SimpliSafe to Join Everon Owner GTCR’s Security Holdings

SimpliSafe announced today it has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by private equity firm GTCR from Hellman & Friedman.

Financial terms were not disclosed. Bloomberg previously reported an enterprise value of about $2.5 billion including debt and financing talks with HPS Investment Partners for roughly $1.2 billion. When Hellman & Friedman took a controlling stake in 2018, TechCrunch pegged the valuation at about $1 billion.

The Boston-based provider is positioned as the No. 3 residential security brand behind ADT and Ring. It pioneered DIY systems with 24/7 professional monitoring and no long-term contracts. In recent years, SimpliSafe has emphasized “proactive protection,” including AI-powered Active Guard outdoor technology and expanded whole-home offerings. GTCR, a long-time security investor, said it will support continued product and service innovation and expansion.

SimpliSafe CEO Christian Cerda will remain in his role, while founders Chad and Eleanor Laurans will stay on as substantial investors and board members, according to an announcement. The companies expect the transaction to close in the fourth quarter of 2025, pending customary approvals.

What the deal could signal

GTCR’s security pedigree runs deep. The firm closed on ADT’s commercial division in October 2023 and backed its relaunch as Everon — with longtime partner Tim Whall on the board — following earlier platforms such as SecurityLink, HSM and Protection 1, making SimpliSafe its fifth security alarm investment. With SimpliSafe now under agreement — and Everon also announcing it will acquire ADT’s multifamily business — GTCR is assembling a portfolio that spans consumer residential and commercial markets.

Industry veteran Kirk MacDowell, founder of the consulting firm MacGuard Security Advisors, sees the move as a measured bid to command national scale across distinct go-to-market lanes.

“I think [GTCR/Everon] want to become a national player again, and probably one of the biggest national players in the U.S. They can now offer everything from residential to commercial but do it under separate strategies with separate second-tier leadership,” he said.

In MacDowell’s view, this isn’t a pure market-share consolidation play so much as a strategy to “own” share within separate verticals where SimpliSafe has been “coming upstream” with analytics and AI and even testing dealer-assisted models. At the recent CEDIA Expo, the company said it will tap security and AV integrators and installers to expand into this market.

MacDowell cautioned against rushing any back-end consolidation. He expects SimpliSafe’s and Everon’s monitoring operations to stay independent for now to preserve best-in-class focus — residential for SimpliSafe, commercial for Everon — while still sharing operational learnings where it makes sense. “A mistake… would be to try to merge those two together too quickly,” he said.

He also sees competitive moves ahead. ADT, he suggested, will likely keep pressing its attrition improvements and could lean harder into insurance-adjacent offerings such as water-damage mitigation. MacDowell calls Vivint the wild card and expects it to lean into M&A rather than incremental moves. With NRG as owner and door-to-door growth no longer the engine it once was, he says the logical play is a “very, very large acquisition” of another residential-centric company to shore up scale, distribution and service density, essentially “circling the wagons.”

And although SimpliSafe doesn’t run on Alarm.com, MacDowell notes that Everon is a “very large” commercial user. He expects Alarm.com, which he calls “always two chess moves ahead of the industry,” to move even closer to Everon to ensure it can supply whatever the commercial business needs.

For independent residential dealers, MacDowell’s advice is to compete on relationship and education, not fear. MacGuard customer-satisfaction surveys indicate about 30% of customers want to hear more about services their provider already offers — an opening for integrators to reduce churn and raise ARPU by communicating value more consistently.

Demand tailwinds favor add-on services

Elizabeth Parks, president of Parks Associates, frames the acquisition as validation of growth runway in residential security. “It’s notable that SimpliSafe has transitioned from one private equity owner to another, a clear signal that investors see more growth potential as the company broadens its reach,” she said. Parks’ firm tracks 8,000 U.S. internet households each quarter and reports adoption at multi-year highs:

• 48% of U.S. households had a security solution in Q2 2025, up from 38% in July 2022.
  
  
• Security system ownership rose from 31% (2022) to 34% (2025), while device-only adoption doubled from 7% to 14%.
  
  
• 35% of households subscribed to a paid security service in 2025, up from 30% in 2022; device-tied paid services climbed from 5% to 9%.

SimpliSafe ranks third among self-installed system brands — behind Ring Alarm and ADT— and third among professional monitoring providers — behind ADT and Ring — according to Parks Associates’ research. She added that the “next wave” of growth will be driven by add-on services beyond traditional intrusion: in 2025, 61% of system owners expressed interest in fire and gas safety monitoring, 59% in vehicle monitoring, 57% in water-leak monitoring, with more than half citing interest in advanced video analytics and cloud storage. Even pet monitoring drew interest from 50% of owners, evidence that lifestyle use cases are broadening system value.

Multifamily emerges as a logical adjacency

Parks also noted adjacency opportunities GTCR may evaluate across its portfolio. With amenity technology entrenched in multifamily housing — and security systems offered by 39% of luxury and 24% of non-luxury property owners — SimpliSafe could eventually explore offerings tuned for that segment. That potential ties to MacDowell’s view that multi-tenant environments behave like “commercial on steroids,” where access control, video and visitor management converge with operational workflows.

Taken together, these dynamics point beyond intrusion to a services-led platform where security orchestrates the broader property experience, single-family and multifamily alike.

“Increasingly, the security system itself is becoming the hub that connects and controls other devices and the attached services in the home,” Parks said.

J.P. Morgan Securities and Raymond James served as financial advisors to SimpliSafe. Goodwin Procter LLP served as legal counsel to SimpliSafe and Chad and Eleanor Laurans. Kirkland & Ellis LLP provided legal counsel to GTCR. Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP provided legal counsel to Hellman & Friedman.