Houlihan Lokey Advises KureSmart Pain Management

Houlihan Lokey is pleased to announce that KureSmart Pain Management (KureSmart), a portfolio company of New Harbor Capital, has been acquired by Clearway Pain Solutions (Clearway), a portfolio company of NexPhase Capital. The transaction closed on August 27, 2019.

Founded in 2003 and headquartered in Annapolis, Maryland, KureSmart is a leading provider of interventional pain management services with a differentiated multimodal approach to care, designed to treat each patient holistically. The company's capabilities cover a wide spectrum of services, including clinical assessments, minimally invasive procedures, physical therapy, toxicology services, and other ancillary products. The company achieved significant growth under New Harbor Capital's ownership—more than quadrupling in size over the past four years—and has 26 pain management clinics, 10 ASCs, and three physical therapy clinics in Maryland, Michigan, and Delaware.

New Harbor Capital is a Chicago-based private equity firm, with more than $400 million of capital under management, focused on research-based investing in lower middle-market, growth-oriented healthcare, education, and business services companies. Its partners have a combined 50 years of experience working with strong founders and management teams to systematically enable accelerated growth, value creation, and long-term sustainability.

Headquartered in Pensacola, Florida, Clearway is a leading interventional pain management medical practice with 13 locations in the Florida Panhandle and Alabama. Clearway provides a compassionate, patient-centered system of integrated care that includes interventional treatments, medication management, chiropractic services, physical therapy, massage therapy, and regenerative medicine.

NexPhase Capital is a thematic, operationally focused independent private equity firm that makes equity investments between $25 million and $75 million in lower middle-market, growth-oriented companies in the healthcare, consumer, and software and services sectors. The firm was formed by the former principals of Moelis Capital Partners to execute, on an independent basis, the same strategy of completing control investments in lower middle-market companies to create value through dedicated operating resources, new sales channels, and effective partnerships. Led by co-managing partners Kurt Larsen and Ted Yun, NexPhase advises $1.2 billion of private equity capital.

This transaction further strengthens Houlihan Lokey's leadership position in interventional pain management, having now advised two of the most significant deals in the space. This transaction also highlights the firm's continued leadership in the physician practice management and multisite healthcare sectors—where it has closed 46 transactions since 2016—representing more than $9 billion in transaction enterprise value, including 13 transactions over the past 12 months. Houlihan Lokey's Healthcare Group is among the largest dedicated healthcare investment banking groups in the country. In 2018, Houlihan Lokey was ranked the No. 1 M&A advisor for all U.S. healthcare transactions by Thomson Reuters.

Houlihan Lokey served as the exclusive financial advisor to KureSmart.