BioTeam Acquired by British n2 Group
By Allison Proffitt
August 2, 2024 | BioTeam announced its acquisition today by British firm n2 Group. BioTeam will be a US-based, independent business within n2 Group. Financial details have not been disclosed.
“This was a unicorn deal,” Stan Gloss, BioTeam co-founder and fellow told Bio-IT World. “BioTeam can stay BioTeam and now we’re in the position to fund good academic research that advances science in our field.”
Ari Berman, BioTeam’s CEO, agreed. “BioTeam is a pretty unique company in a lot of good ways, and we’ve had a lot of opportunities for acquisition over the years, but [co-founders] Stan [Gloss] and Chris [Dagdigian] really held off in hopes that we might find somebody who would want to buy us because they like who we are and what we do.”
n2 Group is a portfolio company based in the UK. BioTeam joins other companies under its umbrella including NAG, an industry-leading numerical software and technical services company. In the high-performance computing space, Berman said, NAG’s library and compiler have been used extensively throughout the industry for 53 years. NAG created the n2 Group to bring together like-minded companies “that really help expand the reach of technology to really help move the world forward,” Berman said.
In addition to NAG and BioTeam, n2 Group companies include STAC, an independent financial services technology research and community events company, which was acquired by n2 Group late last month and VSNi, which provides data and statistical analysis solutions for the biosciences.
BioTeam’s integration into the n2 Group supports the group vision of improving the accessibility, quality, and robustness of computing solutions to enable greater productivity in engineering and scientific disciplines.
In a press release announcing the acquisition, Adrian Tate, CEO of n2 Group said, “n2 Group is honoured to welcome BioTeam into our unique community of businesses. As a respected boutique consultancy in the life-sciences and healthcare sector, BioTeam is helping clients solve increasingly difficult data and computational challenges. The acquisition strengthens the group’s core mission while providing new avenues of collaboration between BioTeam and other n2 businesses.”
Support for New Endeavors
As an independent business within n2, BioTeam is “free to do the same kind of work that we’ve done before and just continue doing what we do, but we get backed by n2 and we can partner with all the other portfolio companies,” Berman explained.
Over the past six months, BioTeam has focused on restructuring to better scale their capabilities, Berman said. The company is now organized around four practice areas that work closely together: advanced IT infrastructure for science; data strategy and data ecosystems; data science and AI/ML; and organizations for advancing science. This more scalable structure will remain at BioTeam under the new headship.
“Unlike most acquisitions, the team remains intact,” Berman said. “We’ll maintain our brand, our identity, our ethos, and our staff… There was no need to restructure that because we worked hard independently of this deal over the past six months or so to create a new structure.”
Berman’s role will expand a bit as he will now work on strategy with Tate at the n2 Group level. The rest of the team, including Gloss and Dagdigian, will be retained.
Both Gloss and Berman highlighted one particularly exciting aspect of the acquisition: the opportunity to create new innovations in the life sciences. BioTeam wants to “build new technologies, new ideas, new services,” Berman said, beyond just the projects that consulting clients request. “One of the big things that n2 does is take a portion of the profits of the organizations and pay it back to the scientific community,” Berman said. “That was a very good alignment.”