New Mountain Capital is launching a single-asset continuation vehicle for portfolio company Real Chemistry, a healthcare marketing and commercialization platform it bought in 2019.
The deal is expected to raise around $2.5 billion. Coller Capital is leading, with the remainder syndicated out to additional investors in an ongoing Goldman Sachs-led process.
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The planned CV will hold both Real Chemistry and its recently spun-out AI agency unit Swoop, moving them out of the firm’s fifth fund. Unnamed sources cited by Buyouts say New Mountain sees more room to run for the business and wants to to extend its hold on the asset. There’s also the expectation of a more robust M&A environment in the future, both for add-ons and an ultimate exit.
Real Chemistry booked seven percent topline growth last year with revenue of $595 million, working against a market-wide biotech slowdown that’s cut spending across a core customer segment.
It’s modest growth, but New Mountain is betting on the upside from ongoing work to build out AI-enabled tooling to complement Real Chemistry’s existing set of services, like a new AI-driven targeting platform that powers some of the company’s physician and patient engagement solutions.
Supporting the thesis are a handful of recent tech-forward add-ons—ConversationHealth (‘22), Swoop and IPM.ai (‘21), and TI Health (‘23)—that add data & AI capabilities across market access, commercialization, and real world data use cases.
It’s a familiar playbook: last year, New Mountain ran a separate single-asset process for another healthcare data platform, Datavant, which sold to ICG’s Strategic Equity unit as the sole buyer. New Mountain rolled over its full economics in the Datavant process and is expected to do the same with Real Chemistry.