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

Key takeaways

• United Veterinary Care (UVC) is a veterinarian-led group of primary, specialty, and emergency practices founded in 2019 and headquartered in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, operating more than 60 hospitals across 13 states per UVC company materials.
• Nordic Capital has backed UVC since April 2021, when it acquired the shareholding previously held by Atlantic Street Capital and, in its own words, joined a broad base of UVC’s veterinary owner-practitioners as a major shareholder.
• The doctor-shareholder model is the defining feature. A selling veterinarian can hold equity at the platform level — a stake in the entire UVC group rather than only in their own practice — which ties their retained value to the group’s growth and eventual liquidity rather than one location’s results.
• Platform-level equity changes what you actually negotiate. When a real share of consideration is group equity rather than cash, the share class, the roll-in valuation, the liquidity windows, and the governance rights matter more than the headline multiple.
• The reliable way to know what UVC — or any major buyer — would truly pay 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 UVC bids against a curated set of qualified competitors, the cash, the equity terms, and the protections all move in ways a single-bidder conversation never produces.

When a vet hands me a United Veterinary Care offer, the conversation almost never starts with the multiple. It starts with a different question, and it’s a good one: “If I sell to these people, do I actually become one of the owners, or am I just an employee with a payout?” That question exists because UVC’s whole pitch is built around the answer to it.

Most consolidator conversations are about what the buyer pays and what they do to your practice afterward. The UVC conversation has a third axis that the others mostly don’t, at least not in the same form.

You can come out the far side of the deal as a shareholder in the larger group, not just in your own clinic. That single structural fact reshapes everything else on the page.

What follows is the same picture I’d lay out over dinner if a vet showed me a UVC offer and asked what to make of it. Who UVC is and who stands behind it now, what “doctor-owner in the broader group” really means once you read the fine print, how the platform integrates a practice it brings in, where the negotiation leverage actually sits, and how to weigh UVC against the rest of the buyer pool in a process run the right way.

Quick facts on United Veterinary Care

United Veterinary Care is a veterinarian-led group of primary, specialty, and emergency care practices in the United States. The company was founded in 2019 by Dr.

Michael Tuder, starting from an initial group of 4 practices per UVC company materials.

UVC is headquartered in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. The platform has grown to more than 60 hospitals across 13 states, employing more than 1,200 professionals, including more than 250 veterinarians, per UVC company materials.

The ownership picture is where UVC differs from the way most people picture a private equity-backed group. Nordic Capital has backed the platform since April 2021, when it acquired the shareholding previously held by Atlantic Street Capital, the firm that supported UVC’s growth from 2019 onward. Nordic Capital is an international private equity firm with a substantial healthcare investment practice.

Here’s the part that matters most for a seller. Per Nordic Capital’s own April 2021 announcement, Nordic didn’t simply buy out a financial sponsor and take the chair.

It “joined a broad base of UVC’s veterinary owner-practitioners as a major shareholder.” Read that twice. The practicing veterinarians inside UVC are shareholders in the group alongside the sponsor.

That is the through-line of every UVC conversation, and it’s the lens this whole guide runs through.

What United Veterinary Care actually pays for veterinary practices in 2026

The consistent pattern we see. When a multi-doctor practice gets a direct offer from any major buyer’s acquisition team, UVC included, the offer reflects the leverage the buyer perceives in the room. A single bidder facing no visible competition has no structural reason to lead with its strongest cash percentage, its most generous equity terms, or its tightest seller protections.

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

It’s the basic way every major buyer in this market calibrates an offer to the room.

UVC does not publish a standard price sheet. 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, and the multiple is the multiplier buyers apply to that number to set the price.

There’s a wrinkle with UVC that you don’t get with a straight cash buyer. A meaningful slice of the total consideration may come as platform-level equity rather than cash.

So the headline figure tells you less than usual. Two offers at the same nominal multiple can be very different deals if one is mostly cash and the other leans heavily on group shares whose real value depends on the share class and a future liquidity event.

For specialty and emergency hospitals, the broader market generally values these higher than comparable general practices per industry research. UVC’s footprint already spans primary, specialty, and emergency care, so the platform may bid as a buyer for qualifying specialty hospitals that fit its geographic and clinical criteria.

For practices below the $2 million revenue threshold, or single-doctor practices, the buyer pool generally shifts toward regional groups, smaller consolidators, and individual buyers. UVC’s growth has tilted toward practices that fit its multi-state, multi-discipline footprint and its veterinarian-ownership thesis.

