Cross Country Healthcare is going private in a $437 million deal that will bring the travel nursing company under investment firm Knox Lane.
The definitive agreement was announced Wednesday evening and is expected to close in the third quarter, pending customary closing conditions, including stockholder and regulatory approvals. It prices Cross Country’s stock at $13.25 per share, a roughly 31% premium over Wednesday’s closing price, and would see Cross Country continue to operate under its own brand.
“We are excited to be working with Knox Lane, who brings significant and direct expertise in our sector to help Cross Country Healthcare enter its next phase of growth, while delivering significant and immediate value to our stockholders,” CEO, Chairman and Cofounder Kevin Clark said in the announcement.
Notably, the news comes about half a year after a separate acquisition deal between Cross Country and digital staffing platform Aya Healthcare was called off. That proposed transaction, snarled by regulatory delays, would have been much more lucrative for Cross Country’s shareholders, pricing the company at $615 million or $18.61 per share.
Cross Country is a 40-year-old company that has been publicly traded on the NASDAQ stock exchange since 2001. It staffs travel nurses and allied professionals, per diem and other local contract professionals, locums tenens physicians, education-adjacent personnel and home care workers via its integrated, cross-service line Intellify platform. Additionally, it offers related workforce services, including assessments and consulting, resource pool development and management, and managed service programs.
In 2022, it acquired Mint Medical Physician Staffing and Lotus Medical Staffing to build its locum tenens platform. Also in 2022, the company bought interim leadership firm HireUp Leadership to strengthen its position in the talent management landscape.
Knox Lane, which manages $3.5 billion in assets, describes itself as a growth-oriented investment firm. Its portfolio already includes related healthcare companies like All Star Healthcare, another staffing firm focused on locum tenens physicians, and related businesses like HCEsquared, which offers practitioner engagement and medical education services to biopharma customers.
Clark said the firm values its brand strength and its proprietary technology platform that “uniquely positions organizations to design, predict, and optimize labor strategies with market‑leading precision.” Both companies positioned the acquisition as an opportunity to further grow and specialize in Cross Country’s business.
“Cross Country Healthcare is a longstanding leader and innovator in healthcare workforce solutions, with an unparalleled focus on delivering clinical excellence,” John Bailey, managing partner at Knox Lane, and Shamik Patel, partner at Knox Lane, said in a joint statement included in the announcement. “We are excited to leverage our extensive experience to bring added strategic focus and capabilities to the business to build on its already strong foundation, technology and customer relationships.”
Cross Country’s prior deal with Aya was pitched as a complementary merger in which the former’s technology and wide slate of staffed services would bolster the latter. Officials from the Federal Trade Commission said their staff had “identified significant competitive concerns” with that arrangement, throwing the proposed combination’s success into doubt.
Should this week’s new arrangement also fall through, the terminating party would be on the hook for a $14.2 million one-time fee, according to regulatory documents filed Thursday.