EQT & Hillhouse seen as frontrunners as sale of ChrysCapital owned GeBBS Healthcare enters final lap

The target, a healthcare BPO firm, is owned by India's largest home-grown private equity firm ChrysCapital .

Swedish investment giant EQT and Hong Kong based private equity major Hillhouse Investment are seen as the two lead contenders as the ongoing race to acquire a controlling stake in GeBBS Healthcare Solutions enters the final lap , three persons in the know told Moneycontrol on the condition of anonymity.

The target, a healthcare BPO firm, is owned by India's largest home-grown private equity firm ChrysCapital .

" The final bids are due in the coming week. There are other suitors in the fray but EQT and Hillhouse Investment are seen as the two most aggressive suitors currently ," said one of the persons above.

Two other persons confirmed the above.

One of them added that proposed transaction is likely to value GeBBS Healthcare at around $800 mn.

"Investment banks Jefferies and Avendus Capital are the joint sell side advisors for the deal," the third person added.

Earlier reports have named private equity firms Caryle and CVC Capital as other interested parties in the above transaction.

An email query to ChrysCapital, GeBBS Healthcare, EQT and Jefferies remained unanswered at the time of publishing this article.

When contacted, Hillhouse Investment and Avendus Capital declined to comment.

GeBBS Healthcare Solutions sold a majority stake to ChrysCapital in December 2018 in a deal which valued the former at $175 mn, according to reports.

It is headquartered in Los Angeles and has its delivery centres in India, Philippines and Dominican Republic. According to its website, the firm provides solutions in revenue cycle management, patient contact solutions, HIM ( health information management solutions), extended business office and risk adjustment HCC ( hierarchical conditional categories) coding solutions.

As per the website, Nitin Thakor is the Founder and Chairman of GeBBS Healthcare Solutions while Dr Milind Godbole is the MD & CEO. Sanjay Kukreja and Akshat Babbar are the two ChrysCapital nominees on the firm's board.

Incidentally, EQT, is simultaneously eyeing an IPO of its portfolio firm Sagility India ( earlier called Hinduja Global Solutions), a technology-enabled healthcare focused solutions and services provider. Sagility India filed it's draft red herring prospectus with SEBI in July. EQT had acquired Sagility from the Hinduja Group for $1.2 bn in 2021.

In February, the Economic Times reported that Hillhouse , founded by Lei Zhang, is teaming up with former COO and president of WNS Gautam Barai and Gautam Narayan, ex-partner, Apax Partners, to build an IT-enabled Business Process Management (BPM) platform Novarete. The firm invests globally in healthcare, industrials, energy transition, business services, and consumer opportunities, according to its website.

In recent deals in the BPO segment, KKR announced the acquisition of a “significant minority stake” in Infinx Healthcare, an artificial intelligence (AI) driven healthcare business process outsourcing (BPO) company. Sources pegged the deal value at around $150 mn.