ViaSat (NASDAQ: [[ticker:VSAT]]), the Carlsbad, CA-based satellite communications company raised $133 million in equity funding in December, according to a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. ViaSat spokesman Bruce Rowe tells me the company issued about 4.3 million shares for the stock component of the company’s $568 million stock-and-cash purchase of Colorado’s WildBlue Communications, the high-speed Internet service provider. That deal was announced in October and closed Dec. 15.
In an interesting reprise of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss,” ViaSat named senior vice president Tom Moore to head the company’s new WildBlue subsidiary. Moore co-founded WildBlue in 1998 and served as the company’s CEO until 2005 and as a director until 2008.
ViaSat, founded in 1986, specializes in satellite-based communications and other digital communication products. The company has 2,100 employees and reported sales of $628 million in the fiscal year that ended in April. ViaSat CEO Mark Dankberg has said the company’s acquisition of WildBlue, a longtime business partner, is key to helping ViaSat reduce the business risk of its planned satellite venture. ViaSat said last year it planned to build and launch its own $450 million communications satellite to provide high-speed Internet service.
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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