The investment firm KKR & Co. Inc. (NYSE: KKR) announced Friday that it had entered an agreement to acquire 11,619,998 shares of BrightSpring Health Services (Nasdaq: BTSG) stock from Walgreens Boots Alliance (Nasdaq: WBA).
KKR is an existing backer of BrightSpring, which had a share price of $13.85 as of market close on Friday.
Based in Louisville, BrightSpring provides home- and community-based pharmacy and health care services for complex populations. It offers home care, home health care and home-based primary care, and has a presence in all 50 states.
The company went public earlier this year.
In 2019, KKR and an affiliate of Walgreens Boots Alliance bought BrightSpring for $1.32 billion. Now, Walgreens is exiting that investment, while KKR is doubling down.
BrightSpring was one of a few Walgreens investments that involved home-based care over the past half decade. It also acquired the post-acute technology platform CareCentrix, and invested over $6 billion in the home-focused primary care provider VillageMD.
Since its IPO, BrightSpring has been focused on an “integrated” approach to home-based care.
“As we’ve been saying, since the IPO, I believe in the next year, we’re really going to start to see the fruits of more and more integrated care in the organization,” BrightSpring CEO Jon Rousseau recently said. “We, obviously, have very clinically appropriate home health to hospice transitions, [and] some personal care being delivered to the same patients, therapy as well, … but we see an opportunity to really increase that in the future. It takes focus, so we’re investing in an integrated care team to do that.”
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