Bermuda cybersecurity company QuoVadis is set to be taken over by a Swiss industry giant.

The company has signed a letter of intent to join forces with Zug-based WiseKey, a leading Swiss cybersecurity firm.

Roman Brunner, chief executive officer of QuoVadis, said the move would benefit both companies in the global marketplace.

“With our excellent industry reputation, global client base and proven sales and operations teams located in important markets, we believe QuoVadis will complement and strengthen WiseKey’s vision and drive to market,” he said.

QuoVadis was founded in 2000 by Anthony Nagel and Stephen Davidson and already operates in Switzerland, as well as Britain, Germany, Holland and Belgium and elsewhere, serving clients around the world.

The company began certification authority operations in 2001 and has grown throughout the years to include services like cloud hosting, disaster recovery encryption and digital signatures.

It now works with 3,000 customers worldwide, including more than 300 large capitalisation companies, with around $17 million in revenue predicted for this year alone and $20 million for 2017.

Carlos Moreira, chairman of WiseKey, said: “We are delighted to sign this letter of intent to potentially acquire QuoVadis, whose operations we have respected for many years.

He added that the proposed deal would allow WiseKey to take part in the huge EU electronic identification and trust services for electronic transactions, governed by the EU’s eIDAS regulations, and to position WiseKey as a key company in the Digital Switzerland drive designed to make the Alpine nation “a major player of the fourth industrial revolution”.

Mr Moreira said that “QuoVadis has been a leading managed public key infrastructure provider in Europe for over a decade” and had an important position in the Transport Layer Security and its predecessor, Secure Sockets Layer market.

He added that QuoVadis had added electronic signature security to “hundreds of millions of online transactions with a strong nexus serving Swiss clients in the financial, industrial and media sectors”.

“This acquisition will be immediately accretive to WiseKey and the QuoVadis stand-alone business is projected to add over $20 million of profitable revenues in 2017, while we explore further synergistic opportunities to grow our client base and geographic footprint,” he said.

Mr Davidson, a director of Quo Vadis and vice-president of product development and also deputy chairman of Bermuda Press (Holdings), the parent company of The Royal Gazette, added: “As a cybersecurity company, QuoVadis is active in a market which is going through surging growth.

“As more electronic transactions go online, the importance of the technology we provide gets greater.”

Mr Davidson said what was once a Bermuda start-up now competes on the world stage against major companies.

He added: “It will benefit us being part of a larger group.”

And Mr Davidson said there were also sectors both companies were involved in so there were “significant areas of mutual interest”.

He said: “I think it reflects well on Bermuda that a Bermudian start-up hi-tech company is able to expand internationally.

“QuoVadis serves a broad range of very large capitalisation companies worldwide, so we’re able to compete on this world stage in a very competitive cybersecurity market and this transaction will make it possible for us to go to the next level.

“From our start-up in Bermuda to providing the security around these hundreds of millions of transactions around the world is a big achievement for a Bermudian company.”

It is expected that both companies will have completed due diligence and signed a binding agreement by February, with the deal closed by the end of the first quarter of 2017.

For a timeline of QuoVadis as a company, from its inception in 2000, click on the PDF link under “Related Media”