Oak Hill Capital, a New York-based middle-market private equity firm, announced its investment and partnership with American Veterinary Group. This transaction marks a continuation of Oak Hill’s focus on building veterinary services businesses following prior investments in VetCor and Butler Schein.

The management team of AVG, led by chief executive officer Craig Niebur, chief operating officer Dr. Christopher Smith, and chief development officer Jim Herring will continue to lead the company and retain an ownership stake, as will other members of management and veterinarian professionals at AVG.

“We immediately were impressed with Oak Hill’s knowledge of the veterinary services space, but more importantly their shared value of the long-term client relationships built by our local veterinary teams across our hospitals on a daily basis. We are excited about this alignment with our core values as this partnership positions us to continue our vision of expanding the AVG family of hospitals that we have built over the last five years,” said Craig Niebur, CEO of AVG.

“We have great respect for the platform Craig, Dr. Smith and their team have worked to build and believe that AVG is well-positioned for growth in the highly fragmented veterinary care services market. The AVG partnership is consistent with Oak Hill’s theme-based investment approach, focused on backing exceptional teams in high quality, acyclical markets with multiple levers to grow,” said Steve Puccinelli, managing partner at Oak Hill.

AVG is currently a portfolio company of Latticework Capital Management and Trive CapitalHarris Williams & Co. acted as financial advisor to AVG. William Blair acted as financial advisor to Oak Hill. Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP is serving as legal counsel to Oak Hill, and McGuireWoods LLP is serving as legal counsel to AVG.