Selling Your Veterinary Practice to CareVet: A Vet’s 2026 Guide

Key takeaways

• CareVet is a private equity-backed veterinary network founded in 2018 by veterinarian Dr. Kent Thornberry and entrepreneur Greg Siwak, headquartered in the St. Louis, Missouri area and grown to more than 200 hospitals across 35-plus states.
• Compass Group Equity Partners, a St. Louis-based private equity firm, backs the CareVet platform per Compass Group’s own disclosures — the financial sponsor behind the veterinarian-founder-led company.
• A doctor-centric culture rooted in CareVet’s veterinarian-founder origins is the platform’s defining marketed feature: autonomy, structured mentorship, and clinical-excellence programming such as its Premier Centers initiative per CareVet company materials.
• The central question for a selling doctor is how that stated culture translates into the actual clinical-autonomy and operational language in the definitive purchase agreement. The culture is real positioning; whether it becomes contractual is what the negotiation decides.
• The most reliable way to know what CareVet — or any major buyer — would actually pay for your specific practice is to run a structured competitive process. We call ours the Elite Selling System: we hand-select and vet every buyer who gets to bid, the way a doorman with a velvet rope lets in only the right people, then run a private bidding window inside that vetted group. CareVet is invited inside that rope on practices that fit their criteria, and when they bid against a curated group of qualified competitors, the number and the terms are reliably different from a direct, single-bidder conversation.

When a vet asks me about CareVet, the first thing that comes up is almost never the multiple. It’s the culture.

The owner has usually read CareVet’s materials, seen the language about veterinarian autonomy and mentorship, noticed that one of the founders is a DVM who built and sold his own hospitals, and they want to know whether that doctor-centric story is real or whether it’s a tagline.

It’s a fair question, and it’s the right one to lead with. CareVet was co-founded by a veterinarian, and the platform positions itself around clinical autonomy and support in a way that resonates with owners who worry most about what their post-sale clinical life will feel like.

That doctor-centric, veterinarian-founder framing is the through-line of every CareVet conversation. So the work I do with an owner holding a CareVet offer is less about decoding a mysterious buyer and more about something specific: turning the culture they’ve read about into language they can hold the buyer to.

Who CareVet is, what the founder-led origin actually means for a selling doctor’s post-sale clinical life, what the platform pays in a competitive context, where the negotiation leverage sits, and how to weigh CareVet against the rest of the US buyer pool in a properly run process.

Quick facts on CareVet

CareVet is a private equity-backed veterinary practice network founded in 2018. The two co-founders are **Dr.

Kent Thornberry, a veterinarian who built and grew two of his own hospitals before selling them, and Greg Siwak**, an entrepreneur who serves as the company’s CEO, per CareVet company materials.

CareVet’s headquarters are in the St. Louis, Missouri area.

The platform has grown to a network of more than 200 hospitals across 35-plus states, supported by more than 2,500 employees including more than 500 veterinarians per CareVet and pets.care company profiles.

The financial sponsor behind the platform is Compass Group Equity Partners, a St. Louis-based private equity firm that announced the launch of the CareVet platform in 2019 per Compass Group’s own disclosures.

CareVet has also accessed growth capital through a credit facility with BDT & MSD Partners per a 2024 company press release.

The most important practical fact for a seller evaluating CareVet. The platform was co-founded by a veterinarian and markets a doctor-centric culture. Dr. Thornberry’s background as an owner who sold his own hospitals is the basis for CareVet’s positioning around autonomy, mentorship, and clinical excellence — including its Premier Centers initiative, a designated group of hospitals recognized for clinical depth across disciplines like dentistry, internal medicine, dermatology, and advanced surgery per CareVet’s 2025 announcement.

For a selling doctor, the question that matters is how that culture shows up in the specific clinical-autonomy and operational terms of the deal.

What CareVet actually pays for veterinary practices in 2026

The consistent pattern we see. When a multi-doctor practice receives a direct offer from any major buyer’s acquisition team — CareVet included — the offer reflects the leverage the buyer perceives in the conversation. A single bidder facing no visible competition has no structural reason to put forward their strongest cash percentage, tightest earnout protections, or most explicit clinical-autonomy guarantees in the first conversation.

