Selling Your Veterinary Practice to Companion Pet Partners: A 2026 Guide

Key takeaways

• Companion Pet Partners is a private equity-backed platform formed by Cortec Group in January 2020, headquartered in Los Angeles, and focused on acquiring and operating general-practice hospitals across the Western United States, per Cortec’s portfolio page.
• The footprint is roughly 30 hospitals across six states — California, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Texas, and Washington — concentrated in California (~13) and Arizona (~8), per Companion’s locations page and an April 2026 industry release.
• Retained equity is central to Companion’s pitch. It openly advertises the ability to “realize both the current and future value of your practice, as well as reinvestment opportunities,” and frames each deal as a customized partnership rather than a one-size-fits-all buyout.
• Companion does not publish deal economics. No multiples, no retained-equity percentages, no cash-versus-equity split appear in its public materials. Treat the partnership language as a starting frame, not a number — the actual terms come out in negotiation.
• The most reliable way to know what Companion — or any buyer — would actually pay and structure 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. When a partnership-model buyer like Companion bids against a curated group of qualified competitors, both the headline number and the retained-equity terms tend to look very different than they do in a single, direct conversation.

When a vet hands me an offer from Companion Pet Partners, the conversation almost always lands on one word inside the first ten minutes: partnership. Companion leans hard into that frame, and it resonates, because most owners who built a practice over 20 or 30 years don’t want to hand it to someone and walk away the next morning.

They want to know the thing they made keeps going, and that they get to keep a piece of it. That’s the emotional center of every Companion conversation I have.

So this guide starts where the owner’s head already is. What does “partnership” actually mean when Companion uses it?

How does the retained-equity piece really work, what does the process look like from the first meeting to close, and where does the genuine negotiation leverage sit?

What follows is the same picture I’d lay out over dinner if you slid a Companion offer across the table and asked what to do with it. Who Companion is and who stands behind it, what the partnership-and-retained-equity model means for a seller in 2026, how the staged selling process runs, and how to think about Companion against the rest of the Western-U.S. buyer pool in a properly run process.

Selling your veterinary practice to Companion Pet Partners means selling to a private equity-backed platform that markets a partnership-driven, retained-equity model rather than a clean 100-percent buyout. Companion was formed by Cortec Group in January 2020, operates roughly 30 general practices across six Western states, and openly offers sellers the ability to reinvest and keep upside in the practice’s future value.

It does not publish what it pays.

Who owns Companion Pet Partners? Cortec Group and the 2020 origins

Companion Pet Partners is backed by Cortec Group, a middle-market private equity firm. Per Cortec’s own portfolio page, Cortec formed Companion as a platform company in January 2020 and recruited a leadership team of multi-site healthcare and industry veterans to build it from the ground up.

That January 2020 formation date matters for how you read Companion. This is a PE-backed platform — owned or financed by a private equity firm that invests to grow the platform and ultimately aims to realize a return through a future sale or recapitalization.

Cortec’s Jeffrey R. Shannon and Jeffrey A.

Lipsitz sit on Companion’s board, per the same Cortec portfolio page.

One useful clarification for owners doing their homework. Cortec is a middle-market PE firm with a track record in multi-site healthcare services, including animal health, and it has owned other animal-health companies in the past.

Companion is its own distinct platform, formed in 2020, and shouldn’t be conflated with any earlier Cortec animal-health investment. When you’re evaluating Companion, you’re evaluating the 2020-vintage platform and the team Cortec built around it.

How big is Companion Pet Partners? Footprint and Western-U.S. focus

As of 2026, Companion Pet Partners operates approximately 30 general-practice veterinary hospitals across six U.S. states — California, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Texas, and Washington — per Companion’s locations page. The largest concentration sits in California (around 13 hospitals) and Arizona (around 8).

An April 2026 industry press release independently describes Companion as “a growing network of over 30 general practice hospitals across six U.S. states,” which corroborates the footprint from a second source.

A few things to pull out of that footprint if you’re a seller. First, Companion is general-practice focused — it acquires and operates GP hospitals, which fits the kind of companion-animal practice most owners reading this run.

Second, the geography is concentrated in the West, with California and Arizona as the core. If your practice sits inside or near that density, you’re squarely in Companion’s wheelhouse; the closer your market is to an existing Companion cluster, the more naturally the platform can deliver referral, recruiting, and back-office support.

If you’re outside the Western footprint, Companion may be less of a natural fit, and a properly run process would surface buyers better matched to your geography.

