Updata Partners takes a minority stake in an ABA clinical platform that says it reached more than 1,000 customer organizations without institutional capital.
Key Takeaways
- ABA software consolidated around capital, and Hi Rasmus was the last sizable holdout. Roper Technologies closed its $1.65 billion net purchase of CentralReach in April 2025, and Five Elms Capital put $27 million into Motivity a month before that. The $50 million round removes Hi Rasmus from the short list of clinical platforms operating without an institutional investor.
- The deal is a minority investment rather than a sale. Updata Partners, which closed an $875 million fund in February 2026 and writes checks between $20 million and $200 million, is taking a minority position, with General Partner Braden Snyder joining the board. Hi Rasmus says its founders retain majority ownership and that Nikolaj Hendriksen remains Chief Executive Officer.
- Federal Medicaid data explains the timing. CMS reported in August that Medicaid and CHIP payments for ABA rose from roughly $1.94 billion in 2021 to $10.1 billion in 2025, a 421 percent increase that has drawn audits, enrollment freezes, and state rate reviews. Software that can document medical necessity and outcomes is selling directly into that pressure.
- The capital is aimed at AI, enterprise capability, and outcomes research. Hi Rasmus co-authored a skill acquisition study with a multistate provider two days before the announcement, in a field that still has no established benchmarks for what good looks like. The scale figures in the release, including 19.6 million session hours a year, come from the company and are not independently verifiable.
Nikolaj Hendriksen spent the first stretch of his career in Danish financial technology, where he co-founded Mybanker, a retail banking comparison marketplace that grew past a million users. He started over in 2019, after his son’s autism diagnosis reorganized the family’s life, and named the new company for the boy.
On Thursday, Hi Rasmus said it had raised $50 million from Updata Partners in what it describes as a strategic minority investment and the first outside capital in the company’s history. Braden Snyder, a General Partner at Updata, will join the company’s board of directors. Hendriksen remains Chief Executive Officer, and Hi Rasmus says its founders keep majority ownership.
The round lands in a category that has been absorbing capital for the better part of two years. ABA providers now buy their clinical software from companies owned by a $60 billion public conglomerate, by growth equity firms, or, until Thursday, by their founders.
Updata Partners and the $50 Million Minority Investment in Hi Rasmus
Updata was founded in 1998 and invests out of Washington, D.C. In February, it closed its eighth fund at $875 million, reaching its hard cap in six months and bringing the firm past $3.0 billion in committed capital since inception. The firm writes checks between $20 million and $200 million, makes both majority and minority investments, and says it looks to be the first institutional capital into capital-efficient B2B software businesses located outside Silicon Valley.
Hi Rasmus fits that description almost line by line. It is a bootstrapped vertical software company incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in Nashville, several time zones removed from the venture corridors, selling into a customer base that pays subscription fees per client and per staff license.
Snyder joined Updata in 2014 and was promoted to General Partner in December 2024. He led the firm’s $77 million investment in MD Integrations, a telehealth infrastructure company, in October 2025, and sits on that board alongside Operating Partner Kate Winkler. The rest of his portfolio runs through search intelligence, security awareness training, employee mobility, and identity verification, which makes Hi Rasmus his first behavioral health platform.
“What impressed us about Hi Rasmus is the combination of extraordinary growth, a deeply mission-driven culture, and a clear vision for how technology can improve autism care,” Snyder said in the announcement. He added that the team has built a company with the potential to become what he called a defining platform in the market.
Hi Rasmus did not disclose a valuation, the size of the stake, whether any portion of the $50 million is secondary, or the composition of the board after closing.
Inside the Hi Rasmus ABA Platform: 1,000 Organizations and 19.6 Million Session Hours
The company reports more than 1,000 customer organizations across all 50 states and 90 countries, and says the platform supported more than 19.6 million hours of client sessions in the past year. It landed its first United States customers in 2021. It also says it is onboarding two of the world’s largest ABA providers, and does not name them. Those figures come from the company and are not independently verifiable from public filings.
The platform sits on the clinical side of an ABA practice: data collection, care delivery workflows, scheduling, outcomes reporting, and what the company calls AI-supported tools, built ABA-first and extended to multidisciplinary teams. Billing and revenue cycle work has historically run through partners rather than through Hi Rasmus, including an integration with the practice management platform AlohaABA and a joint deployment with Lumary at Community Autism Services that went live in August across nine states. As Acuity noted in its survey of the product leaders building ABA software, the company has leaned on clinical credibility as its differentiator, including digitizing Skill-Based Treatment in collaboration with Dr. Greg Hanley.
