From Information to Autism: The Berkery Noyes Origin Story

NEW YORK, NEW YORK — Berkery Noyes occupies an unusual position in the ABA advisory landscape. Founded in 1983 by Joseph W. Berkery, the firm spent its first three decades building one of the deepest transaction track records in the information industry—media companies, publishing houses, marketing services firms, financial data providers, and the software companies that served them. The MandAsoft research platform, which Berkery Noyes developed to track publicly announced transactions across its covered markets, became a tool that institutional buyers and sellers relied on for market intelligence. By the 2010s, the firm had closed hundreds of deals and established a reputation for bringing rigorous, data-driven analysis to middle-market M&A in sectors where information and technology intersected.

Healthcare was not the firm’s founding mandate. But the convergence of healthcare, technology, and information services—particularly in the behavioral health sector, where software platforms, data collection tools, and clinical workflows are increasingly central to how care is delivered and valued—created a natural adjacency. Berkery Noyes began advising healthcare technology and services companies as an extension of its information-sector expertise, and its healthcare team now works alongside bankers who cover software, education, human capital management, and financial services.

The behavioral health practice has grown through a series of consequential transactions. The firm’s involvement in the ABA sector is not a casual experiment—it reflects a strategic bet that the same dynamics driving consolidation in media and information (fragmentation, technology-driven efficiency, institutional capital, scale economics) are playing out in autism services. PitchBook records 259 total advisory engagements for Berkery Noyes, with the firm’s most recent listed transaction being the Ally Pediatric Therapy sale to ACES in January 2026.

Berkery Noyes built its reputation in media, information, and technology M&A. Its expansion into behavioral health reflects a thesis that the same consolidation dynamics—fragmentation, technology adoption, institutional capital—are reshaping autism services.

The ABA Deal Sheet

Berkery Noyes’s behavioral health credentials rest on several significant transactions that demonstrate both sell-side and buy-side advisory capability within the autism sector.

ACES and General Atlantic (2019–2020). Berkery Noyes served as the financial advisor to ACES, the San Diego-based ABA provider founded in 1996 by Kristin Farmer, in its partnership with General Atlantic. General Atlantic, one of the world’s largest growth equity firms with more than $85 billion in assets under management, invested in ACES to support the company’s expansion across multiple states. The transaction brought a tier-one institutional investor into the autism sector and established ACES as one of the most well-capitalized ABA platforms in the country. For Berkery Noyes, the deal demonstrated its ability to connect a clinician-founded ABA company with a global capital partner operating at the highest end of the institutional investment spectrum.

Golden Gate Capital and Invo Holdings (September 2019). In the same year, Berkery Noyes advised on Golden Gate Capital’s acquisition of Invo Holdings, a leading provider of autism and childhood behavioral health services. Invo served more than 60,000 children annually in schools, homes, and centers across 30 states, making it one of the largest behavioral health services organizations in the United States by patient volume. Golden Gate Capital, a San Francisco–based private equity firm with more than $15 billion in committed capital, acquired Invo to build a platform in behavioral health services. The transaction highlighted Berkery Noyes’s ability to facilitate deals between large PE firms and behavioral health services companies operating at enterprise scale.

Ally Pediatric Therapy and ACES (January 2026). The firm’s most recent behavioral health transaction saw it advise Ally Pediatric Therapy, a Phoenix-based provider of ABA, speech-language, and occupational therapy services, on its sale from SBJ Capital to ACES. The deal expanded ACES’s Arizona footprint to 92 locations across seven states and included plans for ACES to open additional de novo centers in the Greater Phoenix area. Berkery Noyes served as the exclusive financial advisor to Ally, with O’Melveny & Myers providing legal counsel. Bass Berry & Sims served as legal counsel to ACES. The transaction demonstrated the firm’s ongoing presence in ABA M&A and its relationship continuity with ACES, having previously advised the company on its General Atlantic partnership.

The ACES relationship is particularly notable because it illustrates a pattern that the most effective ABA advisory firms cultivate: recurring engagement with the same platform across multiple transactions. Berkery Noyes advised ACES on its institutional capital raise and subsequently advised a company being sold to ACES, positioning the firm on both sides of the ABA advisory equation over time.

The Information-Sector Edge

What distinguishes Berkery Noyes from the specialist behavioral health advisory firms—The Braff Group, Mertz Taggart, Calex Partners—is not deeper knowledge of ABA clinical operations. It is a different kind of expertise: the ability to evaluate and position companies that sit at the intersection of services and technology. In a market where ABA platform valuations are increasingly influenced by technology adoption (clinical data collection platforms, AI-powered documentation, revenue cycle management automation), a bank that understands how technology creates enterprise value brings a differentiated perspective to the deal process.

Berkery Noyes’s coverage spans software, healthcare IT, media, marketing services, education, human capital management, and financial services. Several of these sectors share structural characteristics with ABA: fragmented provider markets being consolidated by institutional capital, technology platforms replacing manual workflows, and increasing demand for data-driven outcomes measurement. The bank’s experience advising companies in these parallel verticals gives it a cross-sector perspective that can be valuable to ABA companies and sponsors evaluating technology-enabled growth strategies.