For context on the broader field of acquirers, our veterinary practice consolidators guide maps the larger buyer pool, and our who to sell your veterinary practice to guide walks through how to match a buyer to your specific goals.

Companion’s partnership model: retained equity and “realizing current and future value”

This is the heart of the Companion pitch, so it’s worth being precise about what the company actually says.

Retained equity is openly on the table. Per Companion’s Partners page, the company advertises “flexibility and the ability to realize both the current and future value of your practice, as well as reinvestment opportunities with Companion.” In plain terms, that’s retained equity — keeping a slice of ownership instead of taking all cash at close, so you can participate in the practice’s future value rather than cashing out entirely on day one.

Each deal is framed as a customized partnership. Companion commits, in its own words, to “design a partnership that’s right for each individual” and to “create your customized plan” around the seller’s financial and personal goals, per the Partners page. The company positions this as the opposite of a one-size-fits-all buyout.

Here’s the honest read I give owners. The partnership-and-reinvestment language is a genuine differentiator in how Companion presents itself, and it maps to something a lot of sellers want.

But — and this is the part I make sure every owner hears — Companion does not publish any numbers behind it. There’s no stated retained-equity percentage, no cash-versus-equity split, no formula for how or when you’d realize that “future value.” The structure, the size of any retained stake, and the path to eventually monetizing it are all negotiated case by case and aren’t disclosed publicly.

So treat the partnership framing as a starting posture, not a settled deal. The interesting questions live in the details: how much equity, in what entity, on what terms, with what rights, and what defines the eventual liquidity event.

Those are exactly the points a structured process is built to pin down. Our PE pricing guide covers how retained-equity and partnership structures across the market generally work, so you can pressure-test whatever Companion puts in front of you.

What Companion says it offers selling veterinarians

Beyond the equity piece, Companion’s public materials describe a fairly specific support package for sellers. Taken from its homepage and Partners page:

Enhance, not replace. Companion’s homepage states, “We’re not here to change what you’ve built — we’re here to enhance it,” emphasizing collaboration and clinical autonomy for selling veterinarians. That’s the cultural posture the company leads with.

Back-office relief. Per the Partners page, Companion offers to take administrative load off the owner’s plate — “We’re happy to take a few things off your plate, like accounting, billing, and HR” — plus centralized support services. For an owner-doctor who’s spent years doing payroll at night, that’s a real quality-of-life pitch.

Investment in the physical practice. Companion commits to “investing in technology, infrastructure, and equipment,” including renovating space, providing equipment, and recruiting support staff, per the Partners page. The message is reinvestment in the hospital itself, not just a financial transaction.

Active operations technology. In April 2026, Companion announced it would deploy an AI documentation “copilot” and scribe across all of its 30-plus hospitals to cut documentation time and administrative burden, per an industry press release. That signals an operator actively investing in day-to-day clinical workflow, not a hands-off holding company.

All of that is the company’s own framing, and it’s consistent across its materials. As always, the gap to close is between marketing language and contractual commitment — anything that matters to you about autonomy, reinvestment, or support belongs in the purchase agreement in writing, not just on the website.

How the Companion selling process works: from intro meeting to LOI to close

Companion describes a staged, LOI-driven process on its Partners page, and it’s worth knowing the shape before you walk in.

It starts with an introductory meeting to get to know each other and the practice. That leads to a Letter of Intent (LOI) — a non-binding document that, in Companion’s words, “captures the important business terms of our partnership.” The LOI is followed by diligence and confirmation of the financial and legal terms, and then close.

A practical note on that sequence. The LOI is the moment most of the real economic terms get set — price, structure, the retained-equity arrangement, the broad strokes of your post-sale role.

Owners sometimes treat the LOI as a casual handshake and save their attention for the final purchase agreement, but by then the anchors are already in. The single most valuable thing you can do is make the LOI competitive: have other qualified buyers underwriting the same practice in the same window, so the terms in that first Companion LOI reflect a real market, not a single conversation.

That’s where a sell-side process earns its keep.

Clinical governance and operations: Medical Advisory Board, centralized services, and AI tooling

For owners worried about losing control of medicine, Companion points to a few specific structures.

Per an April 2026 industry press release, Companion supports clinical independence through clinician-led governance bodies, including a Medical Advisory Board and an Operating Review Committee, and it reduces non-clinical workload via centralized accounting, billing, and HR. The same release describes the platform-wide rollout of an AI clinical “copilot” and scribe across all of its hospitals to cut documentation time.

