Chris Sullens Built CentralReach Into a Juggernaut. He Left Without a Press Release or Permanent Successor

FORT LAUDERDALE, FLORIDA – Chris Sullens worked his last day as CentralReach’s chief executive on Friday, Sept. 4, eight years after he took over a Florida startup that Insight Venture Partners had just bought into. He leaves a company Roper Technologies bought in April 2025 for about $1.85 billion. More than 4,600 provider organizations run scheduling, session notes, and billing for autism and IDD (intellectual and developmental disability) care on its software, and Roper says the business is ahead of the projections it used to price the deal.

No press release announced it. CentralReach’s leadership page lists chief operating officer Clark Convery as interim CEO and COO and Sullens as a strategic adviser, and the speaker list for CR Unite, the company’s customer conference in Boston on Sept. 21 to 23, calls him a former CEO. As of Sept. 17, the three newest items in CentralReach’s newsroom were Sept. 9 award announcements, and Roper’s newest release was a conference notice. Sullens confirmed the move himself in a LinkedIn post, and the company has not said when it expects to name a permanent successor.

When Insight invested in February 2018, CentralReach had more than 500 customers and more than 100 employees. By Sullens’s count in his farewell post, its software now runs more than 250,000 clinical sessions a day, 9 times the volume when he arrived.

The Company He Inherited

CentralReach began in 2012 in Pompano Beach, Florida, as software Charlotte Fudge, a BCBA, built to run her own ABA practice: client records, staff scheduling, authorizations, claims, and clinical data. It grew into an electronic health record and practice-management system for ABA, speech, and occupational therapy clinics, and its sales grew more than 65% in 2017.

In February 2018, Insight Venture Partners made what it called a “significant” investment on undisclosed terms; Sullens has since described it as a majority stake. Insight managing director Richard Wells framed the bet on demand, citing autism prevalence and coverage laws passed in 39 more states since 2008: there was, he said, “a critical need for best-in-class software to manage the care process.” Two months before Sullens arrived, CentralReach bought Chartlytics, a behavior-data charting and analytics tool.

An Operator From Outside ABA

Sullens came to ABA from field-service software. From 2008 to 2018, he ran WorkWave, a New Jersey maker of cloud software for pest-control and other field-service companies, first as chief financial officer for eight months and then as president and CEO. His CentralReach biography says he grew the company from a single installed product into a multi-product cloud business through 11 acquisitions, increasing headcount from 38 to nearly 300 and revenue by 800%. The Sweden-based enterprise software company IFS agreed to buy WorkWave in September 2017, and Sullens stayed on until July 2018.

“I got to know Insight Venture Partners (based in New York) while I was at WorkWave, and there was a degree of familiarity,” he told ROI-NJ in 2019. In his farewell post, he said a mentor had advised him not to jump into anything new after the sale, but “he didn’t know that CentralReach would be the first opportunity to cross my desk.” What he saw, he wrote, was “a small startup with a strong product market fit, a dedicated team, healthy culture and a massive opportunity to make a difference in the autism and IDD care market.”

CentralReach named him CEO on July 31, 2018, effective immediately; Fudge’s title became founder and former CEO. The brief, as he and Wells described it that day, was to automate the back-office work that ate clinicians’ time and to keep pushing the technology forward with Insight’s money behind it.

“The investors and the board really need to be 100% aligned with the CEO in terms of how they want to grow the business.” – Chris Sullens, then CEO, CentralReach, to ROI-NJ (2019)

He started as the company’s only employee in New Jersey. Within a year, he had built a second hub there, first in a coworking space at Bell Works in Holmdel and then in Matawan, housing most of the leadership team along with product, engineering, finance, talent, sales, and marketing, many of which, apart from engineering, were “relatively new to the company,” he said. CentralReach added more than 100 people in his first 12 months, reaching about 200 employees, and organic growth, meaning growth excluding acquisitions, climbed from the mid-40% range to more than 60% a year, he said in 2019.

