Itron will acquire all outstanding shares of Silver Spring for $16.25 per share in cash in a transaction valued at $830 million, excluding $180 million in Silver Spring cash.

Itron is funding the deal, fully underwritten by Wells Fargo, with cash and $750 million in incremental debt. Centerview Partners and Credit Suisse are the financial advisers to Itron, while Evercore is the financial adviser to Silver Spring.

The deal has been unanimously approved by both companies’ boards of directors, but still requires Silver Spring stockholder approval and federal approval to move forward. The deal is expected to close late this year or in early 2018. The offered price represents a high premium over Silver Spring’s current value, although it is in line with other technology merger and acquisition offers.

The surprise merger will create a company with more than 90 million smart endpoints deployed with some of the world’s biggest utilities. That would put it in second place behind Landis+Gyr, the century-old Swiss metering company that recently spun itself out from parent company Toshiba in a $2.4 billion initial public offering.

In North America, Silver Spring and Itron together cover more than half of known installed and contracted AMI endpoints, outpacing Landis+ Gyr’s roughly 20% of market share, GTM Research grid edge research associate Paulina Tarrant noted. Globally, however, L+G has the largest AMI network, although a post-merger Itron would come in a close second, she said.

The two remaining major AMI vendors are Germany’s Elster, acquired by Honeywell for $5 billion in 2015, and U.S.-based Sensus, bought by water treatment company Xylem for $1.7 billion last year.