The picture Companion paints is a platform that wants doctors making medical decisions while it absorbs administrative weight and invests in tooling. That’s a coherent model, and clinician-led governance bodies are a meaningful signal.

Just remember that a governance body’s existence and your specific decision rights are two different things. When you negotiate, get explicit about which decisions stay with you as the lead doctor and which migrate to the platform — that clarity is worth more than any org chart.

What does Companion Pet Partners pay for a practice?

Here’s the straight answer: Companion does not publicly disclose what it pays. There’s no published price sheet, no stated multiple, and no public retained-equity percentage in any of its materials.

Anyone quoting you a specific “Companion multiple” as fact is guessing.

What I can tell you is the consistent pattern across every buyer in this market, partnership-model platforms included. When a multi-doctor practice gets a direct offer from a single buyer’s acquisition team, that offer reflects the leverage the buyer perceives in the room.

A lone bidder facing no visible competition has no structural reason to lead with its strongest cash percentage, its most generous retained-equity terms, or its most flexible autonomy language. 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.

That’s not a knock on Companion. It’s the basic dynamic of how every buyer calibrates an offer to the room.

For a partnership-model buyer specifically, the competitive process matters on two fronts at once: the headline value and the quality of the retained-equity terms. Both are negotiable, and both respond to the presence of real alternatives at the table.

When we prepare a practice for sale, part of the work is a thorough pre-sale financial review on our side of the table — built around exactly the kind of scrutiny the buyers’ accountants will run, but before any buyer sees your numbers. That gives us months to clean up anything that wouldn’t survive a deep look at your EBITDA, the pure operating profit a buyer multiplies to set a price.

A clean, defensible earnings number is what lets you push for the top of the range. Our valuation guide walks through how that number gets built.

Have an offer from Companion Pet Partners? Get a Free Practice Value Estimate — send us the offer and we’ll decompose the terms, separate the partnership language from the actual economics, and project what your practice would likely clear in a structured competitive process with the broader qualified buyer pool. No upfront cost, no obligation.

Is Companion Pet Partners the right buyer for your practice? Fit considerations

Whether Companion fits comes down to a handful of honest questions about your goals.

Do you want to keep a stake? Companion’s whole pitch is built around retained equity and “realizing current and future value.” If you want to fully cash out and walk, a partnership-first buyer may not be your best match. If you want a second bite at the apple as the platform grows, Companion’s model is designed for exactly that — and you’ll want to negotiate the equity terms hard.

Where is your practice? Companion is concentrated in the West, with California and Arizona at the core. A practice inside or near that density is a natural fit.

One far outside it may be better served by buyers built around your region.

What do you want post-sale? Companion markets an enhance-not-replace posture, clinician-led governance, back-office relief, and reinvestment in the hospital. If that’s the kind of operator you want to hand your team and clients to, Companion is worth a serious look.

The way to test the marketing against reality is to get the specifics — autonomy, reinvestment commitments, your role — into the agreement in writing.

As with any single buyer, the best way to know whether Companion is genuinely your strongest option is to see it next to others. Our sell my veterinary practice guide lays out the full decision, and a competitive process puts Companion’s offer side by side with the rest of the field on the same practice.

How a sell-side advisor helps you evaluate and negotiate a Companion offer

For a partnership-model buyer like Companion, the value of a structured process is concentrated in two places: the economics and the equity terms. Here’s how our Elite Selling System runs it.

Phase one — the terms audit. Before anything goes out, we take apart the structure Companion is offering against the comparable structures we see across the Western-U.S. buyer pool. What does the retained-equity arrangement actually grant you — what entity, what percentage, what governance and information rights, what defines the eventual liquidity event?

What’s in the autonomy language, and what’s missing? We identify the leverage points before the process opens.

Phase two — the bidder mix. From the veterinary consolidators we actively track, we invite only the ones that legitimately compete with Companion for your specific practice — partnership-and-retained-equity buyers, brand-preserving operators, and the strategic family-owned alternative where the practice fits. 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.

The right mix is typically a handful of buyers, each genuinely competing on a dimension you care about.

Phase three — the term-by-term comparison. Bidders return full term sheets, not just headline numbers. You see side-by-side comparisons across cash at close, retained-equity terms, post-sale role, autonomy commitments, reinvestment promises, and the path to a future liquidity event.

You choose on the dimensions that matter to you — sometimes the partnership platform with the most attractive equity terms, sometimes the buyer with the cleanest autonomy language, sometimes the highest headline number.

