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A relationship-centric, growth-minded approach to investment banking and corporate advisory services

Rick Kohr is the CEO and founder of Evergreen Advisors, an investment bank and corporate advisory practice headquartered in Columbia, Maryland. The firm serves the needs of emerging growth and middle-market companies by offering a suite of investment banking and corporate advisory services throughout the various stages of the business lifecycle. They provide innovative and strategic solutions in the areas of Mergers and Acquisitions, Corporate Finance, Business Valuation, and Strategic CFO Advisory.

EDWIN WARFIELD: You mentioned that Evergreen has been very active recently in the healthcare and cyber spaces, both of which Maryland is known for. Do you see a lot of crossover between these industries? How would you say our region is evolving from a business development standpoint?

RICK KOHR: To your point, a lot of activity in the healthcare space. It's prominent across the country, clearly prominent here in the region. I know that it's also an area of focus for Maryland, and when you start looking at the biz development that's coming out of the Department of Commerce, among other entities, healthcare in and of itself is just an incredibly large and complex environment.

What's interesting from our perspective is how the technology is really beginning to interplay and impact the industry as a whole. Part of it goes back to some of the Obama initiatives with electronic medical records, but it's also the ability now with cloud computing and whatnot to really be able to bring technology into play. We just closed a transaction this past year with a company in Northern Virginia called Perthera. It's a precision medicine company that is able to take the human genome and different protocols and be very focused on treatment for an individual at their level specifically for pancreatic cancer. Things like that wouldn't have been doable five or 10 years ago. Those types of things we're seeing occur in the marketplace are fascinating from our perspective, and we get to play a small part of raising capital and helping them bring some folks on from a board perspective and really try to enhance what they're trying to accomplish.

Q. Can you walk us through some of the biotech developments and dealmaking you’ve seen occur locally over the past year?

A. Locally, it's been a pretty successful year. You saw Harpoon Medical sell here in the last few weeks and that was a big deal to Maryland Venture Fund and Kyp Sirinakis' fund. That was a $100 million exit with another $150 million earnout on the table, so potentially a $250 million deal. The company wasn't that old; it goes back five-six years in terms of getting the company started—maybe back to 2010. Started with $100,000 of financing, and to get that kind of exit in that kind of timeframe is incredibly impactful.

Other companies I mentioned—Paragon. Paragon’s been around for quite some time but really hit an inflexion point with that capital raise in 2015 when Camden and NewSpring came in to invest, and they have gone from 100 employees to 200 and almost tripled in revenue. I was just talking to Pete Buzzy this morning, and the CEO of the company is just thrilled with what they've accomplished with their expansion opportunities that they're looking at for 2018 and the growth that they anticipate from a revenue perspective.

I'll tell you another company that's kind of off the radar screen to some extent is Personal Genome, over there in Canton. You look at what they've accomplished here more recently: they just completed part of a raise—over $60 million from a capital investment; I think it's part of a larger $100 million-plus investment. We were just down at their facilities in Canton, and, you know, they don't have any space. They're growing quickly. They don't have enough people. They don't have enough space. NEA is involved from an investment perspective. They already had, I think, $80 million invested to date. You're looking at a possible unicorn transaction here in Baltimore, in the biotech space.

So, you look around, and you see the activity that's taking place and the new ideas that are being formulated around an industry that's going to continue to grow significantly over the next decade, and I think Maryland's well positioned. We're fortunate to be participating in it and working with companies that are in that opportunity and in that space to be able to have a meaningful impact.

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Edwin Warfield, CEO of citybizlist, conducts the CEO Interviews.

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