Clean Sheets: CVC Backs Unitex After a Century in the Family

CVC has agreed to invest in Unitex Textile Services (Unitex), which launders and manages the linen, gowns and scrubs that hospitals and nursing homes across the Northeast run through every day. The Potack family, which has owned the business since 1922, is maintaining an equity stake in the business in partnership with CVC.

Unitex rents, launders and delivers the textiles a hospital consumes in a day and needs back the next morning. Patient linen covers gowns, sheets, pillowcases and cardiology capes; medical apparel covers scrubs, lab coats and warm-up jackets; and surgical linen and protective apparel go to operating rooms and isolation units.

The company also supplies resident clothing to nursing homes, culinary linen to hospital kitchens, and mats and mops to environmental services teams. Customers include hospitals, outpatient centers, nursing homes, clinics, assisted living facilities and private medical practices.

Unitex operates a network of automated processing facilities covering New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, with dedicated service areas around New York City, Philadelphia and Boston. Unitex serves more than 5,000 healthcare facilities across the region.

The business is straightforward. Unitex picks up soiled linen, sorts and washes it, and returns clean textiles on a fixed schedule. Hospitals are not really buying laundry service. They are buying the certainty that clean linen shows up every day before it is needed. That makes route density — how many customers Unitex can serve along a delivery route — more important to the economics than the size of any individual processing plant.

Unitex facilities carry Hygienically Clean Healthcare certification, which requires finished textiles to undergo periodic microbial testing against established limits rather than simply reviewing a laundry’s written procedures. For hospitals, that certification becomes part of their own infection-control documentation. It also makes changing providers more complicated, helping support longer customer relationships and higher switching costs.

“For more than a century, our family has been committed to building a business defined by exceptional customer service, operational excellence and an unwavering focus on supporting healthcare providers,” said Robert Potack, the chief executive officer of Unitex. “As we considered the next stage of Unitex’s evolution, it was important to find a partner who shares our long-term vision, values and commitment to our people and customers. CVC stood out thanks to the time they invested in understanding our business and culture, and we are excited to work together to build on the strong foundation we have created.”

The Potack family founded Unitex in 1922 and has held it without outside capital since. The company is headquartered 50 miles north of New York City in Elmsford, New York.

The US hospital linen supply and management services market was valued at $3.3 billion in 2023 and is forecast to reach $6.0 billion by 2030, a compound annual growth rate of 8.7%, according to Grand View Research. Hospitals accounted for 51% of that spending in 2023, and bed sheets and pillow covers for 46% of it by product. The field is fragmented, and contract providers compete not only with each other but with hospital systems that keep laundry in house.

Hospitals have moved textile processing outside their own walls over three decades, trading a capital-intensive in-house laundry for a per-pound contract. Grand View Research expects in-house services to grow faster than contract providers through 2030, a reversal driven by systems large enough to run their own plants — which puts the competitive pressure on regional operators to hold cost per pound down through automation.

“This partnership will enable us to accelerate many of the strategic initiatives we have already begun across our operations, technology platform and customer offering, while remaining true to the principles that have made Unitex the trusted partner it is today,” said David Potack, the president of Unitex. “We look forward to working alongside CVC to continue delivering best-in-class service for our customers while pursuing attractive opportunities to expand our business organically and potentially also through acquisition.”

Unitex’s competition ranges from national operators to regional and family-owned laundry businesses. ImageFIRST, founded in 1967 and based in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, has been majority-owned by Calera Capital since 2018. In 2023, rather than sell the company to a third party, Calera moved ImageFIRST out of its fifth fund and into a new $750 million single-asset continuation fund, effectively extending its ownership while providing liquidity to existing investors. The vehicle was anchored by Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Blackstone Strategic Partners, TPG GP Solutions and Portfolio Advisors, while Calera and ImageFIRST management rolled a significant portion of their proceeds and Calera committed additional capital from its newest flagship fund. By then, ImageFIRST had increased pro forma EBITDA roughly fivefold and completed 25 acquisitions since Calera’s original investment.

Crothall Healthcare, part of UK-listed Compass Group, competes through a much broader healthcare support services platform that operates across approximately 1,300 healthcare clients in 46 states. Alsco Uniforms, founded in 1889 and headquartered in Salt Lake City, remains privately held and family-run more than five generations later, with operations extending well beyond healthcare into uniforms, linens and facility services. Angelica, founded in 1878, was once one of the industry’s major national healthcare laundry operators, but its history took a different turn. The company was taken private in 2008, filed for Chapter 11 in 2017 and sold substantially all of its assets to KKR for approximately $125 million. Between 2020 and 2022, Angelica subsequently sold 22 laundry facilities through 10 separate transactions, largely breaking apart what had once been a national network.

CVC is investing through Strategic Opportunities, a strategy that holds businesses for longer than a conventional buyout fund. The investment is the first outside capital in Unitex’s more than 100-year history.

“CVC Strategic Opportunities strives to partner with exceptional businesses that combine strong market positions, resilient end markets and significant long-term growth potential. Unitex exemplifies this approach,” said Matt Turner, a partner at CVC. “Over more than a century, the Potack family and management team have built the clear leader in outsourced healthcare textile management across the Northeast United States, providing an essential service to healthcare providers every day. We have followed the sector for several years and developed tremendous respect for Unitex’s operational excellence, customer relationships and culture. We are delighted to partner with Michael, Robert, David and the wider team to support the company’s continued growth and long-term success.”

CVC manages approximately €212 billion across private equity, secondaries, credit and infrastructure strategies. Its Strategic Opportunities platform invests on a longer horizon than the firm’s flagship buyout funds and closed its third vehicle, StratOps III, at €4.61 billion in March 2025.

Unitex is the second business CVC Strategic Opportunities has backed this year as a company’s first external shareholder, following gaming testing and certification provider Gaming Laboratories International in June 2026.

Stephens and Citizens were the financial advisors to CVC. J.P. Morgan Securities was the financial advisor to Unitex.