The cash-versus-equity reality

For most buyers I’d open this section by talking about cash at close as a percentage of total value. With UVC I have to start one step earlier, because the more important question is how much of the deal is cash at all.

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

Where UVC’s model bends that pattern is the role of the equity piece. Rollover equity means keeping a slice of ownership instead of taking all cash at close. In UVC’s case that slice is typically a stake in the broader group, not in your own practice.

So the equity isn’t a token gesture stapled onto a cash deal. It can be a deliberately large part of the proposition, because the whole platform is built around veterinarians holding group shares.

That changes the math you need to run. Cash at close is guaranteed money.

Platform equity is a bet on the group’s future value and on the terms of the share class you’re handed. A seller who treats group equity as if it were cash is mispricing the offer, in either direction.

The job before signing is to value the equity honestly, which means reading the share-class terms, not the marketing.

A note on deal structure types in the current market

The broader US veterinary M&A market has shifted measurably toward partnership and equity-retention structures over the past 18 months per MB Law Firm’s 2025 healthcare M&A commentary. In the most common version, the buyer acquires a majority stake, the seller keeps a minority stake, and a contractual put/call mechanism defines the buyout date and formula price for the retained piece.

UVC sits at a specific point on that spectrum, and it’s worth being precise about it. There are buyers whose retained equity is in your individual practice, a practice-level co-ownership model.

UVC’s distinctive emphasis runs the other way: the retained equity is in the platform, the whole group. Those are genuinely different bets.

Practice-level equity ties your outcome to the clinic you know and run. Platform-level equity ties it to a national group’s growth and a future group-wide liquidity event that you don’t individually control.

Neither is automatically better. They suit different sellers.

A vet who wants their stake tethered to the practice they’ve built may prefer a practice-level model. A vet who’d rather diversify out of a single location and ride a larger growth story may prefer UVC’s platform model.

The point is to know which bet you’re actually being offered, then negotiate the terms that make that bet fair. Our PE pricing guide walks through the structure-by-structure comparison in depth.

How United Veterinary Care’s acquisition team operates

UVC’s corporate-development team sources the standard way: direct outreach to owners identified through industry data, participation in structured competitive processes run by qualified sell-side advisors, and inbound inquiries from owners who reach out on their own. What’s distinctive is the pitch the team brings to the table.

Because the platform’s identity is built around veterinarian ownership, the team tends to frame the conversation around partnership and shared upside rather than around a clean exit. For the right seller that framing is genuinely attractive, and it’s a real differentiator in a crowded buyer pool.

For a seller who simply wants to monetize and step back, it’s a reason to look closely at how much of the deal must be equity versus how much can be cash.

A practical implication. The UVC team engages more substantively, and competes harder on terms, when the materials they receive reflect a sophisticated sell-side process rather than a casual one-on-one conversation.

That’s not unique to UVC; the same holds across the institutional buyer pool. But it means the value of running a real competitive process is high here, because the equity terms — the part of a UVC deal where the most value hides — are exactly the kind of terms that only sharpen under competition.

How United Veterinary Care integrates the practices it acquires

UVC’s integration story is framed around the doctor-ownership thesis, which makes it read differently from a pure back-office-absorption model.

Veterinarian-led, support behind the scenes. Per UVC company materials, the platform’s model centers on letting veterinarians focus on clinical work and the client experience while the group delivers operational support behind the scenes. The framing throughout is alignment with practitioners, consistent with a structure where those practitioners are themselves shareholders.

Shared operational infrastructure. Like any group of scale, UVC can provide centralized administrative, financial, purchasing, recruiting, and back-office support that an independent practice cannot match on its own. The specific timeline and approach for any acquired practice are determined case by case.

Platform-level alignment. Because selling doctors can hold group equity, the integration narrative leans on alignment rather than absorption. The idea is that a doctor-shareholder shares in the platform’s overall results, so the platform’s growth and the doctor’s retained stake are meant to move together.

Whether that alignment is real for any given seller depends entirely on the equity terms, which is why those terms deserve so much scrutiny.

Doctor relationships post-close. 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. UVC’s specific post-sale employment and non-compete terms for any given deal are negotiated case by case under the definitive purchase agreement.

United Veterinary Care’s recent activity in 2025-2026

UVC enters 2026 as an active acquirer in the US veterinary buyer pool, having grown to more than 60 hospitals across 13 states since its 2019 founding per UVC company materials. 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.

