Private-Equity Firm Launched by Warburg Pincus Alum Inks First Deal With Examinetics
Coalesce Capital, founded in 2022 by former Warburg Pincus executive Stephanie Geveda, held an initial closing of its debut fund earlier this year
Emerging manager Coalesce Capital has backed its first deal with an investment in occupational-health compliance services company Examinetics.
Freedom 3 Capital, a credit investment firm that previously backed Examinetics, is reinvesting in the company alongside Coalesce Capital.
Overland Park, Kan.-based Examinetics provides a range of testing and monitoring services that help organizations protect worker safety and comply with health and safety regulations. Its services include medical examinations, on-site and on-demand hearing testing, noise surveys, air sampling and medical consulting, according to the Examinetics’ website. The company currently reaches more than 3,000 clients across over 18,000 locations and operates a fleet of 130 mobile testing units, its website says.
Coalesce has identified environmental health and safety testing and compliance as an attractive investment area within business services, according to founder and Managing Partner Stephanie Geveda.
“There’s an increasing amount of responsibility that corporations are taking for their underlying employees,” said Geveda, who founded Coalesce in 2022 after a career at Warburg, where she led the private-equity firm’s business services investment strategy. “Also, regulations in this category tend to grow over time.”
While at Warburg, Geveda led investments across a number of testing and compliance companies, including A-Lign, Hygiena and FlexXray.
She said she sees strong growth potential at Examinetics, particularly in its internally developed Salux technology, a digital hearing testing platform that allows customers to conduct on-site hearing tests on demand. She also sees potential for the company to expand the services it offers, including, for example, in compliance-program-management consulting.
“We really do think this can be a much broader platform in the health and safety compliance arena,” said Geveda. “We would achieve that through a balanced diet of organic and inorganic growth.”
Coalesce focuses on North American business-services companies that have a heavy human-capital and technology-enabled component, according to its website. The firm typically targets deals with enterprise values ranging from $100 million to $300 million. It generally focuses on companies with at least $5 million of earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization and at least $25 million in revenue.
Coalesce’s first deal follows on the heels of some initial traction the firm gained in raising capital for its debut fund. Geveda declined to discuss the firm’s fundraising. However, a regulatory filing from earlier this year revealed that the firm had amassed at least $328.6 million for the debut fund. One investor that disclosed a commitment to the fund is the public pension system Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund, which indicated on its website that it had backed Coalesce Capital Fund I LP through a fund-of-funds mandate managed by Pantheon.