Matt Geller, OD
SAN DIEGO—CovalentCareers, Inc. a career development company that provides education, mentorship and job opportunities to new health care professionals, has acquired NewGradOptometry, LLC. The deal took place March 27 and the terms of the acquisitions were not disclosed. The president of NewGradOptometry, Matt Geller, OD, will remain in the CEO role at CovalentCareers and will continue to lead the web property NewGradOptometry.com as a separate destination with its own branding and user experience. Geller was responsible for founding NewGradOptometry in 2013 and co-founding CovalentCareers in 2015. Both are privately held businesses.

In conjunction with the acquisition, the founding team member of NewGradOptometry, Antonio Chirumbolo, OD, has joined CovalentCareers as associate director of marketing.

CovalentCareers is now a leading provider of new graduate health care professional career resources, including the web properties of NewGradOptometry.com, NewGradPhysicalTherapy.com, NewGradOccupationalTherapy.com, and NewGradSpeechTherapy.com.

With the acquisition of NewGradOptometry, Geller said CovalentCareers “looks forward to expanding and enriching resources for optometrists and is forecasting to exceed three-and-a-half million pageviews in 2018.” The company has long-term plans to enter several new health care verticals over the next 5 years,” he added.

“NewGradOptometry.com and its users will now have access to the wide range of resources that CovalentCareers brings to the table, namely capital, technology, and most importantly an extremely talented team. Additionally, members will now have more streamlined access to optometrist job opportunities, and employers greater access to optometrists. This acquisition enables us to substantially increase the value we are currently delivering to new graduate optometrists and our enterprise partners,” said Geller.

This acquisition will give the NewGradOptometry brand access to the resources of CovalentCareers in order to scale the production of content and technology tools for readers and users, Geller added. “Since founding OptometryStudents.com in 2009, it has been our goal to be the leader in health care professional career support. This acquisition achieves that by unifying all ‘NewGrad’ brands and web properties under one company.”

According to the executive team at CovalentCareers, users and enterprise partners will not experience any shift in user experience or branding, but can expect a significantly improved and personalized experience and access to a variety of new free and premium resources.