Inside a properly structured competitive process, where the buyer knows other qualified bidders are underwriting the same practice in parallel, those dimensions tend to move, sometimes meaningfully. The pattern is not unique to CareVet.

It is the basic dynamic of how every major buyer in this market calibrates an offer to the room.

CareVet does not publish a standard price sheet for any specific practice profile. Per industry M&A commentary (Octus, Capstone Partners, 2025-2026), competitive outcomes for strong multi-doctor general practices in the $2 million-plus revenue range tend to land in the low-teens EBITDA range across the major buyer pool.

EBITDA here means what your practice earns in pure operating profit, before taxes and accounting choices. The actual number for any specific practice depends heavily on whether other buyers are at the table and on the profile of the practice.

CareVet participates in this competitive band when it bids on qualifying practices, with the specific offer on any specific deal negotiated case by case under confidentiality. For a culture-forward platform like CareVet, the headline cash number is only part of the picture — the autonomy and post-sale-role terms carry real economic and quality-of-life weight, which I’ll come back to.

For larger multi-location groups ($10 million-plus revenue, $2 million-plus EBITDA), the multiple range typically extends higher than for single-location practices, with deal sizes scaling into the eight-figure-plus range per industry research. CareVet’s growth pace over its first several years means the platform has the institutional capacity to bid for larger groups when the profile and geography match.

For practices below the $2 million revenue threshold or single-doctor practices, the buyer pool generally shifts toward regional PE-backed groups, smaller consolidators, and individual buyers. CareVet’s footprint spans 35-plus states, so geographic fit is less of a constraint for CareVet than for more regionally concentrated platforms, but the practice profile still drives whether CareVet engages.

The cash-at-close reality

Cash at close is the portion of the sale price you receive in hand at the closing table, as distinct from money paid later through an earnout or held as rollover equity. For a growth-stage platform with institutional private equity backing like CareVet, the cash-at-close component of a competitive offer is generally supported by the sponsor’s capital position.

Per industry M&A commentary across the major buyer pool (Dechert LLP, Holland & Knight, Capstone Partners 2025-2026), the typical offer structure allocates the majority of total deal value to cash at close, with the remainder split among earnout, rollover equity, and occasional seller notes. CareVet’s specific allocation on any given deal is negotiated case by case.

Where CareVet’s culture-forward positioning intersects the cash conversation is in how a seller weighs the cash percentage against the non-cash terms. An owner drawn to CareVet specifically for the doctor-centric culture may be tempted to accept softer cash terms in exchange for the autonomy story.

That trade can be reasonable, but it should be a deliberate choice made with the full field visible, not a default driven by enthusiasm for the culture before the autonomy commitments are actually in writing.

A note on deal structure types in the current market

The broader US veterinary M&A market has shifted measurably toward partnership and joint-venture structures over the past 18 months per MB Law Firm’s 2025 healthcare M&A commentary. In these structures, the buyer acquires a majority stake (commonly 60 to 80 percent), the seller retains a minority stake (commonly 20 to 40 percent) as direct equity in the practice itself, and a contractual put/call mechanism defines the buyout date and formula price for the retained equity.

Rarebreed Veterinary Partners, the legacy SVP playbook (now part of Mission Pet Health), IVC Evidensia, and Encore Vet Group have publicly emphasized partnership variants in their company materials.

CareVet’s specific posture on partnership versus 100-percent acquisition structures is determined case by case under confidentiality and is not publicly enumerated. What can be said is that a platform built around a doctor-centric, autonomy-forward culture is a natural fit for sellers who want to stay clinically engaged, which is exactly the seller profile that partnership and rollover structures are designed to serve.

Rollover equity, for the record, means keeping a slice of ownership in the new entity instead of taking all cash at close. Sellers evaluating a CareVet offer should ask explicitly which structures are available — full acquisition with rollover, or a partnership variant — and how each interacts with the clinical-autonomy terms.

Our PE pricing guide covers the structure-by-structure comparison in depth.

