The Clinical Trial Management System Market is projected to grow at 13.2% CAGR, reaching $3.7 Billion by 2029, but seasoned healthcare investors recognized this opportunity years before headlines began tracking private equity’s sudden interest in research technology. While Nordic Capital and Riverside Partners make news for their clinical trial management system investments, veterans like Reeve Waud have spent decades building the investment framework that anticipated this exact convergence of healthcare services and mission-critical software.
Reeve Waud, founder and Managing Partner of Waud Capital Partners, has led or overseen more than 500 company acquisitions over his career since 1993. His Chicago-based firm’s healthcare portfolio reads like a roadmap for understanding why clinical trial technology represents such compelling investment territory today.
Pattern Recognition in Healthcare Technology
Waud Capital’s investment in Integrated Practice Solutions demonstrates the firm’s early recognition of healthcare workflow software demand. IPS is described as “a market leading provider of practice management and EHR software to healthcare practices in chiropractic, optometry, speech and other therapy markets” with software applications that include “ChiroTouch, RevolutionEHR, ClinicSource and ACOM Health.” The company serves exactly the type of fragmented, regulation-heavy healthcare segments that clinical trial management now seeks to organize and optimize.
The operational challenges IPS addresses—streamlining administrative processes, ensuring compliance, improving patient data management—mirror the pain points driving investments in clinical trial IT infrastructure that Bain’s 2024 healthcare private equity report identified as a key growth driver. Healthcare providers struggling with financial pressures and shifting reimbursement models invest in core systems to boost efficiency, creating the same underlying demand dynamics that make clinical trial software attractive to pharmaceutical companies managing increasingly complex research protocols.
Reeve Waud’s experience with Acadia Healthcare provides additional context for understanding clinical trial technology investment appeal. According to the firm’s materials, Waud founded Acadia Healthcare in 2005 as a startup platform and continues to serve as Chairman of Acadia’s board of directors. Acadia operates facilities for patients with behavioral health and substance abuse disorders, managing regulatory compliance, patient data, and operational coordination at scale—precisely the challenges that clinical trial management systems aim to solve for pharmaceutical companies.
The Infrastructure Play
Clinical trial management systems represent mission-critical infrastructure similar to the EHR and practice management platforms Waud Capital has successfully backed. Global Clinical Trials market size was valued at USD 79.58 Billion in 2023 and is poised to grow from USD 84.57 Billion in 2024 to USD 140.27 Billion by 2032, creating substantial demand for the software tools that organize this activity.
Waud Capital’s approach focuses on “mission-critical software with clear value propositions that help companies operate more effectively” and seeks solutions that “bring attractive, recurring revenue business models in niches like vertical application software, integrated payments, knowledge technology, and healthcare IT.” The firm targets recurring revenue business models in healthcare IT, exactly the characteristics that define successful clinical trial management platforms.
Market Timing and Execution
2025 is set to be another significant year for clinical trials. According to GlobalData’s Clinical Trials database, as of January 2025, there are 3,213 trials planned to start this year. This volume creates infrastructure demands that software solutions must address, from patient recruitment and data collection to regulatory compliance and site coordination.
Reeve Waud’s three decades of healthcare investing provide the pattern recognition necessary to identify these inflection points before they become obvious. His firm manages approximately $4.6 billion of assets under management as of December 31, 2022, and has completed more than 450 investments since its founding.
The clinical trial management system opportunity represents a natural extension of investment principles Waud Capital has refined across hundreds of healthcare transactions, suggesting that experienced healthcare technology investors saw this wave building long before it crested.
