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Private Equity Focus: Quality, Innovation, and the Importance of an Intrinsic Understanding of the Market’s Needs and Expectations
Private Equity Focus: Quality, Innovation, and the Importance of an intrinsic understanding of the market’s needs and expectations
Meiping Yap Interviews ARCHIMED’s Denis Ribon
At the 2025 Stonehage Fleming Family Investment Conference, Meiping Yap, Director of Private Capital, sat down with Denis Ribon, Chairman and Managing Partner of ARCHIMED, a private equity firm focused on accelerating the development of healthcare businesses.
Denis, you have had an interesting career path. What motivated you to launch ARCHIMED as a healthcare specialist investor back in 2014?
I have always been very interested in animals and healthcare, and I started my career as a veterinarian. That gave me a strong foundation in healthcare and problem-solving but after a few years, I transitioned into management consulting with A.T. Kearney, where I learned how to tackle complex business challenges.
Following this, I moved into private equity and was at 3i for 13 years. For many years of my time there, I was leading the Healthcare team investing in Europe, North America and Asia. It was during that time that I told the CEO that I thought there was a real market opportunity to move from our Healthcare dedicated team to a Healthcare dedicated fund. That’s where the idea for ARCHIMED came from. All in all, it has been an exciting journey combining my passion for healthcare with strategic and global business experience.
What are the key attractions of investing in Healthcare in today's market?
When talking about Healthcare, you have the care providers, hospitals, clinics and other market segments. While the care providers are well spread across the world, they carry few cross-border strategies. We focus on those associated Healthcare industries such as medical devices, licensing tools and healthcare software that are more global. When you have a great medical device for instance, everybody in the world wants to buy it. Those are the sectors that are growing organically and that is a very attractive space for players like us.
How would you describe ARCHIMED’s approach towards responsible investing?
Our approach focuses on quality and innovation. Strategic buyers want something that is real, so that is where you have the perfect convergence between impact investing in Healthcare and attracting those strategic buyers. There is not a single company that can be approved in our process that does not either bring better efficiency, safety, accessibility or affordability at a patient, doctor or hospital level. Generally, ESG frameworks tend to focus on environmental impact and less on social impact. So, we created our own which is now being used by some of the European authorities.
We also established the EURÊKA Foundation, a non-profit that receives a substantial portion of carried interest across all of our funds. This Foundation is allocating capital to PhDs that are working on unmet medical needs as well as mental health organisations around the world.
Let us now turn to one of your case studies, Polyplus, a leading cell and gene therapy business. Could you please talk us through the Polyplus story?
It's all about focus. When we met Polyplus, they had a number of smaller products in development. We brought in new people from the industry with pharmaceutical rather than academic expertise. We moved them from Europe to the US which brought in new blood to the leadership team both at the company and board level bringing knowledge of navigating similar transitions before. Finally, we added people in-house with good manufacturing practises (GMP) to make the whole operation work smoothly. A combination of all these changes is what enabled us to attract the largest buyers in the world. And ultimately, Sartorius acquired Polyplus in 2023 which returned over 300x our initial investment in the fund.*
How did you build a competitive auction for Polyplus leading up to its sale?
One of the key things we did was to build an in-depth understanding of the market’s needs and develop relationships with a few strategic players very early, putting the company on their radar well before we had made the investment. This strategy of early engagement is key because when we eventually go to the investment community, we want a positive exit scenario already in place. With Polyplus, we had buyers who had been following the company for many years and, when the timing was right, one of them made an unsolicited offer. That triggered competitive interest from others to create an auction process for the business.
Disclaimer: Opinions expressed here are as of the date of publication and subject to change without notice. It does not take into account the financial circumstances, needs or objectives of the recipient.
Issued and approved by Stonehage Fleming Investment Management Limited authorised and regulated by the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FRN. 194382).
* Source, ARCHIMED