Private-Equity Firms Bain and Kohlberg Make Another Big Bet on Biopharma Industry

The firms lead an investment valuing PCI Pharma at $10 billion, see the company benefiting from broader trends.

Private-equity firms Bain Capital and Kohlberg are leading a new multibillion-dollar investment in PCI Pharma Services, a company that specializes in helping biopharma companies bring new drugs to market, executives at the firms said.

PCI plans to use the new investment to expand its services and geographic reach.

The deal values PCI at $10 billion, including debt, according to people familiar with the matter.

Details

This will be Bain’s first investment in PCI, which has been in private-equity hands for more than a decade.

Kohlberg in 2020 teamed up with Abu Dhabi state-owned investment fund Mubadala to take a majority stake in the company. As part of the new deal, the executives say the two will reinvest in PCI, as will Partners Group, which first took a stake in the business in 2016.

The context

Bain is already invested in 40 different pharmaceutical and biotech companies and sees PCI benefiting from a number of broader trends, including the acceleration of drug development through generative artificial intelligence, according to Devin O’Reilly, the firm’s head of healthcare in North America.

Based in Philadelphia, PCI got its start as a drug-packaging manufacturer. It now works alongside biopharma companies throughout the yearslong process of rolling out a new drug, from creating and delivering samples for clinical trials to manufacturing, packaging and distributing the finished product.

It supports 25% of the top 200 drugs, including popular GLP-1 injectable weight-loss drugs and drugs for oncology and central-nervous-system disorders. It is also backing more than 2,300 drugs in development.

PCI plans to use the new investment to expand its services and geographic reach, including through acquisitions.

Since Kohlberg’s investment, PCI has more than doubled its revenue and quadrupled its customer base, according to PCI Chief Executive Salim Haffar. Its employee count has grown from around 3,000 to almost 8,000.

Kohlberg has known it wanted to reinvest in the company since it started looking for a new investor, said Matt Jennings, a Kohlberg operating partner who serves as chairman of PCI.

Write to Miriam Gottfried at Miriam.Gottfried@wsj.com