Chris Sullens is leaving CentralReach after eight years. COO Clark Convery becomes Interim CEO on September 5, with Sullens staying on as a Strategic Advisor.
Key Takeaways
- The CentralReach CEO transition was announced in a customer email, not a press release. Sullens wrote to the people he addressed as customers and friends on Thursday, saying his last day would be Friday, September 4. CentralReach had issued no public statement and had not updated its leadership page as of publication.
- Chief Operating Officer Clark Convery becomes Interim CEO on September 5 while a permanent search runs. Convery joined CentralReach in 2022 and oversees customer operations, sales, and the company’s BillMax revenue cycle service. Sullens said he will stay on as a Strategic Advisor through the transition.
- Roper Technologies has told investors that CentralReach hit its first-year targets. Roper’s second-quarter presentation, dated July 23, 2026, reported that CentralReach achieved its year-one revenue and EBITDA targets. The $1.85 billion acquisition closed in April 2025.
- Sullens is still on the CR Unite agenda to deliver the keynote three weeks after he leaves. The published conference schedule lists him as Chief Executive Officer in a two-hour opening slot on September 22 in Boston. Convery does not appear on the agenda or the speaker lineup.
The email went out Thursday afternoon under a subject line of unusual restraint for the software business: a personal update. It opened the way Chris Sullens has opened letters to applied behavior analysis operators for the better part of a decade, addressing them as customers and friends, and then delivered the news in its second sentence, ahead of any of the reflection these messages normally front-load.
After eight years at CentralReach, Sullens wrote, he had decided the time was right “to let another CEO take the reins” of the organization. His last day would be Friday, September 4. He said he still plans to attend CR Unite, the company’s annual user conference, later this month, and called it the right place to mark the end of the chapter. The letter was reviewed by Acuity.
CentralReach had issued no press release as of Thursday evening. The most recent item in its newsroom was a July 30 announcement naming a new Chief Sales Officer, and its leadership page still listed Sullens as Chief Executive Officer. His LinkedIn profile still showed the role as current, and his most recent public post on the platform predated the announcement by several months. Acuity has requested comment from CentralReach and from Roper Technologies, which has owned the company since April 2025.
For a company that sits underneath a large share of the ABA industry’s daily operations, the way the news traveled is itself part of the story. Roughly 4,600 provider organizations run scheduling, documentation, and claims through the platform, and most of them learned about the change the same way they learn about a product release.
Clark Convery Named Interim CEO of CentralReach
The letter did answer the succession question, at least for now. Clark Convery, CentralReach’s Chief Operating Officer, takes the Interim Chief Executive Officer role effective September 5. Sullens described him as a leader who joined in 2022 and already runs customer operations, sales, and BillMax, the company’s managed billing service, and said Convery will guide the business while CentralReach looks for a permanent Chief Executive.
Sullens said he will remain actively involved as a Strategic Advisor to support the handoff. No end date was attached to that arrangement, and no timeline was given for the permanent search.
An interim appointment drawn from the operating bench is the conventional move, and it is the one Roper’s decentralized model would predict. It does leave the company without a permanent Chief Executive during a stretch it has spent two years building toward, including the outcomes-based care push that Acuity has tracked across the field. Convery does not appear on the published CR Unite agenda or speaker lineup, both of which still list Sullens as Chief Executive Officer, delivering a two-hour CEO welcome and keynote on the morning of September 22 at the Westin Copley Place in Boston.
What Chris Sullens Built at CentralReach From 2018 to 2026
Sullens is not a behavior analyst, and CentralReach did not hire him to be one. He was named Chief Executive Officer on July 31, 2018, arriving from WorkWave, the New Jersey field service and logistics software company where he served briefly as Chief Financial Officer in 2008 before spending nearly a decade as President and Chief Executive Officer. He has described stepping into the CentralReach role following a majority investment by Insight Partners, with a mandate to scale a vision that was already in place. It is a familiar arc in vertical software, and one Acuity has traced elsewhere in the sector, most recently when RethinkFirst named Dinesh Senanayake its Chief Executive Officer in March.
What followed was eight years of acquisition and expansion. CentralReach bought Chartlytics shortly before Sullens arrived and kept buying, moving into assessment tools, curriculum, special education, and eventually artificial intelligence. In the March 2025 announcement of the Roper deal, Sullens said the company had completed 14 strategic acquisitions and grown from 20,000 users in 2018 to more than 200,000. The most consequential of the later deals came in August 2025, when CentralReach acquired SpectrumAi and AI.Measures and brought in Dr. Thomas Frazier as Chief Clinical Officer and Ling Shao as Senior Vice President of Outcomes-Based Care.
