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Lender to health care is launched

Backers have put up about $290 million for Gemino in Phila. It will offer financing to various care providers.

Investors and lenders have put up about $290 million to launch a Philadelphia firm that will provide various forms of financing for U.S. health-care companies.

Gemino Healthcare Finance L.L.C. will provide senior-debt financing to customers that will include hospitals, surgery centers, home health and hospice agencies, ambulance companies, nursing homes, and staffing firms. Senior debt is generally the first to be repaid if a borrower seeks bankruptcy protection.

Gemino, at 1 International Plaza near Philadelphia International Airport, was founded with $240 million in debt and $50 million in equity capital to provide a variety of lending products, including revolving lines of credit, secured term loans, and real estate financing.

The company was founded by several former executives of Healthcare Business Credit Corp. in Mount Laurel, which CIT Group Inc. bought in 2005

Gemino's investors were led by EDG Partners L.L.C. of Atlanta and Laminar Direct Capital L.P. of Washington, joined by BH1 Investments Inc. and Clayton Associates of Nashville and Fulcrum Ventures of Atlanta.

WestLB, a German bank with offices in New York, lent the company $240 million.

Gemino said it would provide loans to health-care companies with financing needs of $500,000 to more than $10 million. "We will look at larger transactions," chief executive officer Mike Gervais said. "We have a couple right now where providers have approached us with larger transactions."

Gemino, with nine employees, chose Philadelphia because of the "talent pool" of health-care lenders in the area. Gemino has a sales office in Atlanta and plans to open development offices in Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles and perhaps Boston.

"I saw the opportunity to form this company with a team of people that I worked with previously," said Gervais, one of Gemino's founders. "This was an opportunity to bring us back together and serve a market that is exclusively health care."

"There are a lot of finance companies, a lot of banks," Gervais said, "but there are not a lot of people who are specifically targeted to health care. We understand health care. We understand changes in reimbursement. We understand the challenges that health-care providers face as they operate their business. We have an expertise and a specialty."