KKA acquires majority stake in CuraMed Kliniken

The GP invested EUR 18.5m in equity in the deal, which gives the company a EUR 33m enterprise value.

Previous shareholder Feller Gruppe Zürich, which was founded by KKA founding partner Patrick Feller, is to hold a significant minority stake in the company following the deal, as is CuraMed's management team.

Incumbent lender ApoBank provided debt financing.

The deal came about in part via KKA's increased awareness of the growing need for mental healthcare as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. "Our partner Patrick owned an interest in the psychosomatic clinic space via CuraMed," founding partner Dominic Faber told Unquote. "During the first part of the Covid-19 pandemic, between April and August last year, he educated us as a team about the increase in anxiety, depression, burnout and stress levels in adolescents and adults, and the fact that we will need to take care of more people with mental health problems in the immediate future."

"We looked at ways to increase mental health care capacity in Germany and we decided to acquire CuraMed in August last year," Faber added. "CuraMed represents the ideal nucleus due to its proven medical concept applying a holistic view of the human being, our patient. We then did a 'buy, build and convert' scouting trip and found two clinics we plan to add to the group by the end of this year or early next year, which will increase capacity more than fourfold, particularly in southern Germany."

In addition to the two targets that have been identified so far, the GP intends to support CuraMed with the expansion of its clinic facilities and patient capacity over the next few years, Faber told Unquote. "In the next five years, we are expecting to go from one clinic to three, then likely to more than six clinics overall," he said. "This will be a buy, build and convert strategy, where we will also convert previously non-mental-health-related real estate into clinics. Some of this capacity increase will just be operational. We can provide the operational expertise to add and invest in medical grade facilities to equip hotels with characteristics needed for our medical concept, for example."

KKA is deploying equity via KKA Fund II, which held a first close in May 2021 with commitments of more than EUR 50m, as reported. The fund has a target of EUR 200m and expects to hold a second or final close in either Q4 2021 or Q1 2022. The vehicle generally deploys equity tickets of EUR 20m-30m and makes deals in the EUR 20m-120m EV range, backing DACH Mittelstand companies with EBITDA of at least EUR 2m.

Company
Headquartered in Albstadt, CuraMed provides psychosomatic mental health treatment with the aim of treating conditions including anxiety, eating disorders and depression in a holistic way. In addition to psychotherapy, the clinic offers a range of physical treatments including sleep therapy and pain therapy, as well as osteopathy.

People
KKA Partners – Dominic Faber, Kaspar Hartmann, Patrick Feller (founding partners).
CuraMed Kliniken – Bernd Scheffold (managing director).

Advisers
Equity – EY, Thomas Grohmann (financial due diligence); AC Christes, Eicke Möller (tax); CMS, Heiko Wiechers (legal); YPOG, Stephan Bank (legal).

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