Quadria Capital expands into the Middle East with new Dubai office

[SINGAPORE] Healthcare-focused private equity firm Quadria Capital has expanded into the Middle East with a new Dubai office.

This comes on the back of its partial exit from its portfolio company Nephrocare Health Services (NephroPlus), a dialysis operator in India, the Philippines, Uzbekistan and Nepal, via an initial public offering (IPO) in India. NephroPlus will also be entering Saudi Arabia as part of Quadria’s push into the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) markets.

NephroPlus is the first exit from Quadria’s Fund III that closed in May, raising US$1 billion – above its US$800 million target. The exit is not due to the current exuberance the Indian public markets are experiencing, said Sunil Thakur, partner and head of South Asia at Quadria.

“Only when we believe that the company is of a certain size, scale, maturity, and will find traction with public investors post-IPO is when we encourage them to go to IPO – it is not when the market is hot,” he told The Business Times.

The NephroPlus IPO has been oversubscribed 27 times by institutional investors and listed at a 7 per cent premium over the listed price of 490 rupees.

The expansion into Dubai is not a refocusing away from South and South-East Asia, as the size of GCC markets is still smaller than Quadria’s traditional regions of focus. Rather it is more about what Quadria can bring to the table with its portfolio companies and experience.

“We are looking to expand regionally to our capabilities, operating experience, clinical experience, and investing experience in the healthcare space to cover regions which we believe have similarities to the region that we’ve already been investing in,” said Thakur.

The opportunities in the GCC markets that Quadria is looking to tap include healthcare services, pharmaceutical manufacturing, consumer healthcare and digital healthcare. With a large migrant workforce from South Asia and South-east Asia on both the demand and supply sides of healthcare, Quadria’s portfolio companies will enjoy some brand recognition.

Thakur does not see any major challenges in entering GCC markets for Quadria aside from the shortage of talent in both the clinical and managerial sides of healthcare. However, he believes that Quadria might be able to fill the gap.

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“That has always been an issue, and that is where funds like us who have deep-rooted connections and networks come to support and fill the gap, but that’s a structural challenge which will slowly get resolved,” he said.

Quadria will be evaluating opportunities in GCC markets, with the establishment of the Dubai office as a mark of its seriousness about the region. It will be building a pipeline of deals in the GCC, but Thakur is not expecting the same size of deals from South and South-east Asia, as the Gulf region has a smaller market size.

Growing the team in Dubai will be the focus for the next 12 months, with plans to do at least one deal in 2026. There is no dearth of deals in the healthcare sector, and Thakur believes that the growth of deal volume will likely continue next year.

Healthcare is one of the few sectors in private equity that has seen deals continue in 2025. There is room for private capital in healthcare across South and South-east Asia to contribute to developing capabilities, said Thakur.

“Healthcare in Asia will always generate good commercial returns as well as huge impact,” he added.