UVC-attributable activity in trade press and Octus’s 2025-2026 sector coverage suggests a cadence consistent with a platform in a growth phase under its Nordic Capital backing, though specific acquisition counts are not itemized by UVC in real time. The practical takeaway for an owner receiving 2026 UVC outreach: this is a buyer pitching shared ownership and platform growth, and the offer in your hand should be read through that lens — what’s cash, what’s equity, and what those group shares are really worth.

Have an offer from United Veterinary Care? Get a Free Practice Value Estimate — send us the offer and we’ll decompose the cash, the platform equity, and the protections, 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 United Veterinary Care compares to the other major buyers

If you’re weighing UVC, you’re probably comparing them implicitly to the other buyers who would compete for your practice. Here’s how UVC stacks up on the dimensions that matter, with the equity model front and center.

Versus Mars Veterinary Health (VCA, BluePearl, Banfield). Mars is the strategic, family-owned exception in the US veterinary buyer pool per Mars company disclosures, distinct from UVC’s private equity backing. Mars deals are generally cash-and-employment in shape; UVC’s distinctive offer is the platform-equity stake.

A seller deciding between them is partly deciding between a clean monetization and an ongoing ownership bet. 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 distinct from the PE-fund cycle. The contrast with UVC is the ownership horizon behind your retained equity: a long-hold sponsor and a fund-cycle sponsor create different timing dynamics for any eventual liquidity event.

Our NVA buyer profile walks through the NVA-specific dimensions.

Versus AmeriVet Veterinary Partners. AmeriVet has publicly emphasized partnership and JV structures. The useful distinction is the level of the equity: where a partnership model may keep a seller’s stake in their individual practice, UVC’s emphasis is on group-level shares.

Both are equity-retention stories; they just point your stake at different things. Our AmeriVet buyer profile covers the partnership-model dimensions.

Versus the larger PE-backed platforms (VetCor, PetVet Care Centers, Thrive, Alliance, Mission Pet Health, others). Each has its own integration philosophy, target profile, and equity approach. Some lean toward straight cash-and-rollover; some emphasize partnership variants; UVC’s signature is the platform-shareholder model.

Smaller and newer groups sometimes pay more aggressively for practices that fill specific geographic or clinical gaps. The right way to find out which buyer pays most, in cash and in well-structured equity, is to put them in a competitive process and let them surface their best offers in parallel.

What to negotiate before signing with United Veterinary Care

Six priorities when negotiating with UVC’s acquisition team, with the platform-equity terms as the highest-leverage category given the structure of the offer.

Platform-equity terms (highest priority). This is where the real value of a UVC deal lives or dies. Negotiate the share class and its rights, the valuation at which you roll into the group, the liquidity and put/call windows, information and governance rights, and anti-dilution protection.

Equity you can’t value, can’t exit on a defined timeline, and can’t protect against dilution is worth far less than the headline number implies.

Cash-versus-equity split. Decide how much of your consideration you need as guaranteed cash at close versus how much you’re willing to put into the group bet. Then negotiate to that line.

Every dollar shifted from contingent equity to cash is certainty instead of a wager on a future liquidity event.

Roll-in valuation. The price at which your equity converts into group shares quietly determines your return. Rolling in at a rich group valuation can erode your upside before the story even begins.

Push for clarity on how the group is valued at your entry point and how that compares to the basis of earlier doctor-shareholders.

Non-compete scope. Non-competes commonly run several years and cover a defined radius for all veterinary work. Negotiate shorter duration, a tighter radius, or a carve-out for specific work you might continue post-employment.

Post-sale clinical autonomy. The veterinarian-led framing is attractive, but framing is not a contract. Negotiate explicit language preserving your clinical autonomy — you make medicine decisions — and a clear line for which operational decisions stay with you versus migrating to the platform.

Brand and identity handling. If keeping your practice’s local name and identity matters to you, get it in writing in the definitive purchase agreement rather than relying on the platform’s general philosophy.

The doctor-owner question, in depth

For sellers evaluating UVC specifically, the most useful exercise is to think hard about what it actually means to become a doctor-owner in the broader group, because that single feature is the reason most owners are talking to UVC in the first place.

