September 2009 Mid-Atlantic Deal Review from Chessiecap, Inc. Editor’s Note: Welcome to the Inaugural Edition of the Mid-Atlantic Deal Review, a periodic review of transaction activity in the D.C.-Maryland-Virginia-West Virginia region. Measure real activity in the region. Entertain and Inform. Pull no punches. Get beneath the surface of deals, news and trends. Participate. Stat Notes: […]
Private Placements: Biotech had a busy month in September. Ten of the 25 private placements and 42% of private placement volume were Biotech related. Sleep Solutions, which raised $20M and works structurally with sleep apnea, is classified Healthcare. If you combine these two related categories, Healthcare-Biotech was the overwhelming recipient of dollars in September.
VirtuStream Inc., 9/1/09 private placement. Columbia Capital and Florida based Blue Lagoon Capital put some big second round money ($25 million) behind this Bethesda IT services company…
ICF International, 9/14/09 public shelf filing. ICF International filed a Shelf Registration for $200 million. Very interesting for a number of reasons.
Smithfield Foods, Inc., 09/16/2009 follow-on offering. Here is a something you don’t see often. A Smithfield Foods (Smithfield, VA) director resigned because he disagreed with the $300 million follow-on offering that the company completed in September.
CEL-SCI Corporation, 9/16/2009 PIPE. PIPE stands for “Private Investment in Public Equity.” In current times, PIPE investors are often private equity funds of various stripes, including ones with the misnomer “hedge funds.”
Iridium, Iridium, 9/29/2009 sale of company & IPO. In a somewhat complicated deal (we’ve seen worse), a Greenhill (investment bank) sponsored SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Company) acquired the up and down (yes, a pun) satellite company Iridium for $539M (a unique Chessiecap calculation).
SkyTerra Communications, Inc., 9/23/2009 sale of company. This is another buyout of another local satellite company for approximately the same transaction value as Iridium—all in the same week.
Mini-Notes. Sleep Solutions (SSI) (9/22/2009) raised a respectable $20M led by new money from Quaker BioVentures near Baltimore. SSI is developing technologies for the sleep apnea market,
American Capital Ltd (Nasdaq: ACAS) is one of the most unheralded and downright ignored finance stories in the Mid-Atlantic. In the past decade, American Capital has added scores of middle market acquisitions and investments to its portfolios,
Columbia Capital, since 1989, has been one of the premier private equity funds and citizens in the Mid-Atlantic. People have often wanted Columbia to be more than it is and have come away disappointed when Columbia sticks consistently to its knitting
CalPERS stands for California Public Employees’ Retirement System. It is one of the powerhouses of investing in America, placing tens and hundreds of millions of dollars at a throw in only the largest and best known private equity firms
Investment Bankers as Heroic Figures. You may have heard recently that the BBC Radio has produced a fictionalized dramatic account of the attempt to save Lehman Brothers with top actors playing former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Lehman CEO Richard Fuld. I had to laugh on several levels. I was a junior officer at Drexel […]