Patient Square Capital adds Neel Varshney and Alex Albert to roster

Patient Square Capital, the PE shop launched by former KKR executive Jim Momtazee last year, is continuing to build out an impressive roster – bringing on a pair of seasoned healthcare investors from his former firm and Ares Management. 

The new hires include Neel Varshney, a former managing director within KKR’s Americas Healthcare team, and Alex Albert, who most recently co-head private equity healthcare efforts as a partner at Ares Management.

Both Varshney and Albert have joined Patient Square as founding partners. PE Hub first wrote in early January that Albert had left Ares. 

The new additions come after Patient Square at the beginning of January hired Adam Fliss as a founding partner and general counsel. Fliss was previously general counsel at TPG Capital. Other founding members the now five-person team include former KPMG senior partner Maria Walker, partner and chief financial officer of Patient Square.

Momtazee formally announced the launch of his firm in August 2020 after spending 21 years at KKR, where he helped form the healthcare industry group and spent 10 years leading it.

Albert and Varshney look to be natural additions, as Momtazee has worked with both investors in the past.  

Albert has more than 15 years of investment and acquisition experience, most recently a partner within Ares’ Private Equity Group focusing on healthcare. Albert was previously a vice president at FFL Partners, and before that, an associate in private equity at KKR where he worked on the healthcare industry team with Momtazee. Albert got his start in finance as an analyst in the investment banking division at Goldman Sachs from 2005 to 2007.

Based out of the greater Los Angeles area, Albert has held various board memberships at Ares portfolio businesses including DuPage Medical Group, OB Hospitalist Group, Unified Women’s Healthcare and National Veterinary Associates. He also is a board member and on the executive committee of the Healthcare Private Equity Association (HCPEA). 

Varshney, similarly, has more than 15 years of investment and healthcare experience, having joined KKR in 2016 from healthcare-focused PE firm Linden Capital Partners, where he was vice president. Varshney previously worked at McKinsey & Co and was on Medtronic’s business development team. He was also trained in internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), a Harvard academic teaching hospital. 

The investor held many previous board memberships at companies including Ajax Health, BrightSpring Pharmerica, CORPAK MedSystems, Envision Healthcare, EPIX Therapeutics, Headlands Research, Slayback Pharma and Virtus Pharmaceuticals. He was also involved with Spirox.

Sources told Buyouts in August that Momtazee could target $2 billion or more for his debut fund with his new firm. The expectation is that Patient Square will start raising the debut fund this year. 

Momtazee, in the meantime, has also gotten into the SPAC game. Patient Square is sponsoring a blank-check company called Montes Archimedes Acquisition Corp that raised $400 million in its IPO in October.