March 16th, 2026
Blackstone, Carlyle and Hellman & Friedman win PE Hub’s Overall Deal of the Year Award for Medline’s $7.2bn IPO
PE Hub_Awards 2025_Overall Deal of the YearFor delivering the largest private equity-backed IPO of all time at $7.2 billion, the largest healthcare IPO ever and the largest public offering of 2025 – despite a severely challenged IPO market – Blackstone, Carlyle and Hellman & Friedman win PE Hub’s Overall Deal of the Year Award for 2025, as well as our Large-Cap North America Deal of the Year Award, for the public debut of Medline Industries.
It’s a deal that touched on many of the biggest themes in private equity, including investment in automation and robotics. The PE consortium also grew the company’s total addressable market via some smart add-ons.
Blackstone, Carlyle and H&F own equal shares of Medline, and together they hold the majority stake. They took the medical supplies maker public on December 17 in an initial public offering that netted $7.2 billion in proceeds (including a greenshoe option) and was 12x subscribed. The IPO valued the company at $65 billion, based on its closing price at the end of the first day of trading.
The three large-cap investors bought Medline in 2021. Headquartered in Northfield, Illinois, Medline was valued at $34 billion at that time. It was then a 60-year-old, family-owned company whose second-generation owners were deliberating on a succession plan for taking over the company, Anushka Sunder, senior managing director and head of healthcare PE at Blackstone, told PE Hub.
Blackstone met Medline’s management team in early 2021. “The company had scaled to such a degree that the Mills family could achieve some liquidity, while still remaining actively involved in the business and ownership group post-transaction,” added Sunder.
Sunder affirmed that an IPO was the only exit option the co-investors considered.
“What we saw at that time was Medline’s ability to grow consistently above market and take share,” Robert Schmidt, partner in Carlyle’s healthcare group, told PE Hub. “They’ve continued to do that over the last several years under our investment.
“When we came into the deal, we allowed Medline to tap for the first time into the US debt markets, including the leveraged loan and high-yield market. We were able to attract capital at very attractive prices, and now we’re doing that here in the equity markets as well.”
Medical moat
With 350,000 products under Medline’s product SKU catalog and a well invested network of manufacturing facilities, distribution centers and a logistics fleet, Medline delivered a lower-cost manufacturing base and had a business model “that created a scale advantage and strong, defensible moat,” Sunder said.
“Medline’s product assortment includes essentially all the consumables at a doctor’s office, from medical table paper, gowns, surgical masks, syringes and IV tubes,” Jacob Best, partner and head of US healthcare at Hellman & Friedman, told PE Hub.
He likened the company to “the Costco of medical supplies.”
Medline manufactures products from its 26 North American facilities and 69 global distribution centers, making it largely impervious to tariff pressure from 2025 and reshoring and nearshoring trends over the past several years, Best said.
Organically, the company invested in digitization, robotics and customer service over the four-year hold, specifically to improve operating efficiencies. Combining this approach with its M&A strategy, Blackstone, Carlyle and H&F helped Medline achieve 9 percent annualized revenue growth.
Under Jim Boyle, CEO since 2023 and a Medline career lifer since 1996, the company continued to deliver low-cost, high-value products that were tailored directly to its hospital and healthcare industry customers, Best said.
“Boyle created a high-powered culture, and he continued that culture after the Mills family stepped away from day-to-day operations in 2023,” he said. “His toolkit was ‘more of the same’ but accelerated, and he empowered company leaders to move more quickly.”
Medline’s ability to gain market share for additional products increased under Boyle’s stewardship, thanks to his sales background.
Since 2024, Boyle was also deeply embedded in growing Medline through add-on acquisitions, Best added.
Under PE ownership, Medline closed eight add-ons, with the most pivotal being its 2024 carve-out of Ecolab’s global surgical products group in a $905 million deal.
Note: PE Hub’s Overall Deal of the Year Award and Large-Cap North America Deal of the Year Award granted on March 16, 2026. By Michael Schoeck.