HgCapital’s Services team has announced today a majority investment in Kinapse, a leading global provider of advisory, capability building and operational services to the life sciences industries, focused on regulatory compliance and quality. Kinapse is headquartered in London. HgCapital will back the existing management and assume majority ownership from management shareholders and Synova Capital. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Established ten years ago by Co-Founders Nicholas Edwards, Chairman, and Andy Black, CEO, Kinapse provides advisory, capability building and operational services to the world’s leading life sciences organisations, their customers, suppliers and regulators across a range of specialist areas, including quality and compliance, regulatory and medical affairs, pharmacovigilance and clinical trial disclosure. The Group has offices in the UK, India and the United States and employs over 500 professionals worldwide. Kinapse is a partner of 9 out of the top 10 global pharma companies.

The Services team has followed Kinapse closely for several years, and this investment fits HgCapital’s strategy of investing in leading global providers of regulatory-driven services across several industry end-markets, examples of this focus include ATC and Radius within the Services sector, regulatory software in the TMT sector, and significant previous experience investing around the Healthcare sector. Kinapse demonstrates many of the business model characteristics that HgCapital looks for, providing an excellent platform for growth across a diversified and loyal client base. HgCapital will work closely with the management team to accelerate Kinapse’s strong, organic growth and will also evaluate inorganic growth opportunities.

“I am enormously grateful for the great work of our global team during the past ten years.   We have been privileged to work with many industry leaders and to have had fantastic support from Synova Capital since they invested in Kinapse in 2012 ” said Andy Black, CEO. “We are all delighted to be partnering with the HgCapital team as we take the business forwards with a vision of achieving sector leadership across our Advise, Build and Operate services.”

Nicholas Edwards, Chairman, said “This investment is recognition of the success already achieved by Kinapse and provides us with a significant financial partner to support our continuing growth as we work with leading pharmaceutical companies to help them rapidly bring new medicines to patients.  We are delighted that our unique model combining advisory and operational services has again been recognised as the best way to support the life sciences industry.”

“We have been deeply impressed by the Kinapse team, who have built the business into one of the leading pharma regulatory service providers to the global pharmaceutical industry,” said Philipp Schwalber, a Director in the HgCapital Services team. “Through its outstanding people and excellent service, Kinapse is uniquely positioned in this rapidly expanding global market.”

Andrew Land, Partner at HgCapital added, “We are delighted that Andy and his team chose HgCapital as their new investor. Kinapse has a huge opportunity for growth over the next few years and we will support this through our deep services sector expertise.”