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Chemical Week: Creating Customer Value Key to Company’s Strategy of Becoming A Specialties Firm
Media Coverage
This article was originally published in Chemical Week on March 10, 2025.
Author: Sotirios Frantzanas
Partnerships are central to the ongoing transformation of Aurorium Holding LLC (Indianapolis), formerly Vertellus Specialties, into a specialty ingredients and materials company, and they are its greatest asset, according to Faye Freeman, Aurorium CEO, and John Van Hulle, the company’s executive chairman.
“My goal is for Aurorium to always be the partner of choice for our customers and create value for all stakeholders. To achieve this, our customers, partners and employees must always feel supported and valued, and we must enable them to meet their current and future goals,” Freeman told CW.
Freeman became Aurorium’s CEO in December 2024 after six years with the company, succeeding Van Hulle, who had been CEO since 2018.
Aurorium is owned by private equity firm Pritzker Private Capital (PPC; Chicago) and members of Aurorium’s management team. It has a workforce of about 1,000 and serves an expanding portfolio of customers globally across the personal and home care, healthcare, mobility, infrastructure, and paper and packaging end markets.
The company said it is currently undergoing a transformation into “a specialty ingredients and materials partner to customers around the globe.” Aurorium already had some “unique” specialty technologies in its portfolio and “great” technical bench strength, Freeman and Van Hulle said.
“This combination was already valued by a wide range of customers across different industries, and building on these relationships helped us understand what was important and how we could expand the value we bring to them. With this in mind, we transitioned from a product-focused company to an industry-orientated company. We focused our attention and resources on segments where customers have a need and utilized our regulatory expertise, industry knowledge, innovative research and development [R&D] solutions, and global reach to deliver a bespoke solution,” they said.
Part of the company’s transformation came from M&A deals, Freeman said. Aurorium’s M&A strategy focuses on identifying a segment where it already provides value and making acquisitions that enhance its offering to that specific industry, they added.
Since partnering with PPC in 2021, Aurorium has acquired and integrated several businesses in Europe and North America, including specialty materials company Centauri Technologies in March 2023. “These acquisitions have strengthened us and enabled us to bring greater value to our customers. Our growth and success created an opportune time and environment for us to accelerate our rebranding in 2023 and establish ourselves as a specialty company under the Aurorium umbrella,” Freeman and Van Hulle said.
The company’s transformation has been an “incredible journey” so far, and there are still many opportunities ahead within the healthcare, personal and home care, mobility, infrastructure, and paper and packaging industries, they said.
The company ended 2024 on a “strong note” and is optimistic going into 2025, according to Freeman and Van Hulle. “Our focus continues to be on transitioning to a specialty company and ensuring we delight the customer. With these focuses in mind, we will continue to invest in our people — developing our existing teams and adding talent to key business areas. We will also continue to advance our operations through capital investment and drive a culture of continuous improvement,” they said.
M&A remains a top priority for Aurorium. The company has identified niche areas where it adds value for its customers through continued investment, and it will look to pursue the addition of new companies to the “Aurorium family” in 2025, Freeman and Van Hulle said.
Pharmaceutical drug delivery solutions and sustainable solutions across a variety of the company’s focus industry segments are considered key growth areas for Aurorium in 2025, they noted.
In 2024, Aurorium launched a business line dedicated to enhancing drug efficacy through high-purity solutions and drug delivery products. The business line is called Haelium Pharmaceutical Solutions, and its products support therapeutic areas including peptide and oligonucleotide production, large-molecule biologics, vaccines and oral solid dosage forms, Freeman and Van Hulle said.
“The launch of Haelium resulted from our customer-centric approach to understanding the customers’ needs and responding with the right solution. Coupled with investment in innovation and solutions such as high-purity buffers, reagents, solvents, extended-release coatings and immunostimulants, Aurorium has invested heavily in its current good manufacturing practice [cGMP] footprint and regulatory expertise to support our customers,” they said.
Investment in this segment will continue in 2025, but outside the drug delivery space, Aurorium’s R&D investment is increasingly focused on finding solutions from renewable sources, and it already supplies many natural-based solutions in the personal and home care space, Freeman and Van Hulle said.
Aurorium also provides solutions that allow its customers to deliver more sustainable products to meet future environmental and climate targets in industries such as mobility and paper and packaging, according to Freeman and Van Hulle.
Aurorium’s focus areas in 2025 tie back to its main goal of having customers at the heart of the company’s strategy, understanding their challenges and taking the opportunity to be a strong partner for them, they said.