Thrive Holdings agreed to acquire ADT Inc. in an all-cash deal that values the home-security company at about $15.3 billion including debt, handing one of the oldest names in American security to an owner that plans to rebuild it around software and artificial intelligence.
ADT shareholders will receive $10 a share, a 45.6% premium to the stock’s unaffected close of $6.87 on Oct. 27 and 52.1% above its 30-day volume-weighted average. The price gives ADT an equity value of about $7.6 billion. ADT’s board approved the agreement unanimously.
Apollo supplies the debt
Funds managed by affiliates of Apollo Global Management Inc. have provided all of the financing commitments, and the deal is not contingent on financing. Closing is expected in the first quarter of 2027, subject to ADT shareholder approval and U.S. antitrust clearance. After that, ADT’s stock will stop trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
The agreement includes a 30-day go-shop. With help from its advisers, ADT can seek competing proposals until 11:59 p.m. New York time on Nov. 28, with a possible 10-day extension for parties that submit bids during the window, and it may terminate the agreement to accept a superior offer.
A different kind of buyer
Thrive Holdings is the permanent-capital arm spun out of Josh Kushner’s venture firm Thrive Capital, and OpenAI is both a partner and an investor. Rather than buying companies to sell them within a few years, the firm holds businesses indefinitely and embeds its own engineers to automate how work gets done. It already owns more than 75 companies in accounting, IT services and the built environment, and ADT will become the base of a new smart-home security unit.
Thrive said it sees room to use new technology to cut false alarms, give monitoring staff better information when an alert fires and catch equipment problems earlier. ADT, which has more than 12,000 employees and the largest network of security technicians in the U.S., said its data and privacy policies will not change and that no new data sharing will happen without customer consent. ADT will still release third-quarter results on Nov. 3 but will not take analyst questions.
