British Invasion: UK's Largest Fertility Group Makes First US Acquisition

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BY RACHEL LELAND

CARE Fertility, the United Kingdom's largest fertility group, has announced its first-ever entry into the United States fertility market by acquiring REACH, a former Integramed fertility clinic in Charlotte, North Carolina with four REI physicians and four advanced practice providers (APP).

The acquisition, along with one other, are CARE's first outside of the U.K. and Ireland. In tandem with announcing the REACH acquisition, CARE announced it was buying IVF-Life Spain. 

The financier behind CARE is Nordic Capital, which bought CARE from Silverfleet Capital in January 2022, to support the fertility group’s expansion into international markets. CARE Fertility generated €74 million in revenue in 2021. Nordic Capital reports €31 billion in assets under management from 47 investments in its current portfolio. According to Crunch Base, the international investment firm is based in Copenhagen.

Robert Goodman, Vice President at MidCap Advisors, an investment banking firm which handles mergers and acquisitions, and is familiar with REACH, said that he couldn’t speak to the dollar figure of the deal because MidCap was not involved in this sale. Goodman estimates the range of the deal was “probably a low double digit multiple of EBITDA.” 

According to Patrick McPhillips, Executive Director at REACH, the North Carolina clinic ultimately decided to liaise with the buyer directly, rather than work with an investment banking firm.

As the largest provider group of IVF in the U.K., CARE does about 10,000 fresh treatment cycles every year and a similar number of frozen embryo procedures, according to Alison Campbell, Chief Scientific Officer at CARE. REACH currently does just under 600 retrievals per year according to McPhillips.

Campbell called their acquisition timely, because of a shortage of embryologists in the U.S., which is largely due, in their view, to a lack of adequate embryology training programs. CARE launched a master's program in clinical embryology in partnership with Liverpool John Moores University in 2022.

“We use half a billion images of thousands and thousands of embryos to train the machine learning to automatically annotate these timelapse videos,” Campbell said. “So that in itself is saving twenty-three weeks of embryology time across the group. A real efficiency gain there.” 

McPhillips, says one of the most significant benefits of the partnership for REACH will be having access to CARE’s extensive network of data. While the two clinics are in the beginning stages of the integration, REACH will soon have access to CARE’s IT systems and Power BI, the cloud-based analytics service that CARE uses to visualize and analyze data from its over twenty clinics in the U.K. 

According to Campbell, CARE and REACH are already talking about introducing CAREmaps, CARE’s trademarked time-lapse imaging technique, which helps clinicians select embryos that have the highest potential without needing genetic testing. 

CARE was co-founded in 1997 by Dr. Simon Fishel, who was a part of the team that created the world's first IVF baby in 1978. REACH was founded in 1988 by Dr. Richard L Wing.

Campbell says that CARE is looking at partnering with even more clinics in the Southeast and the broader U.S. 

REACH says they will maintain their name and not take on the CARE name in the United States.

“CARE isn’t going to rebrand us or make us one of many,” McPhillips said. 

The themes reported in this publication are those of the news. They do not reflect the views of Inside Reproductive Health, nor of the Advertiser


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