Oak Hill Capital, a New York-based midsize private equity firm, announced its investment and partnership with American Veterinary Group. This transaction is a continuation of Oak Hill’s focus on building veterinary services businesses following prior investments in VetCor and Butler bill.
The AVG management team led by the CEO Craig Niebur, Operations manager Dr. Christopher Smithand Chief Development Officer Jim Herring will continue to run and hold a stake in the company, as will other senior management and veterinarians at AVG.
“We were immediately impressed with Oak Hill’s knowledge of the veterinary services arena, but most importantly, their shared value in the long-term customer relationships that our local veterinary teams build in our hospitals every day. We are excited about this alignment with our core values as this partnership allows us to continue our vision of expanding the AVG hospital family we have built over the past five years, ”said Craig Niebur, CEO of AVG.
“We have great respect for the platform that Craig, Dr. Smith and her team worked to believe AVG was well positioned to grow in the highly fragmented veterinary care services market. The AVG partnership is in line with Oak Hill’s themed investment approach, which is designed to support exceptional teams in high quality, multi-lever acyclical markets to grow, ”he said Steve Puccinelli, managing partner at Oak Hill.
AVG is currently a portfolio company of Latticework Capital Management and Trive Capital. Harris Williams & Co. acted as financial advisor to AVG. William Blair acted as financial advisor to Oak Hill. Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP is legal advisor to Oak Hill and McGuireWoods LLP is legal advisor to AVG.
