D.C.’s FiscalNote Inc., which owns CQ Roll Call, has acquired Frontier Strategy Group LLC, a market intelligence and advisory firm also based in the nation’s capital.
It’s the latest in a string of acquisitions that FiscalNote, which provides a dashboard for legal and regulatory documents, has made in the last year as it prepares to go public via a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, in early 2022.
Terms of the deal with Frontier Strategy Group, which does business as FrontierView, weren't disclosed, but FiscalNote said Monday the price was “at multiples in line with previous transactions of similar scale." It said it expects the deal to add to its earnings starting this year.
Current FrontierView CEO Richard Leggett and the rest of its management will retain their roles at the head of the company, which operates globally but has “hubs” in D.C., London and Singapore. It lists Adidas, Cisco, Clorox, Medtronic, Nike and others among its clients and has a partnership with The Wall Street Journal to couple news stories with its own data and analysis for a combination that “helps executives understand global risks and opportunities,” according to the partnership’s website.
FiscalNote announced its plan earlier this month to go public via a SPAC merger with Duddell Street Acquisition Corp. (NASDAQ: DSAC), with plans to trade on the Nasdaq stock exchange with the ticker symbol "NOTE." That deal values FiscalNote at $1.3 billion and is expected to close in the first quarter of 2022.
The local company has been acquiring companies at a rapid pace ahead of that transaction, helped along by a massive $160 million raise in December — this is FiscalNote's 10th such purchase since the start of this year alone. Most recently, it acquired fellow D.C. companies FactSquared and Fireside, Australia’s TimeBase, New York’s Predata, Singapore’s Equilibrium, Oxford Analytica of the United Kingdom, Austin, Texas-based Board.org, Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Forge.AI Inc. and Curate Solutions of Madison, Wisconsin.
The company has previously said it's targeting $173 million in revenue in 2022 — including revenue from its acquisitions still in the works — and $256 million, with an expectation to become profitable, in 2023, per an investor presentation.
FiscalNote is “immediately seeing the benefits we outlined as part of our announcement to bring the company public,” its co-founder and CEO, Tim Hwang, said in a statement Monday. “FiscalNote remains on track to exit 2021 at a revenue run-rate in line with the projections and M&A goals set out in our business combination with Duddell Street.”
