The Portland, Maine-based company, announced that it has acquired Roadrunner Pharmacy and Atlas Pharmaceuticals, both Phoenix-based companies that operate as compounding pharmacies. Vets First Choice is not releasing financial details of the transactions. (Technically, it’s Direct Vet Marketing doing the acquiring, as Vets First Choice is simply a dba, but I often use the Vets First Choice moniker to avoid confusion.) Vets First Choice, which recently closed a $223 million round of equity fundraising, said the acquisitions “are part of a global initiative to professionalize prescription management services for veterinary practices,” according to the company press release. The acquisitions increase Vets First Choice’s total number of employees by 50 percent, to 750, spread across offices in Maine, Arizona, Kansas, Kentucky, Nebraska and Texas. The major infusion of capital Vets First Choice announced last month did help enable these acquisitions, Ben Shaw, Vets First Choice’s founder and CEO, told Maine Startups Insider. According to Crunchbase, Vets First Choice has made one earlier acquisition—a company called VetCentric, which offered similar home delivery of medications to pet owners, in 2012. Of the two Arizona-based pharmacy companies Vets First Choice is acquiring, Roadrunner Pharmacy is the largest. It is a specialty compounding pharmacy, licensed in all 50 states, that employs more than 250 pharmacists, pharmacy technicians, and other service-related staff. Atlas Pharmaceuticals is a new, much smaller company (only seven employees) that provides compounded sterile and non-sterile drugs for in-office use. Compounding is when a pharmacist or physician combines two or more drugs to create a medication tailored to the needs of an individual patient. The fact both newly acquired companies are based in Phoenix is not a coincidence. Roadrunner and Atlas are related. Eaton Veterinary Pharmaceuticals Inc., owner of Roadrunner Pharmacy, formed Atlas Pharmaceuticals in 2016 in the wake of a new law, the Drug Quality and Security Act, that created a new type of outsourced compounding pharmacy, known as a 503B facility. Unlike traditional compounding pharmacies, the Atlas 503B facility produces medications under the same FDA current good manufacturing processes that are applicable to drug manufacturers, according to the news release. Read more about startup advancements in Portland, Maine at TechCo