In his letter, Sullens put numbers to the run. He said CentralReach now serves more than 4,600 autism and IDD organizations and supports over 250,000 clinical sessions a day, nine times the volume when he joined, and that customers have used the company’s NoteGuardAI auditing tool on more than 16 million claims, avoiding what he put at almost $3 billion in payer clawbacks. Those figures are company-reported and are not independently verifiable from public filings.
The executive bench filled out quickly in the final year. Peter Boumenot joined as Chief Product Officer in November 2025, followed by Joseph Adu as Chief Information Security Officer, then Kimberly Gerard as Chief Financial Officer and Samantha Goldman as Chief Marketing Officer in December. Yagnesh Vadgama arrived from Magellan Health in April 2026 to run payer strategy, and Dan Freund came aboard as Chief Sales Officer in July. Acuity has tracked that reshuffling alongside the wider wave of ABA executive moves through the first half of 2026. Sullens pointed at that team as part of his reasoning, writing that the business is high performing, the team is assembled, and the company has what he twice called a forever home with Roper.
“Leaving your dream job is never easy,” he wrote. He said the company is by no means perfect, and that its culture and its people will carry it after he is gone. He named the products the product organization under Boumenot plans to introduce at CR Unite, including a progress report writer and data benchmarking, and said nothing about the company’s direction changes with his departure.
What Roper Technologies Told Investors About CentralReach
Roper announced its agreement to buy CentralReach on March 24, 2025, at a net purchase price of about $1.65 billion including roughly $200 million in tax benefits, against a gross price near $1.85 billion. The deal closed on April 23, 2025. Roper told the market it expected CentralReach to contribute about $175 million of revenue and $75 million of EBITDA for the twelve months ending June 30, 2026, and to sustain organic revenue and EBITDA growth above 20 percent.
CentralReach’s own announcement was explicit about continuity, saying the company would continue to operate independently, maintaining its existing leadership, team, products, brands, and mission. Sixteen months is not a short tenure under new ownership by the standards of a private equity exit. It is short by the standards of a company that told its customers nothing would change.
The financial record does not describe a company in trouble. Roper’s second-quarter presentation, dated July 23, 2026, lists CentralReach among its Application Software highlights and reports that the business achieved its year-one revenue and EBITDA targets. That segment posted $1,181 million in revenue for the quarter, up 8 percent with 5 percent organic growth, and $505 million of EBITDA at a 42.8 percent margin. Roper raised full-year guidance at the same time, to revenue growth above 8 percent and adjusted diluted earnings per share of $22.15 to $22.30.
Whatever prompted the decision, nothing Roper has published points to performance. Sullens framed the timing as a choice made from strength, and the numbers on the page do not contradict him.
ABA Software Leadership Turnover and a Market Reshaped by Capital
The category Sullens leaves looks materially different from the one he entered. Motivity took $27 million from Five Elms Capital in early 2025, installed a new Chief Executive Officer as part of that round, and in May acquired the practice management platform Calmanac outright. On the same day the Sullens letter circulated, Hi Rasmus announced a $50 million minority investment from Updata Partners, its first outside capital. RethinkFirst is on its second Chief Executive in little more than a year.
The pressure on the provider side has intensified in parallel, and it is the pressure CentralReach has built its recent product strategy around. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services reported in August that Medicaid and CHIP payments for ABA rose from about $1.94 billion in 2021 to $10.1 billion in 2025. Federal auditors have recommended more than $123 million in refunds across four state ABA audits, nearly all of it turning on documentation rather than clinical judgment. A claims auditing tool that measures its value in avoided clawbacks is a product built directly against that environment.
The outcomes work is the harder half, and it is unfinished. Moving providers from fee-for-service toward payment tied to results requires data infrastructure the field does not yet have, which is why the acquisitions of SpectrumAi and AI.Measures mattered more than their undisclosed price suggested. Sullens said in his letter that the investments of the past five years are only now converging into something that can be sold as an outcomes-based platform. That convergence is the part a new Chief Executive inherits, and the part hardest to hand off cleanly.
What the CentralReach CEO Transition Leaves Open
Three questions remain. The first is who takes the permanent job. CentralReach has a deep bench, and Roper has a record of promoting from inside its operating companies, but no search timeline has been disclosed and no candidate has been named.
The second is what Sullens does next. His letter announced no future role beyond the advisory arrangement at CentralReach, and his public profiles listed nothing new as of Thursday.
The third is CR Unite itself, which opens September 21 in Boston as the conference’s eighth edition. Sullens is scheduled to give the keynote on September 22, and Boumenot and Riccardo Bocci are set to present the product roadmap the following morning. The agenda was built for a company with a permanent Chief Executive. It will now double as the first occasion on which several thousand customers can ask, in a room, what the transition means for the platform their practices run on.
Sullens closed his letter by calling the job a dream and thanking the customers who chose to join the journey. What he did not say, because it is not the sort of thing a departure letter says, is how long the interim arrangement will last.