How CareVet’s acquisition team operates

CareVet built its network quickly after its 2018 founding, reaching the 100-hospital mark by late 2021 and surpassing 200 hospitals in the years since per CareVet company announcements. That pace tells you the corporate-development team has run a high volume of acquisitions across a wide geographic spread.

The team works the standard mix of sourcing channels: direct outreach to owners identified through industry data and broker relationships, participation in structured competitive sale processes run by qualified sell-side advisors, and inbound inquiries from owners who reach out independently. Given CareVet’s culture-forward positioning, the team also tends to lean on the doctor-centric story in early conversations, which resonates with owners who are anxious about post-sale clinical life.

A practical implication for sellers. The CareVet team has done enough acquisitions to recognize a well-prepared seller-side deal, and they tend to engage more substantively when the materials reflect a sophisticated sell-side process rather than a casual one-on-one conversation.

That isn’t unique to CareVet; the same pattern holds across the institutional buyer pool. But the value of a properly run competitive process is meaningfully higher than an owner might assume from the warmth of an early culture-led conversation.

How CareVet integrates the practices it acquires

CareVet’s integration model pairs centralized operational support with a marketed emphasis on clinical autonomy and mentorship — the operational backbone of the doctor-centric positioning.

Shared operational support. Per CareVet company materials, the platform provides centralized HR, payroll, accounting, vendor and supply purchasing, IT, marketing, and recruiting across its network. The integration timing and approach are determined case by case under CareVet’s operating structure.

Clinical mentorship and continuing education. CareVet markets structured mentorship rather than what it calls sink-or-swim medicine, along with continuing-education support, per CareVet company materials. For a selling doctor, the relevant detail is how that mentorship infrastructure interacts with the practice’s existing clinical culture and whether it adds support without overriding the seller’s clinical judgment.

Premier Centers. CareVet’s 2025 Premier Centers initiative designates a group of hospitals recognized for clinical depth across multiple disciplines, positioned as hubs for medical advancement and specialized training within the network per CareVet’s announcement. A seller whose practice has clinical depth may find this program relevant to how their hospital is positioned post-acquisition.

Centralized procurement. Network scale translates into purchasing leverage that most independent practices cannot match. Negotiated vendor contracts for diagnostics, pharmaceuticals, equipment, and supplies typically reduce variable costs across the practice’s P&L compared to the independent baseline.

The earnout implication runs both directions: lower input costs raise practice-level EBITDA, which can support an earnout, but central procurement decisions that override seller preferences need protective language in the deal.

Doctor relationships and the medical director model. Per industry M&A commentary on PE-backed veterinary acquirers, selling owners commonly stay on as medical director or in a continuing clinical role for a multi-year post-close period, typically 3 to 5 years, with compensation structured as base salary plus production bonus. The medical director model means the selling veterinarian continues to lead the medical side and mentor doctors after closing.

Given CareVet’s autonomy-forward positioning, this role and its decision rights are dimensions a seller should expect to define explicitly. CareVet’s specific post-sale employment terms for any given deal are negotiated case by case under the definitive purchase agreement.

CareVet’s recent activity in 2025-2026

CareVet enters 2026 as an active acquirer in the US veterinary buyer pool, with a network exceeding 200 hospitals and recent programmatic moves like the 2025 launch of its Premier Centers initiative signaling continued investment in clinical positioning. Capstone Partners‘ April 2026 Pet Sector M&A Update documents the broader sector acceleration heading into 2026, with both PE-backed and strategic acquirers running active pipelines.

Octus’s 2025-2026 sector coverage situates CareVet within the active PE-backed consolidator pool, though specific acquisition counts are not publicly itemized in real time.

The practical takeaway for an owner receiving 2026 CareVet outreach: this is a buyer running a sustained acquisition program with a clearly articulated doctor-centric culture. The implications of that positioning — both the genuine culture-fit appeal and the work required to turn marketed culture into contractual terms — are the lens through which the offer in your hand should be evaluated.