The case for platform-level ownership. When your retained stake is in the whole group rather than your single practice, several things work in your favor:

• Your equity is diversified across dozens of hospitals in many states, not concentrated in one location’s performance
• You participate in a national growth story rather than only in your own clinic’s trajectory
• You’re aligned with a sponsor and a management team whose job is to grow group value toward a future liquidity event
• A bad year at your specific practice doesn’t sink your retained stake the way it could under practice-level ownership

The case for treating platform-level ownership as a negotiation surface. The same feature cuts the other way unless the terms are right:

• You have far less direct control over the value of group equity than over equity in the practice you run
• The worth of your stake depends on group-level results and decisions made well above your clinic
• The timing of any liquidity event is set by the sponsor’s cycle, not by you
• The share class you’re handed may sit behind the sponsor’s preferences in the liquidity stack
• A rich roll-in valuation can quietly cap your upside before you ever start

The balance between these two columns is decided entirely in the equity terms of the definitive agreement. A seller who walks in with a refined sell-side process, and other qualified bidders at the table, consistently lands a better share class, a cleaner liquidity path, and stronger protections than a seller who negotiates the group-equity terms one-on-one with the only buyer in the room.

Should I take a United Veterinary Care offer or run a competitive process?

For UVC specifically, the value of a competitive process is concentrated in the equity terms even more than in the headline cash. The cash percentage matters, of course.

But the part of a UVC deal most likely to be worth real money over time — the platform equity — is also the part where a single bidder has the least incentive to offer its best terms unprompted.

The mechanical reason is the same as for any major buyer. Without competition, no buyer needs to hand you a better share class, a defined liquidity window, or anti-dilution protection.

With competition, every term becomes negotiable because every bidder knows you have alternatives. For a deal whose value rides on equity terms, that leverage is especially valuable.

UVC participates in well-run competitive processes when invited. The UVC-specific dimensions — the share class, the roll-in valuation, the liquidity path, the governance rights — get sharper attention from the UVC team when they know other qualified buyers are underwriting the same practice in the same window, some offering cash, some offering practice-level equity, some offering their own version of group shares.

What our Elite Selling System actually does

For a UVC-affiliated transaction, our process runs a little differently than it does for a straight cash buyer, because the negotiation surface lives in the equity terms rather than only in the headline multiple.

Phase one — the equity-terms audit. Before any bidder packet goes out, we model what UVC’s platform equity is actually worth under a range of roll-in valuations, liquidity timelines, and share-class structures. The goal is to translate “you’ll be a shareholder in the group” into honest numbers, so the seller can compare a UVC equity-heavy offer against a cash-heavy offer from another buyer on the same scale.

Phase two — the bidder mix. From the 42-plus named veterinary consolidators TE actively tracks, we invite only the ones that genuinely compete for this specific practice. The equity-retention buyers (the platform-equity model UVC champions, the practice-level co-ownership buyers, the partnership-emphasis groups) compete directly on structure.

The cash-and-employment buyers (including the Mars-affiliated entities where the practice fits) compete by offering certainty against UVC’s upside bet. The right mix is typically 5 to 7 invited bidders, each competing on a dimension the seller actually cares about.

Phase three — the term-by-term comparison. Bidders return full term sheets, not just headline numbers. The seller sees side-by-side comparisons across cash at close, the size and terms of any equity, share class and liquidity windows, non-compete scope, post-sale role, clinical-autonomy language, and brand handling.

The seller chooses on the dimensions that matter — sometimes the platform with the most compelling group-equity upside (UVC), sometimes the buyer with the highest guaranteed cash, sometimes the cleanest post-sale autonomy.

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 term sheet without testing the field.

Closing thought

The honest read on United Veterinary Care: it offers something most buyers don’t, in the specific form it offers it. The chance to walk out the far side of a sale as a shareholder in a growing national group, not just a seller with a check and an employment agreement.

For the right owner, that’s genuinely compelling.

But the value of that offer is entirely in the terms. Platform equity is worth what its share class, roll-in valuation, liquidity path, and protections say it’s worth, and not a dollar more.

A UVC deal negotiated well can be one of the better outcomes in this market for a vet who wants to stay invested. A UVC deal negotiated casually can hand you group shares that look generous on the summary page and underwhelm when the liquidity event finally comes.

If you’ve received a UVC offer, or if their team has reached out to start the conversation, the highest-leverage move is to understand what the platform equity is really worth and how the rest of the field would structure the same practice before you commit to anything. Get a Free Practice Value Estimate and we’ll lay out the same cash-versus-equity 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.

United Veterinary Care and parent company materials

6. Nordic Capital. Nordic Capital partners with United Veterinary Care, acquiring Atlantic Street Capital’s shareholding. Nordic Capital press release, April 2021. nordiccapital.com
7. United Veterinary Care. About United Veterinary Care — national veterinary group, footprint, and model. UVC company materials, 2024-2026. unitedveterinarycare.com
8. Nordic Capital. United Veterinary Care — investment profile. Nordic Capital portfolio materials. nordiccapital.com

Veterinary practice operations, benchmarks, and profession data

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