Hi Rasmus Receives Eye-Popping $50 Million Growth-Equity Investment From Updata

The Deal and Its Undisclosed Terms

NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE – Hi Rasmus said on September 3 that Updata Partners made a $50 million strategic minority investment in the company. Braden Snyder, a general partner at Updata, will join the board. The company said its founders retain majority ownership and that founder and CEO Nikolaj Hendriksen and the existing leadership remain “at the helm,” framing the round as a strategic backer rather than a shift in control.

Hi Rasmus describes the Updata transaction as coming after growth ‘without outside capital,’ and other sources called it the company’s first outside round.

The remaining terms are undisclosed. Hi Rasmus did not release a valuation, the size of Updata’s stake, or the company’s revenue, nor did it say whether any of the $50 million bought shares from existing holders instead of funding the balance sheet. Updata identified the investor as Updata Partners VIII. Neither company disclosed whether Updata holds rights beyond the board seat or how long the founders’ majority will last. The release lists uses of proceeds in broad categories: product innovation, AI, enterprise capabilities, integrations, “clinical outcomes and research,” plus scaling the team and infrastructure, leaving the round’s strategic reach unclear.

“We were never trying to build a software company. We have aimed to positively impact 1 million children and families navigating autism and give the organizations delivering those services superpowers.” – Nikolaj Hendriksen, Founder and CEO, Hi Rasmus (September 2026)

The Company and Its Founder

Hi Rasmus sells the clinical layer of the ABA software stack: data collection, treatment planning, a curriculum library, scheduling, supervision and telehealth, RBT (registered behavior technician) training, family communication, and clinical outcomes reporting, according to its website. It does not sell billing or revenue cycle management. For those, it directs customers to integration partners, including AlohaABA and Lumary, which handle billing, practice management, and revenue cycle for shared customers. BreakingNewsABA’s April comparison of the category’s three leading platforms flagged that dependence as a synchronization risk “common to all best-of-breed architectures.” The same comparison named outcomes instrumentation, led by the company’s HiQ Impact Score, as its differentiator.

The company’s scale is self-reported. It says it serves more than 1,000 customer organizations across all 50 states and 90 countries, supports over 19.6 million client session hours a year, and is onboarding two of the world’s largest ABA providers, which it did not name. BreakingNewsABA could not independently verify those figures.

Hendriksen grew up in Denmark and, in the company’s telling, went “from childhood coder to startup founder.” Hi Rasmus says it was inspired by his “experience navigating autism care for his son, Rasmus.” The company describes “stressful and often conflicting experiences with the autism support system in Denmark.” It traces the platform’s features to his son’s path “from carrying heavy binders to enabling skill-based treatment remotely.” The company was founded in Denmark and landed its first U.S. customers in 2021, according to the funding release.

The Capital Entering the Category

Updata Partners is a Washington, D.C., growth-equity firm with more than $3.0 billion in cumulative capital commitments. It closed Updata Partners VIII at $875 million in February 2026. It invests $20 million to $200 million per company in both majority and minority positions and focuses on “capital-efficient B2B software companies.” Updata’s portfolio spans more than 80 active and realized investments, including several healthcare technology companies. Its formal portfolio taxonomy uses “Healthcare” rather than “Behavioral Health,” while Hi Rasmus’s company description specifically identifies it as an ABA clinical operations platform for behavioral health providers, making the investment notable within Updata’s healthcare portfolio. Snyder joined Updata as an associate in 2014 and was promoted to general partner in December 2024.

“What impressed us about Hi Rasmus is the combination of extraordinary growth, a deeply mission-driven culture, and a clear vision for how technology can improve autism care.” – Braden Snyder, General Partner, Updata Partners (September 2026)

The check is larger than two other recent outside investments in ABA technology: Five Elms Capital’s $27 million growth investment in Motivity in March 2025 and the $32 million seed round that launched Frontera Health, an AI autism company that also operates clinics, in February 2025. Five Elms, like Updata, describes itself as a B2B software investor, making Hi Rasmus’s round one of the larger recent bets on the category.

