Agilitas, a pan-European mid-market private equity firm, has sold its portfolio company Ionisos to Ardian, an independent private investment company, for an undisclosed consideration.
Agilitas invested in Ionisos, alongside management, in December 2014. During Agilitas’s ownership, Ionisos has boosted its sales and marketing efforts gaining strategic global European customers as well as growing sales to existing customers across a wider range of technologies and services.
Ionisos also invested in its sterilisation facilities, adding capacity and increasing efficiency, thereby improving the service rate to its wide customer base.
The management team has been strengthened by the addition of Laurent Gareau, executive chairman, Christophe Herkens, operations director, and Mike O’Neill, business development consultant.
Based in the Lyon region and founded in 1993, Ionisos is a provider of cold sterilisation services for medical devices, raw and finished materials for the pharmaceutical and cosmetic industries, and for the food and pharma packaging sectors. Ionisos is one of the few companies licensed to offer all three cold sterilisation technologies. The group has around 100 employees across seven sites in France, Spain and China.
Serge Touati, partner at Agilitas and a steering committee member of Ionisos, says: “We are delighted to have helped the management team at Ionisos make such great progress in transforming this strategic business. Their great achievement is the product of much insight, dedication and energy, and we wish them well for the future.”
Laurent Gareau, executive chairman of Ionisos, adds: “We are proud of all that we have achieved at Ionisos in a relatively short time and we have enjoyed working with Agilitas to grow and improve what was already a very good company.”
