Biotech ADL BioPharma exchanges data twice as fast and expedite acquisitions with iDeals

Overview

ADL BioPharma is a Spanish company specialized in providing contract development and manufacturing services of precision fermentation, purification, and synthesis of sterile antibiotics. 

After an impressive 40% growth in sales in 2022, supported by an adjusted EBITDA that increased 2.5 times YoY to reach c. €6 million, their sole shareholder decided to seek new investment partners.

As the company prepared to attract global interest from investors, they required a frictionless tool that could ensure the confidentiality and security of competing bids across various jurisdictions.

“When I started working with iDeals I thought, ‘okay, they are competitive in terms of price, and they are going to be fast, and very intuitive, but let’s see if it has everything that it needs.’ And of course, I can confirm that it does,” Raul Crespo, former Chief Restructuring Officer and COO of the company said, “there is nothing missing!” 

The context

Founded in 1954 in Leon in northern Spain, ADL BioPharma became a pioneer in the manufacture of active pharmaceutical ingredients, thanks to its development of the largest fermentation capacity in Europe.

Today it has over 300 staff developing sustainable and commercially viable biotechnologies for multiple markets and industry sectors.

With a 2022 turnover of c. €53 million, the company was on a solid financial footing to seek investment and looking for the right tool to maximize their opportunities.

Key challenges 

ADL BioPharma needed technology to streamline the sharing of sensitive information and guarantee a level playing field for all the potential buyers.

In order to achieve that, Raul, as the person in charge of driving the capital raising/sell strategy of the company, was looking for an effortless platform able to:

• Guarantee the security of sensitive information
• Ensure compliance with EU data protection legislation
• Allow for fast data uploads
• Provide real-time tracking for the project

Raul was already familiar with iDeals, and liked it. So, after research into other providers, he decided to rely on the VDR for the deal, influenced by the positive recommendation of a colleague who had also used iDeals successfully.

Solution

iDeals exceeded ADL’s initial expectations and Raul found himself amazed by the intuitive interface and seamless workflow, “it’s definitely more user-friendly than other platforms, especially when it comes to setting permission levels for ‘who can see what’ information”

Even the delivery of the final archive USB was lightning-fast compared to other providers, “I would say that it took us 4 or 5 working days from the initial request to the final delivery to my house,” whereas other providers took about two weeks.

Using iDeals throughout the deal, the ADL BioPharma team was able to:

• Create separate rooms to handle different bids and exchange confidential legal information
• Grant different access levels to sizeable teams on the buyer side
• Exchange confidential data twice as fast by keeping it in the data room

The future

The eventual buyer was the German chemical conglomerate, Wacker Chemie AG, which has just acquired 100% of shares in ADL BioPharma at an estimated price of more than €100 million and is now in the process of integrating the two companies.

The new deal means that Wacker now owns the entire Leon site, with total fermentation capacities of just under 3,000 m³. 

Raul expects to continue to use iDeals in the future: as well as supporting the M&A activity of the company, Raul recognizes that iDeals’ platform has all the characteristics to help ADL BioPharma with any exchange of confidential information, scale-up process and trials with clients, etc. In listing his top 3 reasons for staying loyal to the VDR, he mentioned its being:

• Intuitive. “You don’t need a demonstration, you don’t need to read the procedures manual, and you don’t need to spend an hour trying to understand how it works.”
• User-friendly. “If we need to increase the capacity of the data room, or open a new project, or extend the life of a project, it’s all super automatic.”
• Fast. “I would say that this is probably the best aspect when compared with other vendors.”