Malia Spencer
Staff Reporter- Portland Business Journal
July 8, 2014
ZoomCare, the Hillsboro-based company that runs neighborhood health clinics across the Portland and Seattle metro areas, is taking on its first outside investor with a long-term deal with Portland-based Endeavour Capital.
Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, though Endeavor describes its typical equity investment as being between $25 million and $100 million. The deal gives Endeavour a minority stake in the company.
Since its founding in 2006, ZoomCare has grown organically into a profitable business with more than 250,000 customers, said co-founder and President Dave Sanders.
With this investment the company will be able to further fulfill its goal of offering a complete range of care for consumers, he said. The company a year ago began offering specialists on demand, in addition to its on-demand primary care. Now with Endeavour’s partnership, the company can continue down that path with plans to beef up the level of service consumers can find within a ZoomCare clinic.
So rather than expanding into new geographies, it will invest in infrastructure, technology and people.
“We could have kept to primary care services, but we want to go deep and vertical as opposed to expanding geography in a thin layer,” Sanders said. “To do that we decided to really build out a complete solution.”
Because ZoomCare has an established, profitable business Sanders said any number of large private equity firms or large venture capital firms were interested in investing. The company’s goals, he said, aligned with Endeavor.
According to Endeavour’s website, the firm is investing out of a $675 million fund, its sixth equity fund. It invests as a “long-term” partner in companies based in the Western United States and targets companies with earnings — before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization — between $5 million to $50 million and larger.