Antares Vision recapitalizes with a $80-million investment by Mediobanca

Antares Vision S.p.A., one of the leading vendors of traceability technology for the life sciences industry, has agreed to a €70-million investment (about $80 million), representing 12% of the company’s valuation, from the Italian merchant bank Mediobanca. (Technically, Antares Vision is merging with a special-purpose financial vehicle set up by Mediobanca.) In a statement, the company says that as a result it “will be able to look carefully at possible acquisition opportunities which are available due to the high degree of market fragmentation.”

Antares Vision, founded in 2007, says it has experienced 50% CAGR between 2012 and 2017, and has more than 2,000 installations in packaging lines at over 200 pharma facilities worldwide, including 10 of the top 20 pharma companies. Until last year, most of its solution offering was hardware (machine vision, barcoding and inspection), but it now provides a Level 4 (enterprise level) software platform for collecting and reporting traceability information, called ATSFour.