Corten Capital and Ampersand acquire Beacon Intelligence in PE buyout
Corten Capital and Ampersand Capital Partners have completed the acquisition of Beacon Intelligence from the Hanson Wade Group, which had held the business since its founding in 2015. Corten, acting as majority owner, is investing from its second fund, which closed in March 2024 with €680 million in capital commitments. Ampersand joins the transaction as a minority co-investor. No deal value was disclosed.
Beacon provides structured, granular data on early-stage drug development, covering 16 modules that span complex therapeutic modalities including antibody-drug conjugates, bispecifics and RNA therapeutics, as well as disease-based categories such as oncology and neuroscience. The company employs 135 people and counts more than 300 global customers, among them 24 of the 30 largest pharmaceutical companies by revenue. Use cases include competitive pipeline tracking, licensing opportunity identification and R&D investment prioritisation.
The deal
Rob Poolman remains chief executive under the new ownership structure, with Sati S. Sian continuing as chair. David Anderson, General Partner at Ampersand, joins the board alongside representatives from Corten. The seller, Hanson Wade Group, is backed by Graphite Capital and operates primarily as an events and conferences business; the disposal of Beacon reflects a strategic separation of the intelligence platform from the events parent.
Alexandre Michelson, Partner at Corten Capital, cited the "scientist-led curation and depth of the data" and the company's "proprietary ontologies" as key attractions, alongside Beacon's relationships with major life sciences institutions. Corten has built a track record in B2B data and software businesses across Europe and North America, and the firm has raised €1.2 billion across two funds since 2020.
Market context
The market for life sciences R&D intelligence has attracted sustained private equity interest as pharmaceutical and biotech companies seek data-driven tools to navigate increasingly complex drug development pipelines. Competitors in the space include Citeline (formerly Informa Pharma Intelligence), Evaluate, and GlobalData, all of which offer pipeline-tracking and competitive intelligence products. Beacon's positioning around specialist modality coverage, particularly for newer therapeutic classes such as ADCs and RNA-based medicines, differentiates it from broader data aggregators, though the defensibility of that advantage depends on continued investment in curation depth.
Ampersand Capital Partners, founded in 1988, manages over $4 billion in assets and focuses exclusively on healthcare. Its involvement as a co-investor adds sector-specific operating expertise alongside Corten's software and data scaling capability. The combination of a growth-oriented PE majority owner and a specialist healthcare co-investor is a common structure for scaling B2B healthcare data businesses, as it allows portfolio companies to access both capital markets experience and domain-specific commercial networks.
Debt financing for the transaction was provided by HSBC UK Leveraged Finance and HSBC Asset Management. Legal, commercial and financial due diligence was handled by a range of advisers including Oliver Wyman, ZS and Alvarez & Marsal. The next milestones for Beacon as an independent platform are likely to include further module expansion, geographic customer growth and, eventually, a possible secondary sale or IPO as exit options for Corten's fund investors.