Edgeview Partners Transforms into Piper Sandler’s M&A Powerhouse

Firm Overview: A Charlotte Boutique Built on Private Equity Relationships

CHARLOTTE, NORTH CAROLINA — Edgeview Partners was founded in 2001 by Matthew Salisbury and a team of senior bankers who built the firm around a specific proposition: middle-market M&A advisory services with deep private equity sponsor relationships. Headquartered at 201 South College Street in Charlotte, the firm covered enterprise values ranging from $25 million to $500 million across more than 15 industry sectors, including healthcare, business services, transportation, industrials, and consumer products.

The firm earned recognition from The M&A Advisor as Boutique Investment Bank of the Year and received multiple Deal of the Year awards over its twelve-year independent run. Edgeview’s core capabilities centered on sell-side advisory for privately held companies backed by entrepreneurs, families, and private equity sponsors, as well as buy-side acquisitions, growth capital raises, and recapitalization transactions.

Charlotte’s position as a major financial center gave Edgeview geographic advantages in covering the Southeast. The firm maintained relationships with private equity funds operating across the region, including those targeting healthcare services, a sector that was beginning to attract significant sponsor attention during the firm’s most active years.

A Turbulent Ownership History: CIT, Bankruptcy, and Independence

Edgeview’s corporate history included an unusually complex ownership arc. In 2007, the firm was acquired by CIT Group, the diversified financial services company. The combined business was intended to leverage CIT’s industry expertise alongside Edgeview’s M&A execution capabilities, with offices spanning New York, Charlotte, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, and San Francisco.

When CIT fell into bankruptcy during the 2008–2009 financial crisis, Edgeview’s partners executed a management buyback in 2010, restoring the firm’s independence. That second period of independence lasted only three years before Piper Jaffray Companies acquired Edgeview in July 2013, absorbing its team, client relationships, and deal pipeline into what would become Piper Sandler’s expanded middle-market advisory platform.

The CIT bankruptcy and subsequent management buyback gave Edgeview’s partners direct experience navigating financial distress from the inside — a perspective that informed their advisory work with private equity-backed clients considering exits and recapitalizations.

The Piper Sandler Integration: Where Edgeview Bankers Landed

Several senior Edgeview bankers transitioned to Piper Sandler through the 2013 acquisition and remain there today. Craig Walker, who joined Piper Sandler through the Edgeview acquisition, is now a managing director in the healthcare investment banking group, focused on M&A advisory and private equity-backed transactions. Dan Oxenham, another Edgeview alumnus, serves as a managing director at Piper Sandler covering consumer companies.

The integration of Edgeview’s sponsor-coverage model into Piper Sandler’s platform coincided with the firm’s broader push to build a leading healthcare services practice. Piper Sandler’s healthcare investment banking group has since completed more than 60 transactions since 2015 and has provided advisory services to many of the top 100 largest healthcare systems in the United States.

Piper Sandler’s healthcare investment banking group, which absorbed Edgeview Partners in 2013, has become one of the most active advisory platforms in the healthcare services sector.

The behavioral health and ABA-specific dimension of Piper Sandler’s practice accelerated in 2023 when the firm hired Scott Kremeier as a managing director. Kremeier spent nine years at Houlihan Lokey focused on behavioral health and post-acute services M&A before joining Piper Sandler, and his arrival represented a deliberate expansion of the firm’s capabilities in the ABA and autism therapy deal market. Prior to Houlihan Lokey, Kremeier was a healthcare services investment banker at JMP Securities.

Piper Sandler described Kremeier as having extensive transaction experience and being recognized by several leading private equity funds for his expertise in the behavioral health segment. His hiring positioned Piper Sandler to compete more directly with specialist firms like The Braff Group, Mertz Taggart, and Provident Healthcare Partners for behavioral health and ABA engagements.

Relevance to the ABA M&A Landscape

Edgeview Partners itself was never a behavioral health specialist. Its relevance to the ABA M&A ecosystem is indirect but structurally important: the firm represents a category of regional middle-market boutiques whose talent and client relationships were eventually absorbed into larger platforms that now actively cover behavioral health.

The pattern is common in healthcare investment banking. Specialist behavioral health coverage at major advisory firms is frequently built by hiring individual bankers with sector-specific deal books rather than by acquiring niche firms. Piper Sandler’s behavioral health capabilities trace not to Edgeview’s healthcare transactions but to the subsequent recruitment of Kremeier and other healthcare-focused bankers who brought behavioral health deal flow to the platform.

For ABA practice owners evaluating advisory options, the Edgeview-to-Piper Sandler trajectory illustrates how deal expertise in the Southeast has consolidated. What was once a fragmented landscape of regional boutiques has been absorbed into national and global advisory platforms that now maintain dedicated behavioral health coverage teams.

Market Context: The Southeast as an ABA Growth Market

The Southeast has emerged as one of the most active regions for ABA provider expansion. States including Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee have seen significant increases in both provider density and private equity-backed platform growth. Charlotte’s position as a financial hub means that advisory relationships for ABA transactions in the region frequently pass through firms with Charlotte-based bankers or offices.

Edgeview’s Charlotte heritage matters in this context because the sponsor relationships the firm cultivated are now embedded in Piper Sandler’s deal origination network. Private equity funds based in or covering the Southeast that once worked with Edgeview on healthcare and business services transactions are now potential counterparties in ABA platform deals advised by Piper Sandler’s healthcare services team.

AT A GLANCE

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