Please ensure Javascript is enabled for purposes of website accessibility
Upcoming Event

Best Places to Work in Virginia

Hamburger Menu Hamburger Menu

byline: Robyn Sidersky

HawkEye 360 acquires RF Solutions

Herndon-based HawkEye 360 has acquired RF Solutions from Westminster, Colorado-based Maxar Intelligence, the satellite analytics company announced last week.

Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.

It’s the first acquisition for HawkEye 360 and gives the company ownership of two new satellites, intellectual property and a data archive. The company now has a constellation of 23 satellites that detect, characterize and geolocate radio frequency signals. The additional satellites will enable HawkEye 360 to expand frequency coverage and the broader range will enhance customer understanding of the signal activity occurring in each region of the world, according to a company news release.

RF Solutions formed from the Aurora Insight acquisition that Maxar Intelligence completed in January 2023.

“The on-orbit assets and expertise of the RF Solutions group from Maxar Intelligence brings a complementary capability to HawkEye 360,” HawkEye 360 President Rob Rainhart said in a statement. “Our existing satellites do very well at precise geolocation and characterization of signals. This technology from the former Aurora Insight team will allow HawkEye 360 to quickly scan gigahertz of bandwidth to efficiently map active frequencies at a regional level. We look forward to rapidly integrating these powerful capabilities and talented personnel into the company to further accelerate the value we bring to our clients.”

HawkEye 360 had about 175 employees before the acquisition and will add 11 more as part of the deal, according to the company.

In October, HawkEye 360 closed its Series D-1 funding round with another $10 million, for a total of $68 million in the round. HawkEye 360 plans to launch another dozen satellites in 2024. In January, three HawkEye 360 satellites went into orbit during Rocket Lab’s first launch in the United States, which took place at NASA’s Wallops Island facility. The company plans to have 20 clusters with three satellites each by 2025.

In 2022, HawkEye 360 opened a 19,000-square-foot facility to boost the production of its satellites.

Lynchburg and Danville law firms to merge

The law firms of Petty, Livingston, Dawson & Richards in Lynchburg and Southern Virginia Legal (SoVa Legal) in Danville will merge to become PLDR Law beginning Jan. 1, 2024, the two law firms announced Wednesday.

Together, the two firms will jointly have 16 attorneys and have offices in Lynchburg and Danville, serving communities across Central and Southern Virginia, according to a news release announcing the merger.

Scott Kowalski, president of Petty, Livingston, Dawson & Richards, will be president of the newly merged firm. Steven Gould, founder and managing attorney of SoVa Legal, will chair the firm’s transactional practice and manage the Danville office. Holly Trent will join the new firm to lead its health care practice. Trent was most recently senior vice president and chief legal officer of Centra Health.

Kowalski practices construction law, surety law and litigation and has practiced since 1995. He clerked at the U.S. Court of Federal Claims and practiced for more than a decade in McLean for Watt, Tieder, Hoffar & Fitzgerald. He returned to his hometown of Lynchburg to join the firm in 2009. He attended William & Mary for his bachelor’s in history and earned his law degree at George Mason University School of Law.

“We are thrilled to announce this merger of two accomplished firms,” Kowalski said in a statement. “Petty Livingston has experienced significant growth the last two years, and SoVa Legal has developed a tremendous reputation assisting clients who are helping to drive economic revitalization in the Danville area. By combining our resources and talents, we can expand our offerings to clients even further. The addition of Holly Trent is a key component of that expansion.”

Before Gould formed SoVa Legal, he co-founded Byrnes Gould Law and practiced at Williams Mullen in Richmond and Clement Wheatley in Danville. He has served as chair of the Virginia Bar Association’s Young Lawyers Division and will serve on the VBA’s Board of Governors in 2024, a board he has previously served on. Gould also was on the Board of Directors of the Virginia Law Foundation. Before attending law school, Gould spent five years as a policy adviser in the governor’s office in Richmond, where he worked on economic and workforce development, agriculture, housing and executive clemency. He worked under U.S. Sen. Mark Warner and U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine when each served as governor. He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina and his law degree from the University of Virginia.

“We have enjoyed a strong collaboration with the attorneys at Petty Livingston in recent years to supplement the business, employment, and estate planning services we offer to our clients. The opportunity to join forces allows us to ensure that the Danville market continues to be served by a robust, full-service firm that can grow with our community,” Gould said in a statement.

This story has been corrected since publication.

