Graham Holdings Is the Only NYSE-Listed Owner of an ABA Chain

What Graham’s April Filing Shows

ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA – the closest thing the ABA industry has to a recurring public disclosure arrived on April 30. Graham Holdings, the NYSE-listed conglomerate that once published The Washington Post, filed its quarterly Form 10-Q and disclosed that revenue in the group housing Surpass Behavioral Health, its ABA clinic chain, rose 10% from a year earlier, with growth in “each of the other healthcare businesses.”

The numbers behind that sentence are specific in a way ABA operators rarely are in public. The other healthcare group booked $91.6 million in first-quarter revenue, up from $83.5 million, and $11.1 million in operating income, up 28%, according to the earnings release Graham issued the same day. Graham’s healthcare division grew 20% to $209.3 million, though operating income slipped 5%. Operating income fell 35% at CSI Pharmacy, the home-infusion business making up the division’s larger half, even as CSI revenue grew 31%. The division’s profit growth came from the side holding the ABA clinics.

“Revenue increased in other healthcare businesses by 10% in the first quarter of 2026 from growth in home health and hospice services and each of the other healthcare businesses.” – Graham Holdings Form 10-Q, April 30, 2026

The disclosure has limits. Graham does not break out Surpass on its own line; the other-healthcare group also includes home health and hospice services, the Clarus physician-communications platform, the allergy practice partner Impact Medical, and Skin Clique, an in-home aesthetics company. Even so, the 10-Q states growth was achieved across the group and operating results improved at “the other four healthcare businesses,” including Surpass. For a sector whose unit economics surface piecemeal through state audits, OIG reviews, and research letters, an SEC-filed quarterly number including an ABA chain is the closest thing to a public benchmark.

The Company Behind Surpass

The corporate history is striking. This is the company that published The Washington Post until the Graham family sold the paper to Jeff Bezos for $250 million in October 2013 and renamed the remainder Graham Holdings that November. The company that once operated the NYSE ticker now spans Kaplan’s education businesses, television stations, manufacturing, auto dealerships, and a healthcare division.

Surpass entered that portfolio in 2022, when Graham Healthcare Group’s GHC Two subsidiary, partly owned by current and former senior managers, acquired Skin Clique and Surpass. Graham’s annual report described the purchase: Ray Beyond Behavioral Corporation, doing business as Surpass Behavioral Health, a Nashville-headquartered multi-state provider running “approximately 28 ABA clinics with 449 clinicians and 37 back-office employees throughout Kentucky, South Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Florida,” plus a school program in Pennsylvania and a community living program in Kentucky. The majority of its revenue came from center-based operations.

The name was newer than the clinics. Until February 2023, the business operated as ChanceLight Autism Services. The rebrand announcement introduced Surpass as “part of the Graham Holdings family”; the company traces its earliest clinics to 2000. Chief executive Daniel Byrdsong, a Vanderbilt MBA who was previously CFO of the ABA provider Autism in Motion, says his interest in autism care stems from raising a son with ASD. “My son was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder at the age of 2 and a half years old,” he said in the 2023 announcement.

From 28 Clinics to 14, Then Forward

The chain Graham bought is not the chain it runs today. By December 31, 2025, the annual report counted “14 Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) clinics throughout Kentucky, South Carolina and Georgia,” plus the Pennsylvania school program and a positive behavior support program in Kentucky, with about 301 full-time employees. Florida, part of the footprint Graham described at acquisition, no longer appears on the clinic list. This is a decline from 28 clinics in 2022 to 14 by year-end 2025, in two fewer states.

The 2026 direction runs the opposite way. As of July 7, Surpass’s site lists 15 clinics across Georgia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina, including an Eagleville, Pennsylvania location not in the December count. It also advertises openings in Savannah, Georgia, and Illinois. The financial line containing Surpass grew 12% in 2025 to $349.5 million, before the 10% first-quarter gain.

There is also a compliance file attached to the corporate line Surpass descends from, and it predates Graham. In August 2018, Early Autism Project Inc., then South Carolina’s largest ABA provider and a subsidiary of ChanceLight Inc., paid $8.8 million to resolve a False Claims Act investigation into billing submitted to TRICARE and South Carolina Medicaid; the companies admitted no wrongdoing. The corporate integrity agreement that HHS-OIG signed with ChanceLight Inc. and Early Autism Project ran from July 11, 2018 to November 14, 2023, so Graham’s 2022 purchase of the ChanceLight autism business fell inside that window. OIG lists the agreement as closed. South Carolina remains Surpass’s densest state, with seven of the 15 listed clinics.

Why a Public ABA Owner Is Rare

The rest of the sector’s platforms are owned by private owners. A JAMA Pediatrics research letter published January 5, 2026, counted 574 autism-service sites acquired by private equity firms across 42 states from 2015 to 2024, with nearly 80% of the 147 deals struck between 2018 and 2022. STAT News documented in 2022 that firms including Blackstone and KKR sat behind eight of the sector’s biggest names. An M&A tracker published this year lists 15 active PE-backed ABA platforms and treats founder-owned ABA Centers of America as the sector’s notable exception; none of the platforms it tracks trade on a public exchange. That leaves Graham Holdings as the lone New York Stock Exchange-listed owner of a dedicated ABA clinic chain, and its filings as the industry’s only recurring public record of ABA operations.

Scale is the caveat. Hopebridge, one of the sector’s largest platforms with roughly 100 centers in ten states, shut its Arkansas operations effective October 3, 2025, after a state law required ABA centers serving five or more unrelated children for five or more hours a day to be licensed as child care facilities. Surpass, at 15 clinics, is a fraction of that footprint; the difference is the paper trail.

Graham’s second-quarter report, covering the period ending June 30, is the next scheduled public reading on ABA clinic performance anywhere in the market. The company filed last year’s on July 30.

AT A GLANCE

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