Clinipace Worldwide Closes on $50 Million M&A War Chest

Clinipace Worldwide Closes on $50 Million M&A War Chest

Funding to Fuel Additional Expansion After 40% Year-over-Year Growth in 2014

MORRISVILLE, N.C. (Business Wire) JANUARY 15, 2015 – Clinipace Worldwide, a global, digital clinical research organization (dCRO) ("Clinipace"), announced today that it has closed a $50 million round of debt and equity financing to capitalize on a pipeline of corporate acquisitions. The financing was led by Virgo Investment Group, LLC ("Virgo") of Redwood Shores, CA and its investor partners, including Crestline Investors, Inc. Existing investors, including Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital of San Francisco, CA, Hatteras Venture Partners of Durham, NC, Harbert Venture Partners and Mario Family Funds also participated in this most recent round of funding. Perella Weinberg Partners served as advisors to the company.

Clinipace Worldwide plans to use the capital to continue building its therapeutic expertise and to further expand its capacity to deliver services to its clients. The company's three-year growth rate of 348% and the addition of over 450 jobs from 2012 to 2014 validates its unique service model. In addition to its strong organic sales growth, five acquisitions in as many years have created a strong, global footprint with a powerful mix of therapeutic expertise, clinical operations, and regulatory and strategic development services throughout North and South America, Asia and Europe. Clinipace is now home to 700 global staff, and has managed over 1,500 clinical research studies, activated over 23,000 sites, enrolled over 330,000 subjects and managed over 300 regulatory and strategic development engagements.

"With experts located in over 30 countries, Clinipace is the only mid-size CRO with broad geographic capacity, local knowledge and deep therapeutic expertise built on a proprietary eClinical technology," said Jeff Williams, Clinipace Worldwide CEO. "Our model delivers unprecedented visibility, integration and collaboration among functions across clinical trials operations; walls that separate functions in a typical CRO are broken down, and information flows more quickly and freely. With Virgo, we found investors who, not only think about innovation like we do, but who also provided a financing vehicle designed to be used as needed to support our M&A activities."

"Clinipace presented an exciting opportunity in a large and growing segment of the healthcare sector. The fundamentals of the CRO industry are currently strong and the Company is at an inflection point in its growth, which can be catalyzed by the capital of our investment group," said Jesse Watson, Founder of Virgo. "Our firm focuses on partnerships with successful entrepreneurs and management teams that share our values and our dedication to innovation. What we found in Clinipace is an organization that combines proven operational talent with a disruptor philosophy to drive both consistent execution and growth. We believe the CRO marketplace is ripe for re-imagination. Pharmaceutical clients are demanding new thinking and increased efficiency in their clinical trial operations, which creates an attractive market seam, or window of opportunity. Clinipace is ahead of the market in developing a novel business model that addresses not only the needs today, but those looming on the horizon."

About Virgo Investment Group, LLC
Founded in 2009, Virgo has completed 35 investments to date committing over $600 million in capital. Virgo has a history of partnering with founder entrepreneurs, like Jeff Williams and Chris Porter, to support their growth initiatives. Virgo invests in market dislocations and areas of corporate change targeting both less efficient market segments and identified themes (or "market seams") in the firm's core industries. A theme-based approach to idea generation coupled with proactive sourcing, a flexible mandate and creative transaction structuring skills, allows the firm to create differentiated opportunities and optimize risk-adjusted returns across market investment cycles. Virgo is an actively engaged investor that seeks to contribute ideas and human capital to the harvesting of value post-investment.

About Clinipace Worldwide
Clinipace Worldwide, a digital contract research organization (dCRO), pioneered an innovative, technology-amplified CRO service model to serve the unique needs of venture-backed, mid-tier, and strategic pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device firms.

Powered by Clinipace's proprietary TEMPO™ eClinical platform and a team of experts with extensive knowledge in therapeutic areas such as cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, central nervous system, dermatology, gastroenterology, immunology, infectious diseases, nephrology, oncology, respiratory, rheumatology, and vaccines, the company assists life science firms in successfully executing regulatory strategies, clinical development, and post-approval research programs.

Clinipace Worldwide global headquarters are based in Research Triangle Park, NC with additional domestic operations in Overland Park, KS and Boulder, CO. Additional offices located across the globe in Switzerland, Germany, United Kingdom, Taiwan, China, South Korea, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, Brazil, Argentina, Israel and India. For more information, visit http://www.clinipace.com.

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