Capstone Partners, a leading international investment banking firm, announced that it has successfully advised Tricore, Inc. on its sale to High Road Capital Partners’ portfolio company, Dowden Medical Communications Group.
Tricore has clearly established itself as a leader in the learning and development sector capable of delivering unique end-to-end learning solutions to meet the sales training, marketing and compliance education needs of its clients. Corporations are increasingly recognizing the benefits of virtual learning and eLearning including enhanced content retention, rapid skill development, reduced travel and housing costs, and greater employee flexibility.
Tricore specializes in providing customized learning development and mobile training solutions to meet the increasingly complex training and interactive marketing needs of the global pharmaceutical and life sciences sectors. Unique in its industry, Tricore has cultivated extensive expertise in scientific and medical content, therapeutic areas/disease states, adult learning principles, multimedia technologies and animation, and sales and promotional strategies and has developed multi-disciplinary teams capable of blending these distinct skillsets into customized learning modules for its clients. The Company is particularly well regarded for its expertise in several key therapeutic areas including cardiovascular, oncology, neuroscience, vaccines, and metabolic diseases, among others.
Tricore was acquired by High Road Capital Partners’ platform company, Dowden Medical Communications Group (DMCG). High Road Capital Partners is a private equity firm focused on buying and building leading companies in the middle market. The shareholders of Tricore, Bruce Haghighat and Omar Shoheiber, will retain equity and remain active in managing the business. High Road acquires companies with attractive growth prospects that are well positioned within their respective market niches. Tricore is an add-on acquisition and represents a highly complementary fit for High Road’s portfolio company, DMCG, particularly in light of the trend among drug manufacturers to winnow their vendor base and rely more on a few preferred outsourced providers that have the breadth, scale and diversified set of service offerings to meet their strategic needs. DMCG is a provider of technically oriented marketing services to pharmaceutical companies used to educate physicians on appropriate uses of pharmaceutical and biotech products. Its services include scientific content development, arranging meetings between pharmaceutical companies and doctors, and electronic media oriented marketing solutions.
The Capstone M&A team of Eric Williams, Managing Director, and Mark Surowiak, Director, based in Philadelphia, PA, managed the transaction on behalf of the Company. The market is rewarding companies that can develop innovative and effective solutions to satisfy the increasing complexities of product and professional education, compliance and certification training, business applications training, and marketing and business strategy development. Without the internal resources, expertise or time to develop and implement training programs, organizations are relying on third-party professional education firms with increasing frequency.
“We expect to see a strong level of M&A activity in the training and education industry in the coming years,” added Mark Surowiak. “Companies that offer superior learning solutions that combine e-learning and interactive multimedia, subject matter expertise, and proprietary content that is deliverable globally are especially attractive to buyers and investors.”
