Francisco Partners is on a payments tear, agreeing to pay $650 million to buy the healthcare payments company Weave Communications this week, after entering a deal to acquire the Canadian payments company Moneris earlier this month.
With the latest acquisition, Francisco Partners is adding a Lehi, Utah-based business that caters to small and midsize healthcare merchants, including dental practices and local veterinarians. The company’s CEO, Brett White, explained in a LinkedIn post how Weave has evolved over the nearly two decades that it has been offering patient communication and payments software services.
“In 2008, the premise of this company was that the dental office, independent optometry practice, and the neighborhood veterinarian deserved software as good as anything built for a large health system,” White wrote in the Tuesday post. “That was not an obvious bet,” with Weave now serving some 40,000 customer locations, he said.
With the infusion of capital from its new owner, Weave will become a private company and use some of its new funding to build out its use of artificial intelligence, according to a Tuesday press release, though it provided few details as to how the company plans to expand AI use in its services.
Healthcare firms are generally eager to deploy AI in ways that optimize their businesses, Francisco Partners Co-President Ezra Perlman said in the release.
Weave’s “vertical platform sits at the center of how tens of thousands of practices communicate with their patients and collect revenue, a position that is difficult to build and harder still to replicate,” Perlman said.
In addition to the Francisco Partners offer, Weave evaluated multiple strategic and financial offers, according to a statement in the release from Weave board chair Stuart C. Harvey, Jr.
Francisco Partners is a long-time payments sector investor. Its portfolio also includes Schaumburg, Illinois payments software provider NMI, the point-of-sale software provider Verifone and the British payments processing company Paysafe.
In the payments acquisition earlier this month, Francisco Partners snapped up Toronto-based payments software provider Moneris, buying it from the Bank of Montreal and Royal Bank of Canada for an undisclosed sum.
Moneris services, which include point-of-sale hardware, allow merchants to accept and manage payments online, in-store or on mobile devices. The company handles about a third of Canadian transactions, according to an Aug. 10 press release announcing the deal.
As part of that transaction, Francisco Partners appointed former Global Payments CEO Jeff Sloan as chairman to guide the Moneris leadership team, including Moneris CEO James Hicks.
"Together with Jeff Sloan's deep industry expertise and strategic counsel as Chairman, we are excited to support the Moneris team as they continue to deliver the technology, scale and reliability Canadian businesses need to thrive in an increasingly digital and AI-driven economy," added Francisco Partners Principal Nate Zupan said in the release.
