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Vein disease affects tens of millions of Americans, yet when Reeve Waud’s firm entered the space, there was no dominant national operator. Thousands of vascular specialists treated patients from independent offices, with little coordination between practices and no shared infrastructure for billing, staffing, or regulatory compliance.
Center for Vein Restoration had 11 clinics when Waud Capital Partners invested in December 2011. The firm backed founder and CEO Sanjiv Lakhanpal, a vascular surgeon who had built the practice from its headquarters in Greenbelt, Maryland. The thesis followed a pattern WCP had already tested in behavioral health with Acadia Healthcare: find a fragmented clinical specialty, back a physician-founder with capital and operational resources, and grow through a mix of organic expansion and targeted acquisitions.
Building the Footprint
Over roughly four years of WCP ownership, CVR expanded from 11 locations to 44 clinics across eight states. Two acquisitions added locations to the network, and new clinic openings filled geographic gaps between existing markets. Waud Capital provided the operational backbone: centralized billing, staffing pipelines, compliance systems. Physicians could then focus on patient care rather than administrative overhead.
Lakhanpal, who remained CEO throughout the growth period, called Waud Capital a “tremendous partner,” crediting the firm with sharing his vision and providing the guidance that enabled CVR’s expansion. That kind of endorsement from a physician-founder carries weight. Plenty of healthcare consolidations have fractured under the pressure of fast growth because the relationship between the financial sponsor and the clinical operator didn’t hold.
What CVR Proved
Waud Capital exited CVR in January 2016, selling its stake to Cortec Group. At the point of exit, the business had quadrupled its clinic count and established a multistate presence that would have taken Lakhanpal decades to assemble independently.
CVR preceded several of the firm’s larger healthcare bets, including the formation of GI Alliance in 2018 and the continuation fund recapitalization of Ivy Rehab in 2022. But it confirmed something important for Reeve Waud: the physician-partnership model he had built at Acadia Healthcare could be replicated in a completely different clinical specialty, with a completely different founder, in a completely different part of the country. The playbook had legs beyond a single deal.
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