Have an offer from CareVet? Get a Free Practice Value Estimate — send us the offer and we’ll decompose the terms, identify what’s typically negotiable, and project what your practice would likely clear in a structured competitive process with the broader qualified buyer pool. No upfront cost, no obligation.

How CareVet compares to the other major buyers

If you’re considering CareVet, you’re probably comparing them implicitly to the other major buyers who would compete for your practice. Here’s how CareVet stacks up across the dimensions that matter.

Versus Mars Veterinary Health (VCA, BluePearl, Banfield). Mars is the strategic family-owned exception in the US veterinary buyer pool per Mars company disclosures, distinguishing it from CareVet’s PE-backed structure. The cultural framing differs as well — CareVet leads with a veterinarian-founder, doctor-centric story, while Mars-affiliated entities operate at far larger scale with established network programs.

Both may compete for qualifying practices in a structured sale process. Our Mars Veterinary Health buyer profile covers the Mars-specific dimensions in depth.

Versus NVA (JAB Holdings). NVA is owned by JAB Holdings, a privately-held long-hold investment vehicle distinguishable from PE-fund-cycle ownership. Both NVA and CareVet emphasize supporting local practices and their teams per their respective company materials.

The key structural difference is the ownership horizon — JAB’s long-hold posture creates different rollover-equity timing dynamics than a PE-fund-backed platform like CareVet. Our NVA buyer profile walks through the NVA-specific dimensions.

Versus AmeriVet Veterinary Partners. AmeriVet has publicly emphasized partnership/JV structures as a distinguishing feature of its acquisition approach. CareVet’s culture-forward positioning appeals to a similar seller — one who wants to stay clinically engaged — though the specific structures each offers are negotiated case by case.

The choice often comes down to which platform’s stated culture and structure best match the seller’s post-sale goals. Our AmeriVet buyer profile covers the partnership-model dimensions.

Versus Mission Pet Health. Mission Pet Health, the post-merger entity formed from SVP and MVP per the July 2025 Mission Pet Health press release, is a Sun Belt and Southeast-concentrated platform that has emphasized partnership structures per legacy SVP marketing. Both Mission Pet Health and CareVet appeal to doctors who want continued clinical involvement, though through different structural and cultural framings.

Both may compete for qualifying practices in a structured sale process.

Versus PetVet Care Centers (Ares Management). PetVet is PE-backed and operates a meaningful US footprint per PetVet company materials. Both PetVet and CareVet are PE-backed platforms; the differentiation is cultural and operational rather than structural.

The choice typically depends on geographic fit, culture fit, and specific deal terms.

Versus the smaller and regional PE-backed groups (Thrive Pet Healthcare, Alliance Animal Health, Heartland, VPP, others). Each has its own integration philosophy and target profile. Smaller and newer groups sometimes pay more aggressively for practices that fill specific geographic or clinical gaps in their portfolio.

The right way to evaluate which buyer pays most, and which fits your culture goals, is to put all of them in a competitive process and let them surface their best offers in parallel.

What to negotiate before signing with CareVet

Six priorities when negotiating with CareVet’s acquisition team, with the clinical-autonomy provisions as the highest-leverage category given CareVet’s doctor-centric positioning.

Clinical-autonomy language (highest priority). CareVet markets autonomy and doctor-led medicine, which makes this the single most important term to get into writing. Negotiate explicit language stating that you, as the practicing veterinarian or medical director, retain authority over medical decisions, protocols, formulary, and staffing on the clinical side.

A marketed culture is only as durable as the contract that backs it; convert the autonomy story into specific contractual rights.

Earnout protective provisions. The earnout is part of the sale price paid later, only if the practice hits agreed performance targets after closing. Negotiate: no major operational changes without seller consent during the earnout period; a working capital floor; an explicit prohibition on shifting central services costs from other CareVet practices to yours; and a clear definition of what counts in the EBITDA calculation at the earnout date.

Cash at close percentage. Push for higher cash percentages. Every dollar shifted from contingent to cash is guaranteed money instead of conditional, and CareVet’s institutional capital position generally supports flexibility on this dimension when the process is competitive.

