Who Owns ADT?

American District Telegraph formed in Baltimore in 1874 through the consolidation of dozens of telegraph messenger companies. Its first product was a call-box system letting businesses summon messengers, watchmen, and eventually police and fire response over telegraph lines, the remote monitoring concept a century before the term existed.

Through the early twentieth century the call-box network became a burglar alarm business. The company survived ownership by Western Union and the conglomerate era, and by the 1980s the red ADT shield and blue octagon were fixtures on American lawns.

UK industrialist Michael Ashcroft's Hawley Group acquired ADT in 1987 and built it into the dominant US security monitoring company. Tyco International bought ADT in 1997 for $11.6 billion in stock, folding it into a sprawling conglomerate.

Tyco's 2012 breakup spun ADT out as a standalone public company. Apollo Global Management then took it private in 2016 for roughly $6.9 billion, merged it with Protection 1 and ASG Security into the largest monitoring operation in the country, and re-listed it on the NYSE in January 2018.

The modern refocus came in stages: Google's $450 million investment and Nest integration in 2020, State Farm's $1.2 billion stake in 2022, the $1.6 billion sale of ADT Commercial to GTCR in 2023 (later renamed Everon), and the 2024 exit from residential solar, which had been an expensive failed diversification.

Fiscal 2025 revenue reached $5.1 billion with the company delivering on all guidance metrics, buying back shares under a new $1.5 billion authorization, and running the business as a pure residential and small-business monitoring company.