Private Equity Just Bought a 2,500-Person Texas Electrical Contractor

Loenbro, a Westminster, Colorado multi-craft contractor, announced on September 14 that it has acquired Prism Electric, a Texas and Oklahoma electrical contractor with roughly 2,500 employees. Loenbro called it the largest acquisition in the company's history. Terms were not disclosed.

Prism was founded in 1994 by Blake Combs and works out of six offices, in Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, Austin, Oklahoma City and Tulsa. Its jobs run across data centers, hospitals, airports, schools, factories, hotels and arenas, and its scope covers medium- and low-voltage installation, preconstruction and 3-D modeling, prefabrication and 24-hour service. Its project list includes the Moody Center arena in Austin, Dallas Fort Worth International Airport and Dell Children's Medical Center North. Loenbro, founded in 2000, self-performs electrical, mechanical, structural, underground and fabrication work. Combs stays with the business, and Prism's leadership team moves into Loenbro's South Region.

The buyer behind the buyer is a private equity firm. Kohlberg took a majority stake in Loenbro on December 11, 2025, with Braemont Capital and Loenbro management retaining equity, and said the investment was meant to expand the company across data center and mission-critical infrastructure services. Prism is the first large test of that mandate, and it is not an isolated deal. Mergermarket counted a record number of electrical contracting transactions in the first quarter of 2026 and reported in July that larger contractors in strong data center markets were drawing valuations of eight times EBITDA or better, naming Cupertino Electric, Miller Electric, CEC Facilities Group and PayneCrest among the benchmark deals. Dycom announced a 1.95 billion dollar purchase of Power Solutions, a Bowie, Maryland critical-power contractor that draws more than 90 percent of its revenue from data centers, on November 27, 2025.

For the electricians on those crews, the work rarely changes the week a deal closes. Scale is what changes. A platform buys prefabrication capacity, multi-craft self-perform and bonding capacity, and those three things are what let a contractor bid a gigawatt-scale campus or a multi-year mission-critical maintenance contract instead of a single building. Geography widens with it. A Tulsa journeyman inside a national platform becomes a candidate for switchgear and medium-voltage work in several states rather than one metro. Mission-critical contracts carry their own rhythm as well, built around commissioning schedules, phased energization and night windows that a single-building job rarely demands.

The sale does not touch an individual license. Journeyman and master cards are issued by state boards to the person who earned the hours, not to the employer, and they survive a change of ownership intact. What moves in a transaction is the company's contractor license and registrations. The hiring consequence is quieter and more durable: as platforms absorb large regional shops, the recruiter calling a commercial electrician about mission-critical work increasingly represents a private-equity-backed national firm rather than the family name painted on the truck, and the hiring standards, travel expectations and benefit structures come with it.

The data center buildout has spent two years changing where the work is. It is now changing who signs the check.