CoreLink, LLC Announces Partnership with The Stephens Group

ST. LOUIS–(BUSINESS WIRE)–CoreLink, LLC (“CoreLink” or the “Company”) announced today that it finalized its partnership with The Stephens Group, LLC, a Little Rock, Arkansas-based private, family-owned investment firm. The significant equity investment by The Stephens Group completes a recapitalization that positions the Company for the next stage of its growth. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

CoreLink, based in St. Louis, Missouri and founded in 2007, has grown to become a market leading provider of highly engineered spinal implants and instrumentation. The company designs, manufactures and distributes a broad and growing offering of pedicle screw systems, interbody spacers, plates, biologics and surgical instruments through a network of distributors and independent sales representatives as well as its internal salesforce to hospitals, surgery centers and other healthcare providers.

Jay Bartling, CoreLink founder and chief executive officer commented: “CoreLink’s team is very excited about partnering with The Stephens Group to continue to execute our growth strategy. The Stephens Group shares our strategic vision and will enable CoreLink to accelerate product development, add capacity to our world-class manufacturing capabilities and expand our salesforce. We are well positioned to capitalize on growth in the medical device market by providing customers with the highest quality instrumentation and implants at a better all-around value than that of our competitors.”

“We are very excited to be partnering with the CoreLink team,” said Clay Hunter, managing director at The Stephens Group. “We believe this medical device market is undergoing a fundamental shift whereby the business models and the strategies employed over the last decade are being supplanted by more nimble, customer-centric approaches. As more pressure is placed on healthcare providers to reduce costs, the importance of delivering an extremely high quality product at a good overall value with a true service orientation becomes more and more critical. Jay and his team recognized early that having a comprehensive product portfolio with a quality first focus is critical to fulfilling surgeons’ needs, and that having a vertically integrated device partner with state-of-the-art manufacturing capabilities enables the speed, flexibility and cost position necessary to meet customer requirements.”

Clay Hunter and Jim Jacoby, also a Managing Director at The Stephens Group, as well as Grant Jones, Vice President at The Stephens Group will be joining Jay Bartling on the CoreLink board.