Sheridan Goes With the Flow with Carolina Components Buy
Bioprocessing executive Maurice Phelan takes over as CEO while founder John Cooling joins the board and keeps an ownership stake
Carolina Components Group (CCG) makes the fluid-handling hardware that carries biologic drugs through a factory. The company’s core products are single-use assemblies — pre-assembled, pre-sterilized sets of tubing, bags, connectors and fittings that are used once and discarded, sparing drugmakers the labor of cleaning and re-sterilizing stainless-steel equipment between batches.
August 6, 2026|John McNulty
Sheridan Capital Partners has acquired Carolina Components Group, a manufacturer of single-use assemblies and components used to make biopharmaceuticals.
Carolina Components Group (CCG) makes the fluid-handling hardware that carries biologic drugs through a factory. The company’s core products are single-use assemblies — pre-assembled, pre-sterilized sets of tubing, bags, connectors and fittings that are used once and discarded, sparing drugmakers the labor of cleaning and re-sterilizing stainless-steel equipment between batches. The company builds these assemblies to each customer’s specifications in clean rooms at its Durham facility and ships them in hermetically sealed bags ready to install.CCG also makes two- and three-dimensional bioprocessing bags used to transfer and store fluids in volumes from 50 milliliters to 3,000 liters, storage and mixing tanks across a similar range, aseptic connectors, bottle-closure systems and the FlowMixer, a benchtop mixing device for single-use applications. Customers of CCG include more than 250 biopharmaceutical and contract manufacturing companies.
Durham, North Carolina-headquartered CCG was founded in 2020 by John Cooling. Following the close, Mr. Cooling retains an equity interest in CCG and has joined the company’s board of directors.
“The team at CCG has worked extremely hard to develop our reputation as a high-quality provider of custom solutions to our customers,” said Mr. Cooling. “We are excited to partner with Sheridan, whose operational resources and knowledge of our market will enable us to accelerate growth with our customers.”
CCG’s new chief executive is Maurice Phelan, who joins the company from Sartorius, where he had led the German bioprocessing group’s North American operations as president since January 2023, overseeing several thousand employees across the region. His earlier career spans senior roles at Repligen, at GE Healthcare’s life sciences business, now Cytiva, and at Merck Millipore.
“I am thrilled to be joining CCG and I look forward to partnering with the existing team and Sheridan to continue the company’s strong legacy of quality, expertise and deep customer focus,” said Mr. Phelan. “With Sheridan’s support and guidance, we are well-positioned to expand our offerings and deepen relationships across our diversified blue-chip customer base.”
Biopharmaceutical manufacturing has shifted over the past two decades away from fixed stainless-steel systems toward single-use, or disposable, equipment. Because single-use components arrive sterile and are thrown away after one batch, they reduce the risk of cross-contamination and let manufacturers switch between products more quickly, an advantage as production has broadened from a handful of blockbuster biologics to a wider set of therapies, including cell and gene treatments made in smaller volumes. The growth of contract manufacturers, which produce drugs on behalf of pharmaceutical companies, has added further demand for the consumable assemblies that CCG supplies.
Sheridan Capital’s acquisition of CCG extends a thesis the firm has pursued across the pharmaceutical manufacturing supply chain, a segment characterized by recurring, consumable demand tied to regulated production volumes rather than to the commercial success of any single drug.
Michael Bernard
“CCG is the result of our multi-year thesis in the pharmaceutical manufacturing supply chain, and we are very excited to be partnering with the company at this inflection point,” said Michael Bernard, a partner at Sheridan.
Sheridan Capital invests in recession-resistant, non-discretionary markets within the healthcare industry including service providers, information technology, outsourced services, consumer health, and medical products. For service providers and medical product manufacturers it makes investments of $30 million to $150 million in companies with $5 million to $25 million of EBITDA. For software and technology companies, it makes investments of $15 million to $150 million in companies with up to $10 million of EBITDA and revenues of $5 million to $30 million. Sheridan Capital closed its latest fund, Sheridan Capital Partners Fund III LP, at its hard cap with $575 million of capital in July 2023.
The transaction was led by Sean Dempsey, Michael Bernard and Conor Kolstad of Sheridan.
Houlihan Lokey was the financial advisor to Carolina Components Group.
CCG also makes two- and three-dimensional bioprocessing bags used to transfer and store fluids in volumes from 50 milliliters to 3,000 liters, storage and mixing tanks across a similar range, aseptic connectors, bottle-closure systems and the FlowMixer, a benchtop mixing device for single-use applications. Customers of CCG include more than 250 biopharmaceutical and contract manufacturing companies.
