Dental labs firm Leixir Resources Pvt. Ltd, which is backed by serial healthcare entrepreneur GSK Velu through his private equity fund Stakeboat Capital as well as his family office, has hired an investment bank as it looks to raise fresh capital, two people familiar with the development told VCCircle.

Leixir, a services firm which manages a dental labs chain in North America through its group companies, has roped in Avendus Capital to raise around $15 million (around Rs 100 crore), the above-mentioned persons said on the condition of anonymity.

The deal is expected to be a mix of primary and secondary transactions, the persons added. One person said, however, that it will mostly involve a primary infusion of capital into Gurugram-headquartered Leixir as the company is in good health.

Founded by Harmeet Singh Bindra, Leixir started operations in 2011. The company provides dentists with a range of dental restorations including crown and bridge, implants, implant surgical guides, advanced ceramic systems and dentures.

Leixir’s labs are located in the US and Canada and the company has grown both organically and inorganically, it had said in a press statement in 2016. At the time, it had nine dental labs with an offshore design centre in India.Leixir has made another couple of acquisitions in the past few months that has boosted its revenue, one of the persons cited above said without divulging further details.

Velu told VCCircle in an email that both his family office GSK Ventures and private equity firm Stakeboat Capital remain invested in Leixir. “Both the funds are committed to the long-term growth and success of the company,” said Velu, who late last year re-entered the diagnostics sector with a new firm, Neuberg Diagnostics.

Email queries sent to Leixir, Avendus, and existing investor IvyCap Ventures did not elicit a response till the time of publishing this report.

Leixir funding and financials: Leixir had raised angel funding from Gani Atmadiredja, managing director of modern home furnishing retailer W Atelier, in 2012, according to VCCEdge. the research arm of News Corp VCCircle.

Two years after that, the company raised around $4 million in its Series A round of funding from IvyCap Ventures. GSK Velu and Atlanta-based Source Capital invested $12 million in Leixir in 2016. The investment from Source Capital was in the form of mezzanine funding, the company had said. Velu’s $100 million private equity fund Stakeboat Capital, which he launched after his controversial exit from diagnostics firm Metropolis Healthcare, also invested in Leixir, as did his family office.

Leixir clocked total income of Rs 139.54 crore in the financial year 2016-17 compared with Rs 98.23 crore in the previous fiscal, according to VCCEdge. However, its losses increased to Rs 16.6 crore in 2016-17 from Rs 15.8 crore the year before that.

Dental labs market: The dental labs market in India is large but highly fragmented with thousands of small dental labs which claim to not only provide services to dentists in the country but also to export markets, an industry expert noted. As such there is no market data that provides an accurate overall picture of the market in India.

The global dental implants market is upwards of $25 billion with the US as the largest market, accounting for close to 60% of the market share, the expert said.

“The market is growing and there is fair amount of disruption happening on both, how the dental surgery is done (automation) and how the implants are made,” the person added.

Another major funded player in the space is Laxmi Dental Export Pvt. Ltd, which is backed by healthcare-focused investment firm OrbiMed.

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