Rollover equity terms. If CareVet’s offer includes rollover, negotiate the standard protections: defined liquidity windows tied to specific milestones, governance rights including information rights and minority protection clauses, and anti-dilution provisions. Ask directly about the sponsor’s expected hold period and exit pathway so you can underwrite the rollover realistically.

Non-compete scope. Non-competes commonly run several years and cover a defined geographic radius for all veterinary work. Negotiate: shorter duration (1 to 2 years), tighter radius (5 to 10 miles), or a carve-out for a specific modality if you might continue clinical work post-employment.

Post-sale role and culture commitments. Get the doctor-centric commitments that drew you to CareVet written into the agreement: your specific role, your decision rights, the mentorship and continuing-education support you were promised, and any Premier Centers positioning if it was part of the pitch. Positioning language in marketing materials is not the same as a contractual commitment.

The vet-founder-led culture question, in depth

For sellers evaluating CareVet specifically, the most useful frame is to think carefully about what a veterinarian-founder origin and a marketed doctor-centric culture actually mean for the post-sale clinical life.

The case for the culture. CareVet’s founding story — a veterinarian who built and sold his own hospitals, co-founding a platform around autonomy and mentorship — is genuinely differentiated positioning. The appeal is real:

• A founder who has been an owner-seller understands the emotional and clinical stakes of the transition from the inside
• The marketed emphasis on structured mentorship rather than sink-or-swim medicine speaks directly to owners worried about their associates and team post-sale
• Programs like Premier Centers signal ongoing investment in clinical depth, not just back-office consolidation
• The autonomy-forward framing aligns with the priorities of doctors who want to keep practicing the way they practice

The case for converting culture into contract. The flip side is that culture lives in people and positioning, both of which can change. A PE-backed platform operates inside a fund cycle, and leadership, ownership, and operating priorities can evolve across that cycle.

Specifically:

• Marketed autonomy is meaningful only to the extent the definitive purchase agreement grants specific, enforceable clinical decision rights
• Central operating decisions — procurement, vendor selection, staffing models — are made at platform level unless the contract carves out exceptions
• The post-sale role and reporting lines need defined decision rights, not just a friendly description of the relationship
• A sponsor exit or leadership change after closing should not be able to quietly dilute the autonomy you were promised, so anti-erosion language matters

The balance between these dimensions is exactly what gets negotiated in the definitive purchase agreement. Sellers who go into the conversation with a refined sell-side process — and other qualified bidders at the table — consistently land more favorable positions on both the economic terms and the autonomy commitments than sellers who engage in a one-on-one conversation built on culture alone.

Should I take a CareVet offer or run a competitive process?

For CareVet specifically, the value of the competitive process is concentrated in two places: the headline economics and the clinical-autonomy and culture commitments. The economics behave like any major buyer — without competition, no buyer has incentive to put forward their strongest cash percentage or tightest earnout protections.

The culture commitments are the CareVet-specific dimension where a structured process adds distinct leverage.

The mechanical reason is the same as for any major buyer. Without competition, the marketed culture stays a pitch and the contract stays a template.

With competition, every term becomes negotiable because every bidder knows the seller has alternatives. For a platform that leads with a doctor-centric story, a structured process is what forces that story to show up as enforceable contract language rather than goodwill.

CareVet participates in well-run competitive processes when invited. The CareVet-specific dimensions — the clinical-autonomy carve-outs, the post-sale-role decision rights, the mentorship and Premier Centers commitments, the earnout protective provisions — get sharper attention from the CareVet team when they know other qualified buyers are at the table on the same practice in the same window.

What our Elite Selling System actually does

For a CareVet-affiliated transaction, our process is built to test the culture against the contract, because CareVet’s differentiation lives in its doctor-centric positioning and that positioning is only worth what the agreement says it’s worth.

Phase one — the culture-to-contract audit. Before any bidder packet goes out, we map CareVet’s marketed commitments — autonomy, mentorship, clinical-excellence programming — against the specific language in the draft purchase agreement and against the comparable templates we’ve seen from the rest of the PE-backed buyer pool. Where does CareVet’s clinical-autonomy language actually sit?

