Rubicon’s investment will make it the majority shareholder of the combined company. The existing shareholders of the two companies will retain a minority stake in the merged organization.
Glennis Solutions, the company formed as a subsidiary of Atria Senior Living, Enquire and Sherpa CRM are joining forces under one roof, with support from Boulder, Colorado-based Rubicon.
Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
Brad Frasher, who served as executive vice president of Glennis, leads the new company as its first chairman and CEO. The combined company will be able to work with 50 of the 150 largest senior living providers in the country and have a presence in more than 5,700 communities.
While the three companies will be merged into one, they will continue to operate under their respective names until a new brand name is chosen, Rubicon partner Alex Kleiner told SHN.
Still, the combined company plans to integrate the offerings of all three technology providers into a “module-based, user-friendly platform with features that can be easily customized, configured and combined to meet the needs of providers, owners or investors,” according to an announcement of the acquisition.
Services offered include lead management, billing, resident engagement, quality monitoring, care management and medication management.
Frasher spent more than 20 years at Atria as executive VP of financial planning and analytics before joining the company’s in-house software development team. As chairman and CEO of the newly merged company, Frasher aims to maintain the current relationships that all three companies have built while addressing future industry needs.
“I think the Covid 19 pandemic has sharpened the focus on what technology can do for the industry,” Frasher told Senior Housing News. “But the industry is still catching up to other, more mature industries. I think the fragmented nature of our senior housing business has slowed the process. Right now, operators want more data, better systems and “systems they’re used to in other industries,” Frasher said.
Lana Peck, vice president of research at Sherpa CRM, expressed that sentiment in June when she joined Sherpa after leaving the National Investment Center of Senior Housing & Care (NIC). With Peck’s hire, Sherpa doubled down on data collection and analysis. Rubicon began studying the senior housing sector toward the end of 2020. It determined that the senior housing sector was underserved and that there was an opportunity to support an industry leader.
“We were interested in making a big bet on the sector because we believe in the long-term trends,” Kleiner said. “The long-term trends in this sector are undeniable.”