Wholesale electrical distributor plans Va. expansion

Cooperative Electric Energy Utility Supply (CEEUS), a South Carolina-based electrical distributor that serves cooperatives, municipals and investor-owned utilities, plans to invest $37 million into a new 187,000-square-foot warehouse and distribution facility in Hanover County, creating 30 jobs, Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced Thursday.

The facility will support CEEUS’s customers in Virginia, Maryland and Delaware. A wholesale electrical distributor headquartered in West Columbia, South Carolina, CEEUS supplies electric cooperatives with materials and equipment and provides services such as tool repair and a rubber goods testing facility.

The new facility, which is a shell building currently being retrofitted, will be operational in the first quarter of 2024, Jennifer Howell, CEEUS’s director of human resources and loss control, told Virginia Business. Hiring is already underway for the 30 full-time jobs, which are mostly distribution and warehousing jobs, but also sales and inventory control.

“With almost 50 years in the electric utility industry, we are confident we have the experience and distribution knowledge to build strong supply lines for the electric utility and broadband markets in Virginia, Maryland and Delaware while developing supportive relationships in our new community of Hanover County,” CEEUS President and CEO Chad Capps said in a statement. “We are excited to establish in Virginia what we have built in South Carolina.”

The Virginia Economic Development Partnership worked with Hanover County and the Greater Richmond Partnership to secure the project for Virginia, which competed with North Carolina and South Carolina for it.

“Major distributors like CEEUS are repeatedly attracted to Virginia’s strategic location, world-class infrastructure and leading position in the supply chain management industry,” Youngkin said in a statement. “We thank CEEUS for selecting the commonwealth and strengthening our burgeoning logistics sector, positioning the company for success as it expands its electrical wholesale business into the mid-Atlantic.”

Arko names new CFO

Arko has named Robert E. Giammatteo as its chief financial officer and executive vice president, according to a Thursday announcement from the Henrico County-based Fortune 500 company that is one of the nation’s largest convenience store operators and fuel wholesalers.

Giammatteo will start his new role on Jan. 2, 2024. He will also serve as CFO of Arko subsidiary GPM Investments. Giammatteo takes the place of retiring Arko CFO Don Bassell, who has spent 17 years with the company and will stay on until April 2024 to assist with the transition.

Giammatteo joins Arko from Pittsburgh-based grocery chain Giant Eagle, where he was executive vice president, CFO and chief transportation officer. Before that, he served nearly 15 years in executive finance roles with retailers Ascena Retail Group, which owns brands such as Lane Bryant, Ann Taylor and Loft, and VF Corp., which owns The North Face and Vans.

Giammatteo has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as an MBA from MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He also has a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

“We expect that Robb’s leadership and incredibly relevant, multisegment retail experience will significantly benefit the Arko team,” Arko Chairman, President and CEO Arie Kotler said in a statement. “As our business grows and continues to expand, his expertise in finance, strategic leadership and transformational management will help us skillfully reach new levels of development and management as one of the leading public companies in the convenience store industry.”

Arko is the parent company of GPM Investments and brought in $72 million in net income in fiscal 2022, compared with $59.4 million the previous year. It has about 1,500 employees in Virginia and nearly 14,000 worldwide.

 

Norfolk HeadWaters casino could break ground in spring 2024

With the clock ticking on HeadWaters Resort & Casino’s statutory requirement to open a permanent resort casino by November 2025 — five years after Norfolk voters approved it —  the developer has submitted new plans to the City of Norfolk, aiming to start construction in spring 2024.

The Norfolk Architecture Review Board is set to review the Pamunkey Indian Tribe’s revised casino plans at its Jan. 8, 2024, meeting. Following that meeting, the plans must still be reviewed by the city’s planning commission and ultimately approved by Norfolk City Council before any work can begin. The casino’s development team last submitted plans over the summer.

Instead of building the $500 million casino and resort in two phases with a gap between each phase, plans call for the development to be constructed continuously with the casino opening while the hotel, spa and other parts are still under construction. The casino and resort would also no longer be on the waterfront of the Elizabeth River and would have a smaller footprint.

To meet the city’s November 2025 deadline for the casino’s opening, construction would need to start by spring of next year, said Jay Smith, spokesman for HeadWaters Resort & Casino, which is being developed in a partnership between the King William-based Pamunkey Indian Tribe and Tennessee billionaire Jon Yarbrough.

Construction would start on the north side of the property and progress south. 

“Our continuous construction is in response to the city wanting to see what the entire project [looks like] and getting the whole thing built as quickly as possible,” Smith told Virginia Business.

Once the developer receives approvals for the plan and a development certificate, it can purchase the land from the city and get shovels in the ground. It also must secure a license from the Virginia Lottery Board for the casino to be operational. 

