Vinco Capital

Investing in Established Businesses to Drive Long-Term Growth

Vinco Capital, Inc. was formed in 2010 to invest in healthcare and life sciences companies. Today, Vinco Capital and its investment partnerships’ investment focus is on acquiring research sites, services and technology and AI opportunities opportunities in the Clinical Trials Industry.

Vinco Capital was founded by Barry Lake, a Canadian-born, naturalized American serial entrepreneur following his successful investments in the commercial construction and real estate industry. The success of these businesses led to Lake being twice named a Maryland Finalist for the prestigious Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2007 and 2009.

Vinco Capital is headquartered in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in the Research Triangle Park or RDU area.

Leadership

Pursuing Research Site Investment Opportunities

65+

years combined business,
entrepreneurial experience

32+

years combined expertise,
Clinical Trials Industry

19%

Annual ROI,
2015-2025

Starting in 2010, Barry Lake, President, was joined at Vinco Capital for the first decade of the firm’s success by Sean Rice, COO/CFO and a licensed CPA. Together they pursued investment opportunities specifically focused in the highly fragmented research site sector of the Clinical Trials Industry. Clinical research sites exist on the ground floor of the pharmaceutical drug development industry where advances in both drug and device therapies are tested on patient-subjects in a clinical setting with valuable data collected at each trial site to validate a potential new therapy’s safety and efficacy in treating or curing a medical condition.

Believing the Clinical Trials Site Sector to be ripe for consolidation and technological innovation, Lake and Rice formed Vinco Capital’s first investment partnership, the Vinco Capital Fund I, LLP and embarked upon what continues to be a successful investing strategy. The Fund I partnership was very successfully exited in 2025, paving the way for Vinco Capital to raise and deploy what is sure to be a second successful Fund.

Vinco Capital is now well into its second decade of successfully investing, growing and delivering outsized returns to partners and remains guided by Founder and President, Barry Lake.

Vinco Capital President Barry Lake.

Barry Lake

President

Barry's Bio
Vinco Capital CFO, COO Sean P. Rice.

Sean P. Rice

COO, CFO

Sean's Bio

Portfolio

SaaS Platform Adopted by all Leading Site Networks

86% Year-over-Year
Growth in ARR

Automated Study
Start-up Workflows

Simultaneous Site Performance Metrics Capture

Devana Solutions is a transformative cloud-based SaaS application created, launched and set on a path for enormous growth and success by entrepreneur Barry Lake, in 2016.

‘Devana’ as the innovative platform and related SaaS products became widely known, automates workflows and supports performance transparency and accountability across multi-functional teams during Clinical Trial start-up and execution at independent research site organizations, health systems and academic medical centers. At the same time, Devana’s proprietary algorithms capture key site performance metrics throughout the Clinical Trial management process to enable display, analysis and action by research site leadership.

During the COVID-19 global pandemic and Operation Warp Speed, Devana experienced a period of hyper-growth by supporting safe, online-collaboration between centralized research professionals and their decentralized site-based clinical colleagues and patients to speed the development of the global lifesaving vaccines. From 2021 through 2025, Devana Solutions averaged an astounding 86% year-over-year growth in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), a pace of growth unprecedented in almost any industry. During this stretch, Devana was purchased by a large private equity firm who combined the Devana technology business with the firm’s other platform investment in the Clinical Trials industry site sector. www.devanasolutions.com   

High Growth Commercial GC Firm

60% Revenue Growth
2020 - 2025

1 of few Women-led
Construction Companies

Operations in
NC, SC and FL

Founded in 2020, Forge Commercial Construction is a general contracting and construction management company headquartered in Greenville, South Carolina. Forge focuses its experienced project management team on serving the needs of retail, restaurant, hospitality, healthcare, financial, industrial, and general office clients in the Carolinas and Florida. 

In 2025, Forge was purchased by its President, Rachel Johnson, making Forge Construction one of the few female-led construction companies in the U.S. Southeast region.

www.forgeconstruction.com

Forge Construction logo image for the Vinco Capital portfolio section.

Company’s Growth, Nationally Recognized

10 X Growth in Revenue
in only 3 years

$3M to $30M
2005 - 2007

Recognized as No. 61
Fastest Growing in U.S., 2007

Rollins-PCI Construction was a full-service commercial General Contractor serving the Washington, D.C. and tri-state Region including Maryland and Virginia for over 30 years. Founded in 1989, the company, based in Mount Airy, Maryland, focused its best-in-class project management team on serving the needs of blue-chip, bank, healthcare, and retail clients in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern U.S. regions.

In 2007, R-PCI Construction was recognized as the fastest-growing construction company in the U.S. and No. 61 Fastest Growing company across all industries in the U.S. by Inc Magazine.

Devana Solutions logo for the Vinco Capital Portfolio section.
Forge Construction logo for the Vinco Capital Portfolio section.
Rollins Construction logo for the Vinco Capital Portfolio section.