14 Acquisitions and an AI Turn

At CentralReach, growth came partly by acquisition: 14 deals under Insight, by Sullens’s count at the time of the Roper sale. Bronco Billing came in December 2018; Pathfinder Health Innovations, a Kansas City practice-management tool for small clinics, in June 2019; and Thread Learning, a data-collection app, in February 2020, the fifth deal in 18 months. Later purchases reached beyond the clinic, including Avail, an Irish training platform for neurodiverse individuals, in 2021 and SILAS, a social-emotional learning program for PreK-12 schools, in 2024. The user base grew from roughly 65,000 clinicians and educators in mid-2019 to more than 200,000 professionals by 2025.

By the end of 2022, the company had about 400 employees and more than 20 million therapy sessions a year running through the platform. CentralReach announced its generative AI assistant, cari, in August 2023. In July 2024, it announced CR NoteGuardAI, which the company said enables providers to audit all clinical session notes, compared with the 10% or less it said providers typically could review manually. By January 2025, CentralReach said more than 100 organizations had adopted its CR NoteGuardAI and CR NoteDraftAI solutions, with more than 800,000 notes audited and corrected and at least $100 million in revenue protected from potential payer clawbacks. In his farewell post, Sullens put the running total at more than 16 million claims audited and “almost $3 billion” in clawbacks avoided; the company’s July 30, 2026, release had put clawbacks avoided across its AI tools at $1.7 billion. Both figures are company-reported.

The $1.85 Billion Sale to Roper

On March 24, 2025, Roper Technologies agreed to buy CentralReach from Insight for a net price of about $1.65 billion, or about $1.85 billion before a $200 million tax benefit. Roper said it expected about $175 million in revenue and $75 million in EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) in the 12 months through June 2026, both growing more than 20%, and its president and CEO, Neil Hunn, called CentralReach “a fantastic business with clear niche market leadership.” The deal closed April 23, 2025, and Roper paid for it with its revolving credit line.

Sullens said in CentralReach’s announcement that “with Roper’s long-term investment and commitment, CentralReach now has a permanent home,” and the announcement said the company would keep operating independently with its existing leadership, team, products, and brands.

The unit hit its marks. Roper’s Q2 2026 investor presentation, released July 23, said CentralReach “achieved year-one revenue & EBITDA targets,” and Hunn told analysts the business was “delivering very strong growth and meaningful margin improvement.” A week later, CentralReach said revenue grew more than 20% year over year and that more than 4,600 ABA practices use its software.

“After one year, the business is ahead of our deal model.” – Neil Hunn, President and CEO, Roper Technologies, Q2 2026 earnings call (July 2026)

Deals and hiring continued under Roper, and the team Convery inherits is largely new. In August 2025, CentralReach acquired AI.Measures and SpectrumAi, two outcomes-measurement companies, and made AI.Measures CEO Tom Frazier its chief clinical officer. In November and December 2025, it announced new chief product, information security, financial, and marketing officers, followed in July 2026 by chief sales officer Dan Freund.

A Farewell on LinkedIn

The departure surfaced when rumors spread that Sullens was stepping down and the CR Unite agenda began listing him as former CEO. His own account followed on LinkedIn: “After 8 incredible years, last Friday marked my last day at CentralReach.” “Leaving your dream job is never easy,” he wrote, but with the business, the team, and “the ‘forever home’ we have with Roper Technologies, Inc.,” it “feels like the right time for me to step aside and bring in a leader who can build on this solid foundation and take CentralReach to the next level.”

Convery, who joined in January 2022 as COO from Visual Lease, where he held the same title, oversees account management across sales, customer success, implementation, and support. Sullens said he would “support the transition as a strategic advisor as we select my successor.”

The two are due on stage together Sept. 22, when, according to MissionViewpoint, the CR Unite agenda lists them as sharing the keynote slot, one as “Former CEO and Strategic Advisor” and the other as “COO and Interim CEO”; the conference speaker list carries the same titles. After that comes Roper’s Q3 2026 report, the first in which CentralReach’s growth counts as organic rather than acquired.

AT A GLANCE

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