Reeve Waud has two titles, and they point at very different organizations. He’s founder and managing partner of Waud Capital Partners, a Chicago private equity firm. He’s also chairman of the board of Acadia Healthcare, the publicly traded behavioral health company he founded in 2005.
One job is about buying and building private companies. The other means overseeing a Nasdaq-listed operator with 279 facilities and about 25,000 employees.
Waud Capital Partners
Waud started the firm in Lake Forest, Illinois, in 1993. It raised its first fund in 1998 and moved to downtown Chicago in 2009. The firm completed its 500th investment in 2025, and it now has more than 60 professionals and portfolio operations in over 110 countries.
Its sweet spot is North American middle-market companies in healthcare and software, usually through control investments of $75 million to $200 million.
This year the firm created a new senior post. Prithvi Raj, previously at Newmark, was hired in February as its first chief AI and data officer. “Prithvi’s appointment reflects our conviction that AI and data are now foundational to building market-leading businesses,” Waud said. Raj ran enterprise-wide AI and data work at Newmark and held senior roles at Microsoft, Zynga and SquareFoot before that.
Acadia Healthcare
January put the Acadia job in the headlines. That’s when the board Reeve Waud chairs returned Debbie Osteen to the CEO role, with Waud saying the board believed “now is the right time to transition leadership.”
The months since have been good to the company. Acadia raised its 2026 operating cash flow guidance to $350 million to $400 million in July and opened two joint venture hospitals in the second quarter. It had about 12,600 beds across 40 states and Puerto Rico at midyear, and its next earnings report is due November 4. Former CFO David Duckworth also returned as interim chief financial officer in May.
The Background Behind Both
Before he founded his own firm, Waud worked at the private equity firm GTCR and in the venture capital group at Salomon Brothers. He holds a BA in economics from Middlebury College and an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.
Reeve Waud’s civic roles lean toward health care and finance. He’s on the Northwestern Memorial HealthCare Finance Committee and the board of the Northwestern Memorial Foundation. He’s also a trustee of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he serves on the finance and photography committees.
