Inova initiates In-Part takeover

In-Part, the UK-based academia-industry collaboration platform, today announced its acquisition by Inova, a cloud-based service for life science businesses to manage event partnering, secure licences and identify collaboration opportunities.

Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed, but the deal was enabled through a €60m ($67m) investment into Inova by Carlyle in July 2021 – giving the private equity firm a majority stake – and a concurrent commitment of undisclosed size by investment firm NextStage AM and Inova management.

Inova already acquired biotech news media Labiotech for an undisclosed sum last month. Together with the In-Part deal, Inova hopes these strategic moves will help it fortify its market position in the biopharmaceutical collaboration space.

In-Part will continue to offer and expand its platform, benefiting from access to Inova’s software infrastructure, and product and marketing teams.

In-Part’s Connect platform is used by more than 250 universities and research institutes as well as more than 6,000 companies globally to identify partners for commercialisation. Its bespoke scouting platform, Discover, enables industry to find academics and TTOs across more than 1,500 institutes to solve specific research and development challenges.

Patrick Speedie, co-founder of In-Part, said: “In Inova, we have found a great strategic fit across our technology base and close alignment in terms of company values and culture.

“It will give us access to a lot more resources and expertise for In-Part to accelerate its growth and achieve its vision of connecting the academia-industry ecosystem, across all the research fields and sectors we work with.

“It is a big moment for us and we are looking forward to the next part of our journey with the amazing team at Inova.”

In-Part raised $1.2m in a 2019 funding round involving Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund. It had previously secured $516,000 in a seed round led by Mercia’s University Growth Fund in 2016.