Case No. FP·2026 / Jurisdiction: United StatesStatus: Ongoing
Fundprint.Who funds your therapist
The FindingOpened 2026 / United States

Private equity owns 1,621 autism-therapy clinics across 42 states.

Not an estimate and not a projection. 1,621 individual clinics, each one named, each one traced to a named firm through a public document you can open. They are part of the 1,755 clinics whose owner we can name and source. See the whole market.

Fundprint follows the money behind U.S. ABA / autism-therapy clinics: which are run by an independent practitioner, which by a chain, and which by a financial owner that can restructure or close them. Every claim here traces to a public document.

Clinics traced
1,755
from public records
Private-equity owned
1,621
of 1,755 traced
Current owners
19
plus one former owner
States covered
42
as of 2026-07-25
0
Exhibit / Out of how many

The Whole Market

A count invites a fair question: out of how many? The federal provider registry lists every ABA provider in the country, so we counted the whole market from the same source the clinics come from. Here is what is out there, and where the money has landed.

17,569
ABA providers in the U.S.
21,088
Locations they run
15,142
Providers running one location
2.8%
Of all locations, private-equity held

Why 580 here, and 1,621 on the front page. The registry lists 580 of the 1,621 private-equity clinics we trace. The other 1,041 come from owners' own published directories, which the registry does not carry. A percentage is only honest if both of its halves are drawn from the same place, so every figure on this page counts what the registry can see and nothing else.

The shape of the market

American autism therapy is not a corporate industry with a few independents left over. It is the reverse.

Locations per providerProvidersLocations
115,142
13,940
2-42,145
4,867
5-9192
1,142
10-2476
1,033
25+14
774

15,142 of the country's 17,569 ABA providers run exactly one location. Fourteen run twenty-five or more. A very long tail, and a very short head.

Where private equity is concentrated

A national average hides what a family actually faces, because nobody chooses between a clinic in Denver and one in Tampa. Care is bought locally, so this is the number that matters: private equity's share of every ABA location in the state.

  1. MN
    15.8% (22 of 139)
  2. NM
    13.2% (14 of 106)
  3. AZ
    9.5% (50 of 529)
  4. CO
    7.8% (54 of 688)
  5. PA
    7.7% (33 of 431)
  6. WY
    7.4% (2 of 27)
  7. ID
    6.9% (4 of 58)
  8. MD
    6.5% (30 of 464)

States with fewer than 25 ABA locations are not ranked, because a percentage of a handful of clinics is noise. They are still counted in every national figure above.

Source: the federal provider registry, the same one the clinics come from. The numerator and the denominator are counted in a single pass with one address key, so a location can never be counted on one side of a share and missed on the other.
[1]
A
Exhibit / How the record is built

The Machine

Fundprint is not a hand-kept list. It is a five-stage pipeline that pulls public records, snapshots and embeds them, resolves the ownership chain, holds every claim to a validation gate, and publishes only what passes. Watch a record travel through it.

The Fundprint ownership engine, Figure 1A schematic of the five-stage pipeline. Public records from the NPPES registry and owner directories enter at the intake on the left, pass through five machined stages, Acquire, Store, Resolve, Validate and Publish, along a drive shaft, and exit on the right as verified clinic to owner to parent-firm ownership chains.FIG. 1 / THE OWNERSHIP ENGINEDETERMINISTIC / SOURCEDNPPES+ DIRECTORIESIAcquire649 + 255 records inINTAKEIIStorepgvector + snapshotsSNAPSHOTIIIResolveclinic → owner → firmMATCHIVValidate95% hand-checked gateGATEVPublishverified chains outEMITCLINICOWNERFIRMVERIFIEDPIPELINE: 5 STAGES
  1. IAcquire
    649 + 255 records in

    Pull public records from two registries.

    The federal NPPES provider registry (649) plus owners' own machine-readable location directories (255). Every page is fetched and content-hashed on the way in.

  2. IIStore
    pgvector + snapshots

    Snapshot and embed every source.

    Nothing advances without a stored, hashed copy of the document behind it. Names are embedded as vectors in Postgres so the resolver can reason over them.

  3. IIIResolve
    clinic → owner → firm

    Assemble the ownership chain.

    A deterministic name matcher links clinics to owner entities and owner entities to their parent financial firm. Chain confidence is the weakest link along the chain.

  4. IVValidate
    95% hand-checked gate

    Hold everything to the floors.

    Confidence floors and a 95% hand-validation gate. Contradicted or under-confidence claims are quarantined, not published. Over-matched brand names are rejected.

  5. VPublish
    verified chains out

    Emit the pinned snapshot.

    Only claims that clear validation are written to the frozen snapshot this site reads. Every published claim carries the source that proves it.

The same engine runs on a public dataset with an open methodology. See how the machine works for the confidence floors, the two registries, and the integrity rules.

B
Exhibit / Who holds the most

A concentrated market

All owners

Ownership is not spread thin. A handful of firms hold most of the clinics we have traced. Bar length is clinics tracked; color marks the kind of owner.

  1. 01
  2. 02
    KKR197
  3. 03
  4. 04
  5. 05
  6. 06
  7. 07
  8. 08
Private equityPension fundFamily officeOther institutional
C
Exhibit / Why it matters

When the money leaves

In 2018, Blackstone bought the Center for Autism and Related Disorders, then the largest ABA provider in the country at roughly 250 locations. The company was loaded with debt, training was cut, and within five years more than a hundred centers had closed. In 2023, CARD filed for bankruptcy.[1]

That is why ownership is worth tracing. When a financial owner exits, the families relying on those clinics are the ones left without care. CARD appears in this dataset as a former holding, recorded for its history.

Read the investigation
Case exhibit
~250
centers at acquisition, 2018
Bankrupt
five years later, 2023
For families

Look up your clinic

Search by clinic name or city. Every answer links to the public source behind it. Searches run in your browser and are never recorded.

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