Palo Alto – March 12, 2021 – Cooley advised Achronix, a fabless semiconductor corporation, on its agreement to combine with special purpose acquisition company ACE Convergence Acquisition. Estimated to have a $2.1 billion post-transaction equity value, the combined operating entity will be named Achronix Semiconductor Corporation and will be listed on the Nasdaq under the symbol "ACHX." Partners Matt Hemington, Miguel Vega and John McKenna led the Cooley team advising Achronix.
Upon closing, which is expected by the end of 1H, the combined company will receive up to $330 million in cash, including $150 million in gross proceeds from a concurrent PIPE financing and up to $230 million in cash held in trust by ACE, assuming no redemptions by ACE shareholders, less $50 million paid to Achronix's existing shareholders.
"The next era of growth and opportunity is in the trillions of connected devices providing compute-intensive intelligence, all fueled by network connectivity and 5G," Achronix CEO Robert Blake said in a news release. "We are excited to partner with Behrooz and the ACE team at this inflection point in the company's trajectory to capitalize on our design pipeline in excess of $1.1 billion, as we continue to create value as a public company."
Achronix offers high-end field-programmable gate arrays-based data acceleration solutions, designed to address high-performance, compute-intensive and real-time processing applications. Achronix's offerings are enhanced by ready-to-use accelerator cards targeting AI, machine learning, networking and data center applications. All Achronix products are fully supported by a complete and optimized range of Achronix software tools called ACE, which enables customers to quickly develop their own custom applications.