Founded in 2019, Vamstar is working to transform the way healthcare organisations discover and connect with suppliers. With organisations like Innovate UK and several seed investors supporting its growth and development to date, it was now looking to the next stage of its journey and to securing the investment it would need to go further.
Vamstar’s global sourcing and procurement platform for medical goods and pharmaceuticals uses big data and artificial intelligence to facilitate trade between buyers and suppliers.
It’s a healthcare exchange that can surface contract opportunities for suppliers as well as provide supplier intelligence so that businesses, clinics, hospitals and GPs can easily and reliably get access to medical supplies and pharmaceuticals.
With clear market need and a proven innovative solution, Vamstar was at a stage where it needed significant further investment to scale its offer and reach its full potential; and, as the company’s legal advisor since its seed fundraising, the founders turned to Ashfords as an experienced partner able to help the company with the next institutional round of investment.
The team at Ashfords regularly work with founders and innovative companies looking to scale as well as venture capital and other investors looking to back them. That support covers the full range of legal requirements from securing funding via multiple rounds and protecting valuable innovations, through to structuring third party collaborations to help scale and advising on a potential sale or other exit.
That experience coupled with genuine insight and experience working with companies at the crossover between health care & life sciences and technology, and the transformation this is delivering, meant that we could bring real world legal expertise to help Vamstar achieve its objectives.
We used our experience advising venture capital firms and early stage/ growth tech companies on investment rounds to give Vamstar an initial steer on how the terms being offered compared with the terms we typically see. This also included highlighting some of the legal implications of those terms, for example in relation to shareholder dilution, incentive arrangements, corporate governance and exit.
Having recently worked on a similar transaction in the digital health space, we were also able to advise the founders on how best to facilitate the lead investor’s legal due diligence and expedite negotiations with the investors in relation to the investment documentation. This was delivered to the challenging timetable set and recognising the significant other demands on the founders’ time.
Where the interests of investors were not fully aligned, we helped the company to identify suitable compromises to give all the investors the protections they needed. Our familiarity with the company’s share capital table and some of their existing commercial arrangements also helped us to quickly resolve some issues around areas like warranties and voting thresholds.
Vamstar secured $9.5m Series A funding to help it accelerate its market and product development plans within a tight timescale, with new specialist partners including Alpha Intelligence Capital, who led the funding with participation from Dutch Founders Fund and existing investors btov Partners, Antler, and Begin Capital.
This major fundraising is critical to ensuring that Vamstar can deliver its objective to solve some of the biggest healthcare supply challenges globally by using Artificial Intelligence to improve supply stability in a digital exchange for buyers and suppliers in the healthcare industry.
Find out more about our role in the investment here.
For more information, please contact Jocelyn Ormond.
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