise. We look forward to partnering with Erik, Alberto, and the rest of the CTL team to execute on multiple growth opportunities and other strategic initiatives," said Pooneet Goel, partner at Columbia River Partners, in a written statement.
In addition to the deal, CTL announced it is building an advisory board and named Alberto Martin, one of the original team members that developed Chrome OS, to it.
This next chapter of CTL will see the company build beyond hardware and into software and services.
“We want to build a platform for customer to have an all-encompassing solution in the Google sphere,” said Stromquist. “We’re adding software and services to make it easier for customers to scale their businesses.”
CTL has been hiring across executive and management levels and is adding a new role to oversee the growing number of partners and distributors around the world. The most challenging roles to hire continue to be warehouse and operations, Stromquist said.
CTL has global customers, but it also has several high-profile local projects as well. It works with Portland Public Schools to deliver equipment as part of the district’s technology initiative, and it provides Chromebooks for the city of Portland’s program to address the Digital Divide, which has been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic.
