France’s ArchiMed holds €500m close as it eyes bigger targets

ArchiMed, a Lyon-headquartered healthcare investor, has passed the halfway point for its debut mid-cap private equity fund as it looks to invest in larger companies.

The firm – which was founded in 2014 by former members of 3i’s healthcare team – collected €500 million in a first close on MED Platform I, according to a source with knowledge of the fund.

ArchiMed confirmed in a statement it had raised “more than half” of its €800 million target. It declined to comment on the exact sum.

Around 60 percent of limited partners in ArchiMed’s small-cap funds are expected to commit to MED Platform I, managing partner Denis Ribon told Private Equity International. The commitments will be split evenly between European and North American investors, including foundations, family offices and sovereign wealth funds.

“There are also a number of new investors who were looking at ArchiMed development but either wanted to see more value creation evidence in our small-cap funds, which is more and more the case, or needed a bigger fund given their minimum investment size,” Ribon said.

The pan-European MED Platform I will be ArchiMed’s first to target companies with enterprise values above €100 million, the statement said. It will invest between €50 million and €300 million at a time.

ArchiMed raised €146 million for the 2014-vintage MED I and €315 million for the 2017-vintage MED II. It recently completed a dividend recapitalisation for MED I portfolio company Polyplus Transfection at a 4x return.

“We are going to be looking for companies in the same healthcare sub-sectors; the ones we invested in for our small-cap funds,” Ribon added. “We have pretty healthy pipeline of companies with small- and mid-caps and we could not capture the mid-cap ones so far because we did not have the right investment vehicle.”

ArchiMed invests across Europe including the UK, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Switzerland. It has around 30 investment professionals and in October appointed Antoine Faguer as partner, Brian Sheridan as operating partner and Sofia Ysewyn as principal. All joined from positions within the healthcare industry.

The firm was planning to open a US office to aid portfolio company expansion, as PEI reported in February. It is unclear how far along ArchiMed is in this process.