Three casinos approved by Virginia voters in November 2020 have already opened in Danville, Bristol and Portsmouth. Richmond voters in November again rejected opening a casino in the state’s capital.

Plans call for the nearly 1 million-square-foot Norfolk resort and casino to have 800 to 1,000 slot machines and 20 to 25 table games when it opens, Smith said, but those numbers would double to 1,800 to 2,000 slot machines and 50 table games by the time the development is fully completed. 

Construction plans and a detailed construction timeline have not been submitted to the city, but Smith says it’s because there are so many moving parts to the development. “This is a fluid project with many moving parts and … it’s impossible to give the completion date of the entire project,” he said. “But rest assured, we are working as fast as we can to get the entire project open.”

And because those plans have not been filed, Norfolk Mayor Kenneth Cooper Alexander said he remains skeptical about the development. He said he does not want to see a delay between the casino opening and everything else promised, including the hotel. A delay in construction would be unacceptable, he said.

Another wrinkle: At the same time the casino and resort would be constructed, the city is making plans with the Army Corps of Engineers to build a $2.6 billion seawall project to include eight miles of floodwalls, nearly a mile of levees, 11 tide gates and 10 pumping stations along the Elizabeth River. Part of that wall would be near the existing Harbor Park stadium and the casino.

Because of the seawall, the casino and resort would be on a smaller footprint, which necessitated a change in the design and size of the casino property. Instead of buying 13 or 14 acres to build the casino and resort, the developer could — with city council approval — purchase fewer acres for the development and it would not be on the waterfront, according to the plans submitted to the city. The seawall may end up on city property but the developer is still working out details about the seawall with the city.

Of the 963,000 or so square feet of the planned casino and resort, about half is a parking deck with about 1,200 spaces. Another 45,000 square feet will be the main casino floor (eventually expanded to 65,000 square feet) and restaurants, including a 180-seat sports bar restaurant with 25 seats along a bar, a grab-and-go quick service restaurant, a food hall with three or four restaurant concepts and a steak and seafood restaurant. This would all be elevated — with some of the parking garage underneath, raising parts such as the casino floor — to accommodate views over the planned seawall. 

The 300-room hotel would have a rooftop pool facing the ballpark where the Triple-A Norfolk Tides baseball team plays and a 10,000 square-foot ballroom with 8,000 square feet of meeting space.  

The Pamunkey Tribe is working with construction firms Newport News-based W.M. Jordan and Boston-based Suffolk Construction, Richmond-based architectural design firm Baskervill and Dallas-based HKS on engineering and architecture.

The project could create 2,000 construction jobs and 2,480 full-time jobs when it’s fully open.

The HeadWaters project has gone through multiple iterations since voters approved the project in a November 2020 referendum. At that time, developers pitched a $500-plus million resort casino with a 300-room hotel, restaurants, an entertainment venue, a rooftop pool, thousands of slot machines and as many as 150 table games.

Later, HeadWaters’s developers twice announced plans for a temporary casino, first inside the ballpark, and later as a single-story temporary casino in the Harbor Park parking lot. 

McGuireWoods names RVA, Norfolk managing partners

McGuireWoods, Virginia’s oldest and largest law firm, has appointed new managing partners in Richmond and Norfolk, the firm announced Friday.

Janet Peyton will lead the Richmond office, and Michael Herring, the current Richmond office managing partner, will become chair of the firm’s commercial litigation department in January 2024. Peyton practices intellectual property, data privacy and security law. She has been with McGuireWoods since 1995, according to her LinkedIn profile, and is a graduate of Tulane University Law School and Duke University. Peyton is the first woman to be named managing partner of the Richmond office.

Richard Cromwell will succeed John Padgett in leading the Norfolk office. He focuses on complex civil litigation, including business and contract disputes, bankruptcy adversary proceedings, product liability, toxic torts and fiduciary and estate matters. He has taken more than 100 cases to verdict in federal and state courts. Cromwell is a graduate of the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University and William & Mary, and he clerked for the Hon. J. Calvitt Clarke Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. Padgett will remain a partner.

Hampton Roads home sales down in November

Home sales in Hampton Roads were down in November, both compared with October and November 2022, the Real Estate Information Network (REIN) reported in December.

A total of 1,690 settled sales were down 10.77% from October and 12.12% from November 2022, according to REIN. Pending sales were also down 7.69% compared with October and 7.16% compared with November 2022. The median sales price of homes sold in November was down slightly, from $330,140 in October to $330,000 in November. But it’s up from $302,000 in November 2022.