Investment Criteria

Vinco Capital is currently actively seeking investments as follows:

—> Clinical research sites or site-related technology 

—> U.S. base of operations (excluding CA)

—> Minimum $750,000 EBITDA

—> Multi-therapeutic Capabilities  

—> Experienced Principal Investigators and Staff

If you have a research site business or technology that meets these criteria, please upload your Business Plan or Profile or request to be contacted in the contact form.

Copyright © 2026 Vinco Capital PE
All Rightes Reserved

Barry Lake

President

Linkedin
Vinco Capital President Barry Lake.

In 2014, to better serve pharmaceutical company sponsors and their CROs (Contract Research Organizations), Barry Lake and his Vinco Capital team spearheaded the formation of an alliance of 20 high-performing research sites including Vinco’s own Charleston, SC, site. This union of independent sites had strengths across different therapeutic indications including endocrinology, cardio-metabolic, pulmonology, gastroenterology and urology, to name just a few. The ‘Medical Research Alliance’ enabled industry sponsors and CROs to interface with a single point-of-contact to access high-performing clinical trial sites across this array of different therapeutic strengths. The Alliance stood as an early precursor helping pave the way for the site sector consolidation and rise of Site Networks, Site Management Organizations (SMOs) and Integrated Research Organizations just a few years later.

Even more innovative, Lake and his team created a cloud-based software-as-a-service or SaaS application which allowed the research sites in the Alliance to automate complex clinical trial startup workflows across functional teams. At the same time, user engagement with the application automatically triggered proprietary algorithms which captured each research site’s individual performance metrics during clinical trial start-up and execution driving performance transparency and accountability. This technology officially launched in 2016 as “Devana Solutions”. The Devana platform also enabled site leadership to display and analyze critical performance metrics to improve operations and win more of the right clinical trial awards from sponsors. Later that same year, with large private equity not yet having embraced the thesis of investing in the consolidation of individual research sites into wholly-owned Site Networks leveraging technology such as the innovative Devana SaaS platform, Lake led the Vinco Capital’s inaugural Fund I investment partnership to go “all-in” on the Devana Solutions transformational technology.

In 2017, shortly after being acquired by major global CRO, ICON plc, one of the first PE-backed Site Networks, PMG Research, became the first Global Site Network to adopt the Devana platform with PMG Leadership calling it “the most transformative technology to ever impact the research site sector”. The rest of the Clinical Trials industry took notice.

In 2020, with private equity finally funding site consolidation into Site Networks at scale, and the COVID-19 global pandemic fueling the need for an advanced cloud-based technology to support safe online virtual-collaboration across teams working on decentralized clinical trials, Devana Solutions entered an era of explosive growth. From an Average Contract Value (‘ACV’) of just $23,000 and Annual Recurring Revenue (‘ARR’) of only $800,000 on January 1, 2021, adoption of the Devana cloud-platform by virtually every major Site Network of the Devana cloud-platform propelled the company to true enterprise-SaaS level status with an ACV over $106,000 and Devana averaging a staggering 86% year-over-year growth in ARR for the 5-year period through December 31, 2025, and total ARR approaching $5,000,000. During this period of hyper growth, Lake and the Vinco Capital Fund successfully sold Devana Solutions to a private equity-backed Clinical Trials Technology roll-up.

Sean P. Rice

COO, CFO

Linkedin
Vinco Capital CFO, COO Sean P. Rice.

Sean Rice has over 15 years experience in clinical research site services and technology. Most recently, Rice served as COO for a multi-state, multi-therapeutic U.S. based site network from 2023 through the end of 2025 and managed operational execution to 20% growth in both top-line and bottom-line during 2025.

From 2020 through 2023, Rice served as V.P., Site Operations, initially for ClinEdge and then for the combined Elligo/ClinEdge after the merger. During Rice’s tenure, he expanded the feasibility function to support over 400 clinical trial sites which were both wholly-owned & independent research sites.

Sean Rice was also Co-Founder, COO/CFO, for Devana Solutions, LLC, from 2016 through 2020. Devana, an innovative SaaS provider, became central to the technology stacks of the overwhelming majority of Site Networks for clinical trial workflow automation and data analytics of key site performance metrics being captured by the Devana platform.

Rice began his clinical research career as CEO of Medical Research South in Charleston, SC, a multi-therapeutic research site which Sean led for 10 years from 2010 through 2020 before joining ClinEdge. From 2014 – 2020, Rice also served as CEO for Medical Research Alliance, an umbrella ‘network’ of 20 allied but independent research sites across the U.S., a precursor to the integrated site network organizations of today.

Prior to the Clinical Trials Industry, Rice held executive-level finance/accounting roles in energy, aluminum and chemical industries. He is a Licensed CPA, holds a Bachelors Business Administration from Alma College and an MBA, focus on entrepreneurship from the University of Louisville. Sean Rice resides in New Orleans, Louisiana.