What decision rights does the post-sale role carry? Where are the gaps between the pitch and the paper?

This audit identifies the leverage points before the competitive process opens.

Phase two — the bidder mix. From the 42-plus named veterinary consolidators TE actively tracks, we invite only the ones that legitimately compete with CareVet for this specific practice. The culture-and-autonomy buyers (NVA, AmeriVet, the smaller PE-backed pool with explicit doctor-support positioning) are natural competitors on that dimension.

The strategic family-owned alternative (Mars, where the practice fits Mars’s criteria) competes on scale and long-hold posture. The partnership-emphasis buyers (Mission Pet Health, Rarebreed, others) compete on structure flexibility.

The right mix is typically 5 to 7 invited bidders, each genuinely competing on a dimension CareVet cares about.

Phase three — the term-by-term comparison. Bidders return their full term sheets, not just the headline numbers. The seller sees side-by-side comparisons across cash-at-close, earnout structure and protective provisions, rollover or partnership equity terms, non-compete scope, post-sale role, clinical-autonomy commitments, and culture-and-mentorship guarantees.

The seller chooses on the dimensions that matter — sometimes the platform with the strongest autonomy language (which CareVet’s positioning is built to support), sometimes the platform with the highest headline number, sometimes the platform with the best structural fit.

The economic result holds across deal types: practices in the qualifying revenue band that run our process consistently clear materially better total economic outcomes — typically multiple seven figures, sometimes more — than the same practice would have cleared by signing the original direct CareVet term sheet without exploring the field.

Closing thought

The honest read on CareVet: it’s a PE-backed platform with a genuine veterinarian-founder origin and a doctor-centric culture that resonates with owners who care most about their post-sale clinical life. For a seller whose top priority is autonomy and culture fit, CareVet’s positioning is one of the more compelling stories in the buyer pool, and worth taking seriously.

What separates a well-negotiated CareVet outcome from a mediocre one is whether the culture makes it into the contract. The clinical-autonomy language, the post-sale-role decision rights, the mentorship and Premier Centers commitments, the earnout protective provisions.

Those terms determine whether the doctor-centric story you bought into stays true across the years after closing, or quietly fades as the fund cycle turns.

If you’ve received a CareVet offer, or if CareVet’s acquisition team has reached out to start the conversation, the highest-leverage move is to understand how the rest of the field would structure the same practice — on both the economics and the culture commitments — before committing to anything. Get a Free Practice Value Estimate and we’ll lay out the same culture-to-contract comparison we would for a client across a dinner table.

Sources

Industry M&A research and valuation data

1. Capstone Partners. Pet Sector M&A Update — April 2026. Capstone Partners industry research.
2. Octus. Veterinary Services Roll-Up Coverage, 2025-2026. Octus credit research and industry commentary.
3. Dechert LLP. Healthcare M&A: 2025-2026 Trends and Outlook. Dechert healthcare practice publications.
4. Holland & Knight. Healthcare Private Equity 2025-2026 Commentary. Holland & Knight healthcare practice publications.
5. MB Law Firm. 2025 Healthcare M&A Trends — Joint Venture and Partnership Structures. MB Law Firm healthcare publications.

CareVet and parent company materials

6. CareVet. Our Team, World-Class Pet Care, and Veterinarians. CareVet company materials, 2024-2026. carevet.com
7. CareVet. CareVet Announces Premier Centers: Elevating Veterinary Care Through Excellence. CareVet press release, 2025. carevet.com
8. Compass Group Equity Partners. Compass Group Announces Launch of CareVet Platform. 2019. cgep.com
9. CareVet. CareVet Closes on Credit Facility with BDT & MSD Partners to Fund Future Growth. PR Newswire, 2024. prnewswire.com
10. CARE for Pets / pets.care. CareVet — Company Profile & Hospital Locations. 2024-2026. pets.care

Veterinary practice operations, benchmarks, and profession data

11. iVET360. State of the Veterinary Industry — 2026 Industry Report. iVET360 industry research.
12. American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA). 2026 AVMA Veterinary Economic Report. AVMA economic research.