The latest purchase by Fransciso Partners adds to the private equity firm’s stockpile of payments companies, and puts it on course to invest in artificial intelligence.
Francisco Partners is on a payments tear, agreeing to pay $650 million to buy the healthcare payments company Weave Communications this week, after entering a deal to acquire the Canadian payments company Moneris earlier this month.
With the latest acquisition, Francisco Partners is adding a Lehi, Utah-based business that caters to small and midsize healthcare merchants, including dental practices and local veterinarians. The company’s CEO, Brett White, explained in a LinkedIn post how Weave has evolved over the nearly two decades that it has been offering patient communication and payments software services.
“In 2008, the premise of this company was that the dental office, independent optometry practice, and the neighborhood veterinarian deserved software as good as anything built for a large health system,” White wrote in the Tuesday post. “That was not an obvious bet,” with Weave now serving some 40,000 customer locations, he said.
With the infusion of capital from its new owner, Weave will become a private company and use some of its new funding to build out its use of artificial intelligence, according to a Tuesday press release, though it provided few details as to how the company plans to expand AI use in its services.
Healthcare firms are generally eager to deploy AI in ways that optimize their businesses, Francisco Partners Co-President Ezra Perlman said in the release.
Weave’s “vertical platform sits at the center of how tens of thousands of practices communicate with their patients and collect revenue, a position that is difficult to build and harder still to replicate,” Perlman said.
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