Ares, KKR Veterans Leave for Upstart Healthcare Investment Firm

Executives from Ares Management and KKR have joined Patient Square Capital, a new healthcare investment firm, as founding partners.  

Patient Square announced on Monday that Alex Albert, who was most recently the co-head of healthcare private equity at Ares, and Neel Varshney, previously a managing director at KKR’s Americas healthcare private equity team, have joined the firm.  

Patient Square was launched in August by Jim Momtazee, who spent more than 20 years at KKR. Soon after its launch, the firm sponsored a special-purpose acquisition vehicle called Montes Archimedes Acquisition Corp.  

Albert spent six years at Ares before leaving for Patient Square, according to the announcement. Prior to joining Ares, he worked as a vice president at FFL Partners. He previously was an associate at KKR, where he was on the healthcare team with Momtazee. Before joining KKR, Albert was an analyst in the investment banking division at Goldman Sachs.  

Meanwhile, Varshney spent roughly four years at KKR, where he also worked with Momtazee on healthcare deals. Before joining the firm, he worked as a vice president at Linden Capital Partners, focusing on healthcare. He also worked as an engagement manager in healthcare, private equity and corporate finance at Mckinsey and Co., and worked in business development at Medtronic.  

Varshney is a doctor who trained in internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, the announcement said.  

“Having worked closely with both Alex and Neel in the past, I am thrilled to partner with them again,” Momtazee said in a statement. “I know firsthand that their deep health care and investing experience will help us in our goal to establish Patient Square Capital as the preeminent health care investment firm.” 

Patient Square was not immediately available to comment on the news. 

The firm’s SPAC is targeting a healthcare company that is family or founder-owned, venture or investor-backed, or a corporate divestiture, its S-1, filed in September, showed. The SPAC is looking for a growth-oriented company with durable revenue, the filing said.  

“The COVID-19 global pandemic has significantly altered the health care services paradigm, and given this dislocation, we believe further opportunities are likely to be created,” according to the filing.  

The SPAC raised $410.7 million from both private-placements and publicly offered shares. One of its major investors is Millennium Management, 13-F filings show.  

Montes Archimedes is among a growing number of special-purpose acquisition vehicles in the market. Institutional Investorpreviously reported that in the first weeks of 2021, blank-check companies completed 56 initial public offerings to raise a total of $16 billion. Data from Goldman Sachs, which informed that reporting, also showed that in 2020, a total of $76 billion was raised from 229 SPACs — six times higher than in 2019.  

[II Deep Dive: The SPAC Boom Is Hazardous — But ‘That’s the Whole Point’ of Mark Yusko’s New ETF] 

Most recently, Mark Yusko of Morgan Creek Capital Management launched an exchange-traded fund tracking between 50 and 100 SPACs, II reported.