The category was repriced in March 2025, when Roper Technologies agreed to buy CentralReach from Insight Partners for a net purchase price of about $1.65 billion after an estimated $200 million tax benefit. Roper said it expected roughly $175 million of revenue and $75 million of EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) from the business in the 12 months ending June 30, 2026; the deal closed April 23, 2025. CentralReach serves more than 200,000 professionals, according to Roper.

Motivity, which served more than 550 organizations when Five Elms invested, announced in May 2026 that it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire Calmanac, an ABA practice management platform covering scheduling, billing, and authorizations, and says it now serves more than 800 organizations. Motivity subsequently described Calmanac as acquired and the two companies as one platform. Terms were not disclosed. That is the opposite architectural bet from Hi Rasmus’s partner-and-integrate approach.

CMS Oversight and the Outcomes Evidence

A month before the round, CMS released its State Medicaid & Children’s Health Insurance Program Applied Behavior Analysis Toolkit, announced August 4. It reports Medicaid and CHIP payments for ABA rose from about $1.94 billion in 2021 to $10.1 billion in 2025, a 421 percent increase, while the number of beneficiaries with an autism diagnosis who received any Medicaid or CHIP service grew 67 percent, from 1.15 million to 1.92 million. The toolkit also cites federal and state reviews in Colorado, Indiana, Wisconsin, Maine, Massachusetts, Nebraska, and Nevada that collectively reported at least $198.4 million in improper Medicaid payments for ASD-related services, including ABA. Across the reviews, CMS identifies recurring concerns including incomplete documentation, insufficient support for medical necessity, and limited oversight of high-intensity service patterns.

The toolkit itself establishes no new federal requirements. It offers states suggested practices and policy options while also summarizing existing federal Medicaid requirements; any new state-level documentation or oversight requirements would depend on state action.

Taken together, the toolkit describes records: an individualized treatment plan completed “before the provision of ABA services,” “measurable, functionally relevant goals,” a plan to monitor progress and modify goals, and monitoring of “alignment between the prescribed, authorized, and delivered hours” against the child’s progress. Neither Hi Rasmus nor Updata tied the investment to CMS; Snyder cited growth, culture, and vision. Three types of records emphasized in the toolkit—the treatment plan, goal-level progress data, and progress monitoring—map onto three modules Hi Rasmus lists as its product: treatment planning, data collection, and clinical outcomes reporting. That overlap makes the CMS toolkit relevant market context for the investment, although there is no evidence that the CMS action influenced the timing or terms of the deal.

The company has begun publishing outcomes research with a customer. On August 17, it released a white paper with Behavioral Framework, a family-owned provider that reported more than 1,200 clients after selecting Hi Rasmus alongside Lumary in May 2025. The paper compares skill acquisition under Probe-Teach-Probe (PTP) with standard programming across 1,090 clients and 4,022 client-month observations in five states and Washington, D.C., from January to June 2026. As the paper describes it, PTP draws on cold probe data collection, simultaneous prompting, and fluency-based instruction. The paper reports 1.17 to 1.37 mastered targets per session activity hour under PTP against 0.20 to 0.75 for standard programming, with a Wilcoxon signed-rank result of p = .028 on six paired monthly observations.

The results should not be read as establishing causation, and the authors identify substantial limitations. Although the study includes 1,090 clients and 4,022 valid client-month observations for descriptive analysis, the PTP-versus-standard inferential comparison rests on six paired monthly program-level observations rather than 1,090 individual client comparisons. The study uses a retrospective archival design, not a controlled trial. Assignment was not random (“goals best suited to PTP were assigned that workflow”), and the authors acknowledge possible selection effects. The six-pair inferential comparison also comes from a single business unit, limiting statistical power and generalizability. Missing data accounted for 38.5 percent of possible client-month observations—2,518 of 6,540—and the authors treated those observations as missing at random. The authors did not systematically measure treatment fidelity, and the study did not evaluate maintenance or generalization. Two of the four authors work for Hi Rasmus and two for Behavioral Framework, and the paper advises readers to consider those affiliations when evaluating the findings.

The CMS toolkit includes a policy assessment checklist for states. Which states adopt its documentation recommendations, and how quickly, is the open question for Hi Rasmus, CentralReach, and Motivity alike.

AT A GLANCE

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