“We were never trying to build a software company,” Hendriksen said in the announcement. “Our aim has been to positively impact 1 million children and families navigating autism and give the organizations delivering those services superpowers.” He said Updata gives the company a partner that can help it move faster and invest more deeply in innovation without losing the mission and culture that got it here.
ABA Software Consolidation: CentralReach, Motivity, and the Capital Behind Them
The comparison set explains the timing. In March 2025, Roper Technologies reached a definitive agreement to acquire CentralReach from Insight Partners for a net purchase price of about $1.65 billion, including a $200 million tax benefit, against a gross price near $1.85 billion. The deal closed on April 23, 2025. Roper told investors it expected CentralReach to contribute roughly $175 million in revenue and $75 million in EBITDA for the twelve months ending June 30, 2026, from a platform used by more than 200,000 professionals. That August, CentralReach acquired the analytics firms SpectrumAi and AI.Measures.
Weeks before the Roper announcement, Motivity raised $27 million from Five Elms Capital, a round that installed Smith Anderson, previously an operator at the firm, as Chief Executive Officer and moved founder Rex Jakobovits into a Chief of Strategy and Innovation role. In May 2026, Motivity acquired Calmanac outright, folding in the practice management system it had built its operational layer on and bringing scheduling, billing, and authorizations in house. Motivity now reports more than 800 organizations across seven countries. Passage Health, a younger entrant, raised an $8 million Series A in 2025.
The software market those companies compete over is smaller than the deal values suggest. Verified Market Research valued United States ABA software at roughly $456 million in 2024 and projects about $960 million by 2032, a compound annual growth rate near 11 percent. Capital has been moving through the provider side on a parallel track: private equity has been pouring money into behavioral health on a thesis about unmet demand, and pediatric therapy M&A held at 22 deals in the first half of 2026, with private equity-backed platforms accounting for roughly two-thirds of the buyer pool.
Medicaid ABA Spending and Federal Oversight Are Reshaping What Software Has to Do
The demand underneath all of it is documented in federal data. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that about one in 31 eight-year-old children has been identified with autism spectrum disorder, up from one in 36 in the prior surveillance year. The payment side has moved faster still. In a 173-page toolkit released August 4, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services reported that Medicaid and CHIP payments for ABA climbed from roughly $1.94 billion in 2021 to $10.1 billion in 2025, a 421 percent increase against 67 percent growth in the number of children with an autism diagnosis receiving services.
The toolkit creates no new federal requirements. It does hand states a framework for tightening documentation standards, utilization management, provider enrollment, and payment methodology, and states have been reaching for those levers already. Federal auditors have spent four years identifying improper Medicaid payments in state ABA programs on documentation grounds, and Florida’s ABA Task Force opened its review last month with a $6.57 billion state spending figure and a statutory instruction to consider caps on how long a child may receive services.
For a software vendor, that environment is the market. Providers under audit need systems that produce defensible records, and providers negotiating with payers need numbers that describe more than hours delivered.
Where the $50 Million Goes: AI, Enterprise ABA Capability, and Outcomes Research
Hi Rasmus says the investment will fund product innovation, AI, enterprise capabilities, integrations, and clinical outcomes and research, alongside hiring and infrastructure as it pushes further into behavioral health organizations and schools.
The research line is the one worth watching, because the company was already spending against it. Two days before the funding announcement, Acuity reported on a white paper Hi Rasmus co-authored with Behavioral Framework, which published six months of skill acquisition results for 1,090 children and asked the rest of the field to publish comparable numbers. Dr. Cate Davis, Director of Research and Outcomes at Hi Rasmus and a co-author, framed the underlying question for Acuity in operational terms. “Can we improve what a session hour looks like, and therefore work our way to value-based care?” she said. She was also direct about the limits of a vendor-funded study, telling Acuity that readers should not conclude a particular platform is required to produce quality outcomes research. “Set aside the software,” she said.
That work sits in an unresolved space. The Council of Autism Service Providers states that benchmarks for ABA services have not yet been established, which is why this month’s exercise in which seven providers benchmarked their own outcomes against CASP treatment-intensity standards drew attention. Research spending in that gap does two things at once for a software company: it strengthens the clinical claims attached to the product, and it gives customers something to hand a payer.
The enterprise line matters for a different reason. The two unnamed providers Hi Rasmus says it is onboarding would put the platform inside organizations that CentralReach has long served and that Motivity is now built to serve end to end. Hi Rasmus has stayed deliberately narrow, which has been both its argument and its ceiling: clinical depth, with billing and practice management handled by partners.
