A healthcare private equity investor on why quality and returns are not a trade-off, and what he looks for before backing a provider to scale.
David Porter is a partner at Apposite Capital, a London private equity firm that invests only in healthcare services and life sciences. Trained as a chemist, he spent his career in financial services, running funds and companies, before moving into private equity and starting Apposite two decades ago.
He and Jared get into Apposite's core belief that there is no compromise between strong investor returns and high-quality, ethical healthcare, because quality is what differentiates a provider and wins the people who pay for care. He explains how the firm scales smaller companies by professionalising, automating and digitising everything, improving governance, and growing both organically and through acquisition, using a turnaround in UK home care as the example: a loss-making business that prospered only once its quality, and its regulator scores, were fixed.
The conversation widens to why healthcare business models rarely export across borders, because reimbursement and health economics differ so much between the UK, US and Europe, and to where David thinks things are heading: quality as the one constant, robotics and AI as the big change, and why he backs automation with real guardrails at a sensible pace, because one bad headline can set a whole category back years.
“There is no compromise between making good returns for investors and having high-quality, impactful, ethical business practices in healthcare.”— David Porter
Coherent gives private clinics one patient relationship engine, recovering revenue lost at enquiry, recall and billing.