Virtual data rooms are used for a variety of reasons in a range of industries. Whether you’re preparing for fundraising, considering taking your company public, or looking to take control of corporate documents scattered across multiple desks, hard drives, and shared folders, there are many reasons to use a virtual data room. Here are a few of the most common VDR use cases.

Businesses that once relied on rows and rows of filing cabinets to store company documents have now shifted to virtual data rooms, also known as online data rooms. These digital warehouses serve as repositories for storing information and files about an organization: everything from financial statements and lists of company assets to contracts and HR data.

Virtual data rooms are particularly useful for the due diligence process during mergers and acquisitions. Potential M&A buyers want to see that you have all your ducks in a row, investigating and auditing your organization in order to limit the risk of the transaction.

By placing your documents in a centralized repository for easy access, virtual data rooms can significantly speed up the due diligence process. In this blog post, we’ll discuss some of the most important forms and information that you should have in your virtual data room during an M&A transaction.

In the last few years, the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry has experienced enormous growth and over $9 billion in funding. In fact, the latest projections predict the biotech industry could end up being worth over $727 billion by 2025.  With so many investment opportunities and fundraising activities surrounding biotech, it makes sense that investors want to learn all they can about the industry and its future potential. With that in mind, here are our four must-read books about the past, present, and future of biotech.

Despite the popular buzz around cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, the technology has yet to see mass adoption in the world of mainstream business and finance. However, the past year has seen a number of indications that cryptocurrency is gaining a good deal of legitimacy and stability.

Knowing when to sell is always a challenge – since the timing of launching a process is not only critical to it being successful but also can make a significant difference to the valuation. One important consideration is knowing what buyers look for in a deal so founders can maximize their price and make the exit a win for them, the team and their shareholders.

For aspiring entrepreneurs and startup companies, knowing how and when to raise capital for their businesses can be a challenging endeavor. This challenge only becomes compounded when you consider the dynamic digital landscape that all companies are required to navigate. Now more than ever, there is a growing need for companies to be able to provide secure and easily accessible information to their potential investors while minimizing lead-times through seamless virtual data exchanges.

Summer may be almost over, but there’s still time to get in a beach read or two. If you have the bandwidth to pick up a book during the last few weeks of August, why not optimize your reading time by combining business with pleasure?

Growth through mergers and acquisitions has already surpassed $1.7 billion this year, which is the fastest growth rate in value ever recorded. According to accountancy firm Deloitte, this figure is already well beyond the $1.3 billion in M&A growth recorded for the entire year of 2017.

Decades ago, the file room was often the heart of an organization — information  flowed  in and out of its chambers, bringing critical resources to every part of a company. While  paper  is on the fast track to obsolescence in many environments, the file room has evolved to take up residence on local servers or the cloud, with virtual data rooms making M&A due diligence and paperwork that much easier.

And yet, the  organization  of that data room remains a key aspect of ongoing business success. Check out these three tips for maintaining an organized virtual data room to support your entire organization — whether you’re in the midst of M&A activity or not.

According to a KPMG study, attempted mergers have a failure rate around 83 percent. Other research shows a different rate of failure, but it's always above 50 percent, which means you're up against some serious challenges when you step into the M&A waters. CEOs and companies that want to hedge as many bets as possible can learn from common M&A mistakes so they can avoid or mitigate as many hurdles to success as possible.