Raytheon to Acquire BBN

Wade Roush9/1/09

In a convergence of two legendary Boston-area technology concerns, Waltham, MA-based defense contracting giant Raytheon (NYSE: RTN) said today it will acquire Cambridge, MA-based BBN Technologies in a deal expected to close by the end of this year. Financial terms weren’t disclosed. BBN pioneered the development of the Arpanet, the predecessor to today’s Internet, and continues to have strengths in networking, speech recognition and translation technologies, quantum cryptography and communications, and related fields. The privately held firm was acquired by Cambridge, MA-based venture firm General Catalyst and Palo Alto, CA-based Accel Partners from Verizon Communications in 2004. Raytheon said BBN will become part of its Network Centric Systems division. We’ll have more details on the acquisition in a follow-up story.

Wade Roush is Xconomy's chief correspondent and editor of Xconomy San Francisco. You can e-mail him at wroush@xconomy.com or follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/wroush.