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Feb. 12, 2010

Wireless tower provider and installer InSite Wireless Group says it has received an unspecified round of funding from Catalyst Investors.

The new capital will be used to continue to grow its business, including building more towers and distributed mobile antenna systems and acquiring other tower assets.

InSite Wireless and Catalyst Investors have a long history of working closely together, said InSite CEO David Weisman.

The most recent iteration of InSite was founded four years ago by the former management of Mountain Union Telecom L.L.C., but the two companies have known each other since the 1990s when Shipman and Clapp were with TD Bank and invested in Mountain Union.

InSite Wireless Group began in the year 2000 as InSite Wireless L.L.C., a separate company started by senior Mountain Union managers as an affiliated business focusing on the in-building segment of wireless infrastructure.

After the sale of Mountain Union to Crown Castle International in 2006, InSite Wireless Group was formed as the parent company to InSite Wireless, and the new tower and backhaul services divisions – InSite Towers L.L.C. and InSite Connect L.L.C. – were created.

Weisman says that, as of Dec. 31, 2009, InSite owned 351 towers and about a dozen DAS projects in 21 U.S. states. InSite's towers are primarily located in Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas and California. The company is building out some significant DAS projects, including one for the Boston subway system and the new Minnesota Twins baseball stadium.

It also has built an indoor DAS system in the Wynn and Encore resorts in Las Vegas and an outdoor DAS system in Wisconsin. While the two companies aren't disclosing the investment amount, Chris Shipman, a general partner at Catalyst says that the private-equity firm usually invests between $10 million and $20 million.

Shipman and Todd Clapp, also a general partner with Catalyst, will join InSite’s board of directors as well.

Shipman and Weisman both said that the continued buildout of 3G and 4G networks are both looking good for tower installation companies of all sizes.

“It’s a relatively fragmented industry,” Shipman said, noting that even though there are extremely large tower companies like American Tower Corp. and Crown Castle, the sector also is populated by thousands of much smaller companies that own just a few towers.

New York-based Catalyst focuses its investments on media and telecommunications companies, Shipman said. Catalyst previously has invested in TCP Communications, which was sold to Global Tower Partners in 2006 and Aloha Partners, which sold its 700 MHz assets to AT&T Inc. in 2008 for $2.5 billion, and was also an early investor in Clearwire Corp., Shipman said.

“This deal, in combination with our existing credit facility, will enable us to acquire and build additional towers and DAS facilities to serve the wireless communications industry,” Weisman said in a prepared statement.

“Our team has been investing in the wireless tower sector for more than fifteen years and we recognize the opportunities that InSite has to grow and thrive,” said Shipman. “Mobile service operators continue to expand their networks as usage increases rapidly, driven in particular by the mass adoption of smartphones."

"InSite is the ideal partner for us due to its exceptional management team, scalable platform, and the lease-up potential offered by its existing towers and DAS facilities,” added Shipman.

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Source: InSite Wireless Group LLC.