Havencrest Puts Apara Autism Centers Up for Sale

The Deal on the Table

SUGAR LAND, TEXAS – Havencrest Capital Management is exploring a sale of Apara Autism Centers, the applied behavior analysis platform it built rather than bought, according to a late-May report from Axios Pro, which said Piper Sandler is running the auction. Trade outlets reported the same week that the process was underway. Neither Havencrest nor Apara has confirmed the sale publicly, and requests for comment have not been returned.

Apara lists 17 locations across Texas, Missouri, Nebraska and New Mexico, and delivers both center-based and in-home ABA therapy to children with autism. It has grown through a mix of de novo openings and acquisitions. The company acquired Dallas-based Behavior Pioneers in 2021, then in January 2023 added the Nebraska, New Mexico and Oklahoma operations of Autism Learning Collaborative and the Missouri operations of Early Autism Services. Kyle Seco has served as president and CEO since late 2023, succeeding founding CEO Tyler Moore.

The structure is itself a data point. Havencrest, a Dallas-based healthcare private equity firm founded by Christopher Kersey, set out to buy an ABA platform and could not find one that met its standards, so it built one. The firm approached Tyler Moore, a behavioral health operator whose daughter is on the spectrum, in 2018, and the first Apara center opened in Sugar Land in July 2019. A sale would mark Havencrest’s first full exit of the asset after roughly seven years, a hold period that runs past the three-to-five-year window that long defined PE-backed autism deals.

A Market That Has Recovered

Apara comes to market into the strongest ABA deal environment since the sector’s last peak. M&A advisory firm Mertz Taggart reported that first-quarter 2025 transaction volume in autism and intellectual and developmental disabilities hit its highest mark since 2021, with 12 deals, a 71 percent year-over-year increase. A PricewaterhouseCoopers analysis counted 68 behavioral health deals worth $1.2 billion in disclosed value between January and May 2025. Capstone Partners reported that strategic acquirers posted a 105 percent year-over-year increase in deal activity in its October 2025 update.

Valuations have held up alongside the volume. Well-run platforms of scale continue to command EBITDA multiples in the mid-to-high teens, according to industry sources. Dan Beuerlein of Brentwood Capital Advisors has said autism platforms command the highest valuations within behavioral health, a function of strong demand, an outpatient model, and a still-fragmented provider base.

The demand is structural. A study published in JAMA Pediatrics in January 2026 by researchers at Brown University documented 574 PE-acquired autism service delivery sites across 42 states between 2015 and 2024, with about 80 percent of those acquisitions falling between 2018 and 2022. That concentration is the source of the current exit wave: a large cohort of platforms bought in a four-year window is now aging out of its hold period at the same time.

Autism platforms currently command the highest valuations within behavioral health, a function of the segment’s strong demand, outpatient model, and the large number of small providers still left to consolidate.

What the Comparable Exits Show

Recent sales set the frame for what Apara might fetch and who might buy it. The most-watched exit of the past year was InBloom Autism Services, which Webster Equity Partners sold near the end of 2025. Axios reported that Elysium Management, the family office of former Apollo CEO Leon Black, acquired InBloom for $75 million at roughly 15 times EBITDA, with Calex Partners advising. Webster’s seven-year hold ran well past the old norm, a stretch attributed to pandemic disruption and the deal-volume trough of 2023 and 2024.

The buyer profile in that deal is the detail operators should watch. A family office, not a traditional fund, took InBloom, bringing a longer time horizon and different return expectations than an institutional sponsor. Strategic and platform buyers have been active lower down the market: Center for Social Dynamics, backed by Goldman Sachs Alternatives, acquired New Mexico-based Behavior Change Institute in February, and LEARN Behavioral, backed by Gryphon Investors, folded Indiana-based Cornerstone Autism Center into its BACA brand the same month. Apara is not alone in line, either. Butterfly Effects, 360 Behavioral Health, Mosaic Pediatric Therapy and Bierman Autism Centers are all reported to be positioning for sale or already in process.

The Cautionary Case

Not every large ABA platform has exited cleanly, and the sector’s memory of that shapes diligence today. The Center for Autism and Related Disorders, bought by Blackstone in 2018 in a deal valued at roughly $600 million, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in June 2023 and was sold for a fraction of its original purchase price. Long-term reimbursement contracts that failed to keep pace with inflation, an aggressive footprint, and wage pressure combined to undo the largest buyout the sector had seen.

That history is why buyers now reward operational depth over raw growth. Slow Medicaid reimbursement, prior-authorization burden, surprise audits, clawbacks, and a chronic shortage of board-certified behavior analysts squeeze provider margins from several directions at once. For a platform coming to market, the questions are whether its payer relationships are durable, whether its BCBA retention holds, and whether its clinical documentation can survive a sophisticated buyer’s review. Demand for autism services is not in question; execution is.

What It Means for Operators and Clinicians

For clinic owners weighing whether to sell, the Apara process is a live read on demand and price. A competitive auction for a four-state platform at this point in the cycle would confirm that buyers remain willing to pay mid-to-high-teens multiples for scaled assets with clean operations, and would tell smaller operators what kind of platform commands a premium.

For BCBAs employed at PE-backed providers, a change of ownership raises the practical questions that follow any sale: whether clinical leadership stays, whether caseload and supervision expectations shift, and how much clinical autonomy survives a new owner’s operating model. A platform built and held by a single sponsor for roughly seven years carries one set of expectations; a new financial or strategic owner may carry another. The deal process will also answer a sector-level question, whether financial sponsors or strategic acquirers are driving ABA consolidation in 2026. The identity of Apara’s buyer will be part of that answer.

AT A GLANCE

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