Applied behavioral analysis (ABA) provider Behavioral Framework received a new investment from private equity firm Renovus Capital Partners.
Behavioral Framework plans to use the funds to professionalize and invest in its services as well as to onboard new leadership, CEO Kyle West told Behavioral Health Business. The company declined to share the specific amount of the investment.
Rockville, Maryland-based Behavioral Framework, originally a family-owned business, provides autism diagnoses and ABA therapy in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. Its ABA therapies almost exclusively take place in patients’ homes.
“The treatment is really tailored towards making a meaningful impact not only for the child, preparing them for long-term success, but also making a meaningful change in that family’s life,” West said. “We’re also very data-driven. We track against industry standards to ensure each client is making progress, but also to ensure that our program as a whole is living up to very high standards for ourselves.”
The company employs over 800 clinicians who provided therapy to more than 1,100 patients in 2023.
Renovus Capital Partners cited the growing ABA space as the reason for its investment, a sentiment shared by other investors and providers who say that “autism services is essentially where you want to be.”
Renovus is a lower-middle market private equity firm with an investment portfolio that includes companies specializing in behavioral health, revenue cycle management and health care IT. Ascension Recovery Services, a substance use disorder management program developer, is one of its portfolio companies.
Renovus Capital Partners’s investment in Behavioral Framework will help the company “grow up,” West told BHB.
“We’re going to professionalize a lot of our tools and processes and invest in systems and tools and people,” he said. “The investment is going to help us continue to expand, grow, bring in leadership, promote people that we have and ensure that everything we’re doing is the highest quality. Success will come from that.”
Private equity has heavily invested in the autism space over the last few years. For example, PE firm KKR formed autism provider BlueSprig Pediatrics in 2018. But not every autism investment has worked out for PE. In 2018, Blackstone (NYSE: BX) invested roughly $700 million into The Center for Autism and Related Disorders. In 2023 the company declared bankruptcy and was sold back to its original founder.