The MandAsoft research platform is another differentiator. Berkery Noyes continuously tracks every publicly announced transaction in its covered markets, compiling data on deal volume, buyer types, valuation benchmarks, and sector trends. This research capability allows the firm to provide clients with quantitative market context that goes beyond the qualitative insights that relationship-based advisory firms typically offer. For ABA companies or sponsors evaluating a transaction, the ability to benchmark their deal against a comprehensive database of comparable transactions across behavioral health and adjacent sectors is a meaningful analytical advantage.

The firm’s research-driven approach also positions it to identify convergence opportunities—transactions where behavioral health companies are being acquired by or merged with technology, education, or human capital management companies. As the boundaries between ABA service delivery and technology-enabled care continue to blur, advisors who understand both sides of that convergence will be increasingly valuable.

In a market where ABA platform valuations are increasingly influenced by technology adoption, a bank that understands how technology creates enterprise value—not just how therapy is delivered—brings a differentiated perspective to every deal.

The Competitive Landscape

Berkery Noyes enters the behavioral health advisory market against established competitors with deeper sector-specific track records. The Braff Group, led by Dexter Braff, is the most prominent M&A advisory firm in behavioral health broadly, with decades of deal experience across ABA, substance use disorder, mental health, and IDD services. Calex Partners, led by Jon Krieger, has the deepest autism-specific deal sheet in the market, with 22 behavioral health transactions including landmark deals for CARD, ACES, Proud Moments ABA, and Behavioral Innovations. Mertz Taggart publishes quarterly behavioral health M&A data that is widely cited by industry participants. Solomon Partners, Brentwood Capital Advisors, and Stoneridge Partners each bring healthcare-focused advisory experience.

Among these competitors, Berkery Noyes’s behavioral health practice is comparatively small—a handful of transactions against Calex’s 22 and The Braff Group’s extensive multi-decade portfolio. The firm’s competitive position is not based on volume. It is based on the proposition that information-sector expertise, cross-vertical perspective, and research infrastructure create value for a specific subset of ABA transactions: those involving technology-enabled platforms, data-driven clinical models, or companies being evaluated by sponsors who also invest in technology and information services.

The question for the ABA market is whether this proposition is sustainable. As the sector continues to consolidate and the role of technology in ABA operations deepens, the advisory firms that can bridge the gap between clinical services and technology-driven value creation will have a structural advantage. Berkery Noyes’s four decades of technology and information M&A experience position it to claim that bridge—but claiming it requires continued deal flow in the behavioral health vertical and demonstrated results that match or exceed what specialist firms deliver.

The Firm: Structure and Scale

Berkery Noyes is structured as an independent investment bank with a lean team. Tracxn reports 19 team members, including 11 partners and three principals. The firm is headquartered in Manhattan and operates a registered broker-dealer, Berkery Noyes Securities LLC, as a member of FINRA and SIPC. The firm’s senior bankers focus on transactions within specific vertical markets, bringing sector-specific knowledge to each engagement rather than deploying generalist coverage teams.

This structure is typical of boutique advisory firms that compete on expertise rather than headcount. In the ABA context, the relevant question is not how many bankers the firm employs but whether its healthcare team has sufficient depth to manage the clinical, regulatory, and payer complexity of ABA transactions. The firm’s track record—advising on deals involving General Atlantic, Golden Gate Capital, and SBJ Capital—suggests that institutional buyers are comfortable with the firm’s ability to execute at a high level despite its modest team size.

The firm’s total transaction count of more than 500 deals over four decades speaks to sustained execution capability across market cycles. While the majority of those transactions are in the firm’s core information and technology verticals, the infrastructure—process management, buyer outreach, financial modeling, deal structuring, and closing mechanics—transfers directly to behavioral health engagements. A well-run sell-side process is a well-run sell-side process regardless of whether the target is a software company or an ABA provider.

What This Means for the ABA Market

Berkery Noyes’s expansion into behavioral health M&A is a signal of the sector’s growing appeal to advisory firms that historically focused on higher-profile verticals. When a bank with 500-plus transactions and four decades of institutional relationships begins actively pursuing ABA mandates, it reflects a judgment that the sector has reached a level of maturity, deal volume, and institutional capital interest that justifies dedicated coverage.

For practice owners, the arrival of additional advisory capacity in the market is positive. More advisors competing for mandates means more options for sellers, more competitive processes, and more diversity of advisory approach. A practice owner who values technology positioning and cross-sector perspective may find Berkery Noyes’s approach particularly relevant. A practice owner who values deep ABA-specific relationships and clinical-sector expertise may prefer The Braff Group, Calex Partners, or Mertz Taggart.

For the ABA M&A market more broadly, Berkery Noyes’s presence is a reminder that the sector is no longer a niche. It is a market that attracts advisory firms from across the financial services spectrum—from boutique behavioral health specialists to multi-sector information-economy banks. That diversity of advisory interest reflects the same truth that Roper Technologies’ $1.65 billion acquisition of CentralReach and General Atlantic’s investment in ACES have already demonstrated: applied behavior analysis has become a sector that institutional capital takes seriously. The advisory landscape is catching up.

AT A GLANCE

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