Across the deals we’ve closed over the past several years, practices that run a structured competitive process consistently clear materially better total economic outcomes — often multiple seven figures better — than they would have by signing the original direct term sheet without testing the field. For a retained-equity deal, that gap shows up in both the cash today and the quality of the slice you keep.

Closing thought

The honest read on Companion Pet Partners: it’s a Western-U.S., PE-backed platform that has built its identity around partnership and retained equity, with an enhance-not-replace posture, clinician-led governance, and active investment in operations and technology. For an owner who wants to keep a stake and stay involved in a practice that keeps running, that model has real appeal.

What it doesn’t give you, on its own, is a number — or any way to know whether the equity terms in front of you are the best the market would offer. Companion’s materials are deliberately quiet on economics.

The only way to fill that gap is to see how the rest of the qualified field would structure the same practice on different terms before you commit to anything.

If you’ve received a Companion offer, or its team has reached out to start the conversation, that’s the moment to find out what your practice is really worth across the whole buyer pool. Get a Free Practice Value Estimate and we’ll lay out the same terms-and-equity comparison we would for a client across a dinner table.

Frequently asked questions

Who owns Companion Pet Partners?

Companion Pet Partners is backed by Cortec Group, a middle-market private equity firm that formed Companion as a platform company in January 2020 and recruited a leadership team of multi-site healthcare and industry veterans to build it. Cortec’s Jeffrey R.

Shannon and Jeffrey A. Lipsitz sit on Companion’s board, per the Cortec Group portfolio page.

How big is Companion Pet Partners?

As of 2026, Companion operates approximately 30 general-practice veterinary hospitals across six U.S. states — California, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Texas, and Washington — with the largest concentration in California (~13) and Arizona (~8), per Companion’s locations page. An April 2026 industry press release independently describes it as a network of over 30 general practice hospitals across six states.

Does Companion Pet Partners let me keep equity in my practice?

Yes — Companion explicitly advertises retained-equity and reinvestment opportunities. Its Partners page describes “flexibility and the ability to realize both the current and future value of your practice, as well as reinvestment opportunities with Companion.” The specific structure and the size of any retained stake are negotiated case by case and are not publicly disclosed.

What is Companion Pet Partners’ partnership model?

Companion frames each deal as a customized partnership rather than a one-size-fits-all buyout. Per its Partners page, Companion commits to “design a partnership that’s right for each individual” and to “create your customized plan” around the seller’s financial and personal goals, including retained-equity and reinvestment opportunities.

The exact legal structure of any given deal is negotiated case by case.

Will I keep clinical autonomy after selling to Companion Pet Partners?

Companion positions itself as an enhance-not-replace operator and supports clinical independence through clinician-led governance bodies, including a Medical Advisory Board and an Operating Review Committee, per an April 2026 industry press release. Its homepage states, “We’re not here to change what you’ve built — we’re here to enhance it.” Confirm the specific autonomy terms in writing in the purchase agreement.

How does the Companion Pet Partners selling process work?

Per Companion’s Partners page, the process is staged and LOI-driven: an introductory meeting leads to a Letter of Intent that “captures the important business terms of our partnership,” followed by diligence and confirmation of financial and legal terms before close. Running this alongside other qualified buyers in a competitive process is what tells you whether the LOI terms are your best available outcome.

Is Companion Pet Partners private equity-backed?

Yes. Companion is a PE-backed platform, formed and sponsored by Cortec Group in January 2020.

Cortec is a middle-market PE firm with a track record in multi-site healthcare services, including animal health, per Cortec’s own materials. Companion is a distinct platform and should not be conflated with other animal-health companies Cortec has previously owned.

Is Companion Pet Partners a good buyer for my veterinary practice?

Companion is an active acquirer of Western-U.S. general practices and a serious option for owners drawn to a partnership structure with retained equity and clinical autonomy. Whether it is the right buyer for your specific practice depends on geographic fit, the structure you want, and how its offer compares to others.

The most reliable way to know is to run a structured competitive process where Companion bids against other qualified buyers on the same practice.

Sources

Companion Pet Partners and parent company materials

1. Cortec Group. Companion Pet Partners portfolio page. cortecgroup.com
2. Companion Pet Partners. Homepage. companionpet.com
3. Companion Pet Partners. Partners page. companionpet.com/partners
4. Companion Pet Partners. Locations page. companionpet.com/locations
5. Cortec Group. Acquisition press release (animal-health platform history). cortecgroup.com

Industry and operations coverage

6. CoVet. CoVet announces partnership with Companion Pet Partners to deploy AI copilot across 30 veterinary hospitals. April 16, 2026. co.vet