Adiuva Capital invests in Gba Group

Adiuva Capital acquired 49.1% of Gesellschaft für Bioanalytik in September 2011, from Capital Stage, in what was the firm’s first investment since its establishment that year. Tracing its origins to the Laboratorium Döllefeld founded in 1977, GBA Group analyses samples in its laboratories on behalf of manufacturers and public authorities, testing foodstuffs for contaminants and composition, soil and water for pollutants, consumer goods for prohibited substances and pharmaceutical products for conformity with their specifications. German laboratory analysis was then divided among independent operators, many of them founded by chemists and reaching the limit of what a single site can support. Each instrument and each accreditation costs the same whether it processes a hundred samples or a thousand, while samples must be analysed near where they are taken, which makes a network of laboratories under common ownership more economic than any of them alone. Adiuva Capital pursued that consolidation over the following five years, acquiring other laboratories and widening the range of analyses offered, before selling the group to Quadriga Capital in 2016, by which time it operated ten sites in Germany and one in Austria with around 430 employees.