Med spas rapidly are becoming the front door to healthcare, and Empower Aesthetics has put out the welcome mat. Partnering with financial sponsor Shore Capital, Empower’s platform of medical spas are located in Texas and Tennessee and building in the Midwest and upstate New York.

With McGuireWoods partner and host Geoff Cockrell, Empower CEO Alyssa Rapp and Shore’s Logan Pitts share their insights on growing a med spa platform. She attributes Empower’s success to a relentless focus on “pure-play med spas” that offer injectables, lasers and body contouring. “We’re sticking to our knitting and very clear on what we’re doing,” she says.

3 Boomerang Capital has announced a majority growth investment in Enjoin.

Enjoin, founded in 1988 and based in Collierville, Tennessee, provides clinical documentation integrity solutions for hospitals and health systems. 

3 Boomerang, based in Greenwich, Conn., invests in lower middle market healthcare companies in North America and Western Europe. Founded in 2023, the firm focuses on biopharma outsourcing, medical device and diagnostic manufacturing, information technology and tech-enabled services, and alternate site care. 3 Boomerang has a flexible investment structure and targets companies with EBITDA of $4 million to $14 million.

Terms of the investment were not disclosed.

Valeas Capital Partners has announced the closing of its first institutional fund at more than $600 million.

The inaugural fund, VCP Fund I, exceeded its target.

Valeas, founded in 2021 and based in San Francisco, is a middle-market, growth-buyout private equity firm. The firm prefers to invest between $50 million and $150 million in companies operating in healthcare and a few other sectors.

Argosy Healthcare Partners (AHP) has announced the recapitalization of Nicklas Medical Staffing (NMS).

NMS, founded in 2013 and based in Jacksonville, Florida, provides staffing solutions for pathology and histology labs.

AHP, based in Wayne, Pennsylvania, is a lower middle market private equity investor focused exclusively on healthcare. A division of Argosy Capital, AHP typically pursues majority control transactions in U.S.-based, founder-owned healthcare businesses with $1 million to $3 million of EBITDA.

Terms of the investment were not disclosed.

Frazier Healthcare Partners has announced the closing of a new fund with $2.3 billion of commitments.

The fund, Frazier Healthcare Growth Buyout Fund XI, was oversubscribed and hit its hard cap in six months. The fund will focus on acquiring controlling interests in middle-market healthcare companies.

Frazier, based in Seattle, is a provider of private equity capital to healthcare companies. The firm, founded in 1991, prefers to make more substantial investments from a dollars perspective and pursues a wide range of investment types, including company creation and venture capital to buyouts of profitable lower-middle market companies.

As the pharma services sector grows, regulators at the Department of Justice and Food and Drug Administration are putting everything from clinical trials to site management under the microscope.

McGuireWoods partner Clint Narver speaks from experience: He joined the firm after serving in leadership roles at both agencies. With host Geoff Cockrell, Clint helps industry stakeholders understand regulators’ enforcement priorities. He covers the responsibilities of clinical research organizations, the impact of decentralized clinical trials on regulatory oversight and the importance of corporate compliance in avoiding enforcement actions. He has also addressed these topics in a recent alert.

To investors looking at acquiring a company, Clint notes that DOJ’s recent Mergers & Acquisitions Safe Harbor Policy is designed to incentivize the disclosure of corporate crime that is uncovered through the due diligence process.

At fast-growing Allied Digestive Health, with 194 gastrointestinal (GI) physicians, 75 nurse practitioners and locations throughout New Jersey and New York, COO Sap Sinha is excited about the future. “Private equity in general is looking at GI very specifically, and there are multiple reasons for it,” Sap says in this conversation with McGuireWoods partner and host Geoff Cockrell.

One reason is that colon cancer is the second-largest cause of cancer death in the United States. Sap describes the current landscape, in which Allied focuses on clinical quality and partnerships with large institutions. It also invests in frontier treatments, such as the use of genetic testing to detect colon cancer and weight management tools to control liver disease among obese patients.