Private equity firm creates company to harness tech for societal good
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By
Nick Wakeman
Gavin Long’s Pleasant Land group has acquired Livanta and DOMA Technologies to form a new company whose mission is improving how doctors and nurses make better care decisions.
Veteran private equity investor Gavin Long has launched a new federal contractor through his new Pleasant Land group that combines revenue and growth goals with a need to do good.
Long previously worked for Acacia Capital Partners, which previously owned Applied Insight and ID Technologies. Both were eventually acquired by CACI International.
With Pleasant Land, Long is connected with what is known as a “family office.”
Family offices tap into individual wealth for funding private equity activity. These funds are generally more patient with their investments and take a much longer-term view of returns.
“One of the drivers of our sponsor group is outstanding returns, but we also are driven by something that’s societally impactful,” Long said.
Pleasant Land has acquired two healthcare data and analytics companies - Livanta and DOMA Technologies - with plans to apply their capabilities in artificial intelligence and machine learning to transform patient care.
Livanta was purchased in September 2023. The company ingests and process vast amounts of Medicare data that includes complaints, doctor notes, faxes and information from other databases. Healthcare providers use the data to make better decisions.
The acquisition of DOMA closed in June 2024. Long said that DOMA has some of the same data ingestion capabilities, but also brings the artificial intelligence piece in to more efficiently work with that data. DOMA also brings customers with the Veterans Affairs Department.
Long said that over the last several months, they identified at least 10 opportunities to pursue as a combined company.
“This is not just a middle market roll-up initiative, these companies really belong together,” Long said. “There’s an aligned capability set.”
Long described Livanta as the largest quality improvement organization in the U.S. public sector. When a Medicare beneficiary has a problem, Livanta’s data sets are used to find the right solution.
“These data sets are massive,” Long said. “We have one case that has 80,000 pages for one person.”
Doctors, nurses and other providers rely on those data sets for care decisions. Long said he thinks of Livanta as a healthcare business that ingests a lot of data.
The piece that DOMA brings is technology capabilities in areas such as AI and machine learning.
“It’s my passion to make a difference in people’s lives,” said DOMA's founder Pat Feliciano, who was named chief executive for the combined company. “We are in Hampton Roads, which has the largest veteran population in the country, and we see immediate impacts on the people that we serve.”
Leveraging the power of AI is one of the drivers of opportunities in the healthcare sector, Feliciano said.
“The beauty of what we have and what sets us apart is that we have this data and people are chomping at the bit to get it so they can make better decisions,” Feliciano added. “We’re able to make better decisions because we’re dealing with real data.”
One power of AI in the healthcare field is to mitigate shortages in doctors and nurses.
“We can thoughtfully ingest multiple modes of data and tag and index it so that physicians and nurses can make higher quality decisions,” Long said.
AI can also free health care workers from mundane tasks and focus more on patients, Long said.
The combined company expects about $150 million in revenue for 2025 and today employs 750 people that include doctors, nurses and data scientists.
“You can do a lot of cool things with data, but at the end of the day, you've got to have the subject matter expertise and the contextual understanding of how it applies for it to really have an impact,” Long said.
More acquisitions are part of the growth strategy. They are targeting other companies that have full-and-open contracts, along with those that have AI and ML capabilities.
Adjacent markets also present M&A opportunities, Long said.
In the short term, the company is working on a rebranding and a new name that will be unveiled in 2025.
“We really want to tell a story that this is one company,” Long said.
KippsDeSanto and Co. acted as the exclusive financial adviser to DOMA Technologies on its sale to Pleasant Land. G Squared worked in the same capacity for Livanta.