A Five-Clinic Texas DPC Group Just Got Bought. The Buyer's First Move Was to Say It Isn't Private Equity.

Industry News by DPC Insider
#acquisitions#consolidation#practice ownership#Texas#succession#search fund
Sources: MyMD Select Joins the Timshel Health Family and Plans to Open Direct Primary Care Clinics Throughout Texas — Business Wire, July 30, 2026 · Timshel Health · Timshel Health — Partnerships · About MyMD Select · Timshel Health — Hunter Search Capital portfolio · Private equity in direct primary care is winning — KevinMD, June 29, 2026

The company that just bought a five-clinic direct primary care practice in East Texas leads its own website with a denial. Not a private equity firm. Not a national chain.

MyMD Select announced this week that it has joined Timshel Health and plans to open direct primary care clinics across the rest of Texas. MyMD Select runs offices in Tyler, Longview, Nacogdoches, Jacksonville and Lufkin, and was started by Dr. Jeremy Smith after his residency at UT Health Science Center at Tyler. The practice has been in Tyler since 2014 and extends telemedicine into Alabama and Georgia. No deal terms were disclosed.

Five clinics in towns of 25,000 to 100,000 people is not the kind of asset that usually draws a national buyer. That’s most of what makes this interesting.

The buyer is a search fund, not a fund

Timshel Health was founded in 2023 by Mac Findlay to acquire and operate direct primary care practices. Its money came through Hunter Search Capital, which classifies the investment as a long-term hold. The first deal, Anovia Health in Wisconsin, closed in 2025. Anovia contracts directly with school districts, manufacturers and other employers across that state. MyMD Select is the second.

A search fund works differently from a private equity fund. An entrepreneur raises a small pool of money from individual investors and family offices, spends a year or two looking for one company to buy, then runs it personally. There is no ten-year fund life forcing a sale. There is no portfolio of thirty companies competing for the partner’s attention.

Timshel puts the contrast in writing. Its investors, the site says, “do not expect a sale or return in the near-term.” Elsewhere: “we won’t tell you how to run your practice.” The name comes from Steinbeck’s East of Eden, from the Hebrew word for “thou mayest,” which is a fairly loud way of signaling that the pitch to physicians is about who keeps control.

Why the distinction lands right now

DPC has spent this year getting noticed by capital. In June, physician and strategist Dana Y. Lujan named the private equity firms already holding positions in DPC and concierge platforms, and laid out the reason: monthly memberships produce recurring cash-pay revenue that behaves like a software subscription. That revenue is exactly what a buyer with a return target wants to own.

So a holding company that opens by distancing itself from private equity is reading the room accurately. Physicians who left insurance to stop having their panel size decided by someone else are not eager to hand that decision to a new someone else.

The claim still deserves a hard look. A long hold is an intention, not a legal structure. Family offices can wait far longer than a fund on a clock, but patient money is money that eventually wants a return, and it usually gets one through a sale or a recapitalization. Nothing in the public record says what happens if Timshel’s investors change their minds in year twelve.

The questions that decide this for a selling physician sit in the purchase agreement, not the website. Does the founding doctor keep meaningful equity. Who sets panel caps and visit length. Who approves hiring. What happens to the membership price if the practice misses a growth number. Whether Dr. Smith negotiated protections on any of that is not public.

The geography is the surprising part

Capital normally chases metros. Dallas, Houston and Austin all have crowded DPC markets, and a buyer optimizing for density would start there.

Instead, both Timshel deals are in places that don’t look like acquisition targets. Anovia serves Wisconsin employers. MyMD Select serves East Texas towns where the nearest alternative to a rushed fifteen-minute visit may be an hour’s drive. Our July 26 look at the national clinic map found DPC clustered heavily in a handful of states while four had two clinics or fewer. Money moving toward Lufkin and Nacogdoches instead of away from them cuts against that pattern, at least for now.

What This Means

If you have been running a DPC practice for a decade, succession is the problem nobody at the conference wants to talk about. Most DPC practices are one physician and a patient relationship built on that physician’s name. The exit menu has historically been short: sell to private equity, sell to a health system, hand it to a partner, or turn off the lights and send four hundred people to find a new doctor. Holding companies pitching indefinite ownership are a fourth item on that menu. Whether it’s a good one depends entirely on terms you’d have to read for yourself.

If you’re a resident weighing DPC against an employed contract, this deal answers a question you may not have thought to ask. A DPC practice you build has resale value. Somebody paid real money for five offices in small-town Texas this week. That changes the financial case for starting one, and it’s not a point the people talking you out of DPC tend to raise.

Timshel now owns practices in two states and has said it intends to open more clinics across Texas. The sentence to hold them to is the one on their own website about not telling physicians how to run their practices. That promise is easy to keep with two partners. The third and fourth will test it.