10,000 Champions: hospital entrepreneurs
Hospitals - the new entrepreneurial opportunity? Seems so, from this week's deals.
- Dr Oliver Sargent, managing director of care home operator Beagle Healthcare (aka Taunton Hospitals), is one to watch in the south-west. Backed by VC firm, Albion Ventures, Sargent has acquired the Orchard Portman care home outside Taunton, with plans to expand the former school to a 72-room rehabilitation hospital (from the current 45); the total deal value is £6.4m, which points to a sizeable opportunity. Can't find much information about Sargent, apart from comments in the press release, and sympathetic comments after a pensioner died in a 2009 fire at the Kitnocks House home that he runs in Hampshire. Sargent is also chairman of Nursing Home Services.
- Separately, The Times reports that a group of doctors have appointed Cavendish COrporate Finance to help them raise £80m to build a new hospital in Kent (they've already secured a £45m loan from RBS). The funding would go to building the Kent Institute of Medicine and Surgery, the first new hospital in the county for 20 years.
- We've written about Helveta founder-CEO Patrick Newton before. The proven software entrepreneur has spotted the opportunity in the increasingly regulated timber industry for tracking technology. Now he's raised a further £5m from BeCapital, Oxford Capital Partners and Succès Europe, topping up the £1m Carbon Trust investment announced last month. Helveta’s CI World software enables users in the forest and food products industries to track timber, providing "full traceability and compliance verification capability for assets moving along global supply chains." The technology is already being used to monitor 2.7 million hectares of Congo and Amazon forest and in South East Asia.
- Mark Kirby, non-executive chairman, and CEO Douglas Le Fort are leading the growth of advanced medical technology business Freehand, which brings a robotic arm supports a moving camera used in keyhole (laparoscopic) surgery procedures. Kirby: “Traditionally someone, often a junior surgeon, would have to hold the camera in a procedure that might take up to five hours. It’s a stressful job and in that length of time, there will be a fair amount of movement. It’s also not a good use of a junior surgeon’s time – it’s essentially a menial job.” Kirby became involved in Freehand just before the recent funding round (backers: Chord Capital, Hygea VCT and the Norwegian Fritas A/S). Kirby led the MBO of Profile Therapeutics/Medic-Aid and then guided it to IPO in 2000 (raising £27m against a market cap of £81m. The company was then sold in 2004. Mark is also chair of Glide Pharma (needle-less injections of "solid" drugs) and the Oxford University wound-care spin-out Eykona. CEO Douglas Le Fort brings wide experience of the healthcare market from Abbott Laboratories (NYSE), and Chiron Corporation.