There were 3,980 active residential listings, up slightly compared to October (3,968) and up about 3% compared with November 2022. Also, the median days on the market was 19, the same as October and down one day compared with the year prior.

“Traditionally, buyers get focused on other things around the holidays and sales see a decline,” Jon McAchran of AtCoastal Realty and president of REIN’s board, said in a statement. “That said, this is a great time of the year for serious homebuyers since competition will probably be a bit less intense for a couple of months.”

The inventory of houses for sale has remained steady and is up slightly from last month and from November 2022.

Bon Secours tops off new Suffolk hospital

Bon Secours held a topping-out ceremony Thursday for its $80 million, 98,000-square-foot hospital, Harbour View Medical Center, in Suffolk, expected to be completed in 2025.

The surgically focused hospital will have 18 medical/surgical beds and four operating rooms and serve as an extension of the services offered on the campus, which currently has an emergency department, outpatient imaging, outpatient lab services, an ambulatory surgical center and physician practices. The services will be expanded to include a hospital with inpatient beds and operating rooms.

In the ceremony, a construction crew lifted the final steel beam on the new medical center, which had signatures from doctors, nurses, associates and community members.

Bon Secours broke ground on the hospital in October 2022.

Roanoke apartment complex sells for $7.25M

Mount Pleasant Villas apartments, a 90-unit community in Roanoke, has changed hands.

Raleigh, North Carolina-based Sweetbay Capital, a real estate private equity firm, acquired the apartment complex from JC Capital Rutrough for $7.25 million in early December, according to Cushman & Wakefield | Thalhimer. 

It’s the company’s third acquisition in Roanoke.

Clay Taylor from Cushman & Wakefield | Thalhimer’s Capital Markets Group represented Sweetbay Capital in the purchase of the property.

Sweetbay owns multiple multifamily communities in Virginia and the Carolinas. Mount Pleasant Villas is the company’s fourth acquisition.

Henrico greenlights $450M live-work-play community

The Henrico County Board of Supervisors on Dec. 12 greenlit Kinsale Center, a massive redevelopment project in the Willow Lawn area from insurance company Kinsale Capital Group and Richmond-based Marchetti Development. The $450 million mixed-use development is expected to bring nearly 700 residences, an eight-story “high end” hotel, 32,300 square feet of retail and 345,000 square feet of new office space to the 29-acre former Elevance Health (formerly Anthem) campus at the northeast intersection of West Broad Street and Staples Mill Road. 

According to county documents, the project would be developed over several phases, with the first phase including a hotel and mixed-use building, as well as 261 apartments. The second phase would include a residential building with 258 units on the northeast corner at the intersection of Maywill and Thalbro streets. Phase 3 would include two new six-story office buildings and a parking garage with nearly 1,400 spaces along Thalbro Street and at its intersection with Staples Mill Road. Phase 4 would include another new office building at the intersection of Staples Mill Road and West Broad Street and a mixed-use building with 173 units along Staples Mill Road, according to a Henrico County staff report and information presented to the Board of Supervisors.  

The residential buildings would be five to seven stories each, and the office buildings would be around the same scale. The development would have 5-foot-wide sidewalks and may add 10-foot sidewalks along new interior streets. The retail space, taken by upscale boutiques, would be incorporated into the office, multifamily and hotel buildings, 

There are two office buildings already on the site.

One of those buildings, the older of the two, on the north side, will be renovated inside and out “to look like a 2023 modern office building,” said Joe Marchetti Jr., cofounder of Marchetti Development. That building will become Kinsale’s new headquarters and is about 254,000 square feet. Kinsale will take 215,000 square feet and Elevance will use the basement, about 35,000 square feet, he said. It should be ready by fall 2025. The rest of the projects would be delivered starting in 2026.

Marchetti said the focus is to get the Kinsale in its building and then start marketing the other sites as they go forward.

In the county documents, the project is described as “a cutting-edge modern mixed-use neighborhood nested within the vibrant community of Henrico County.” Kinsale Capital Group owns the project, and alongside the developer, Marchetti, Baskervill is the design architect and Kimley-Horn is the civil engineer. 

In this area of the county, near the border with Richmond, there’s an emergence of several communities that are redeveloping as live-work-play centers, said Anthony Romanello, executive director of the Henrico Economic Development Authority.

Marchetti said the property is the gateway to Henrico County, coming out of the City of Richmond, and one of the most centrally located.

One aspect he pointed out as particularly important is that a full-service hotel is included in the plans, which he said is a differentiator for that area. Marchetti said it could have about 150 rooms but the number is flexible.