Add-On Acquisition Tracker, Q3 2026

What counts. A deal is included when (1) it was publicly announced between July 1 to September 30, 2026; (2) the buyer is an operating company owned or backed by a private equity firm, including growth equity investors and independent sponsors; (3) the acquired company is located in the United States or Canada; and (4) the acquired company operates in one of our eight sectors: industrial and manufacturing, distribution and logistics, software and SaaS, tech-enabled services, business-to-business healthcare services, business services, building products and construction services, and environmental services. Signed definitive agreements and completed deals both count, dated by their first announcement.

What is excluded. New platform investments made by a sponsor directly, acquisitions by public companies, by venture-backed companies and by family-owned buyers without a sponsor, minority investments, mergers of equals, real estate and single-facility purchases, and targets outside the eight sectors. Patient-facing provider practices (dental, dermatology, veterinary, physical therapy, behavioral health and similar) are excluded from healthcare services, which here means business-to-business healthcare companies. Insurance brokerage and wealth management are excluded as financial services.

How the list was built. We screened the headline and summary of every release in PR Newswire's Acquisitions, Mergers and Takeovers category dated in the quarter (1,887 releases) and read each plausible candidate in full. We then searched for further announcements in sponsor and portfolio company news pages, sector trade publications and copies of Business Wire and GlobeNewswire releases. For each deal the acquirer, sponsor, target, target location, sector, subsector, status and any disclosed value were recorded from the text. Where a release did not name the sponsor, the deal was included only if the sponsor's or acquirer's own website (or, in a few cases, a deal database or press report) confirmed the ownership, and that page is recorded as a second source. Duplicate announcements of the same deal (for example a buyer's release and an advisor's release) were merged, keeping the earliest date and the primary release where available.

How to read the figures. Counts reflect announced deals that we found and verified, not all add-on activity, and the sample is uneven. PR Newswire was screened in full; Business Wire and GlobeNewswire could not be screened systematically, so deals announced only there are found through searches and reprints and are undercounted. Several dozen PR Newswire candidates were left out because we could not confirm a private equity owner. Sector trade press covers some subsectors, notably accounting firms, more thoroughly than others, which favors those subsectors in the counts. Many add-ons are never announced at all. Where the source was a trade article rather than the release itself, the date is the article date, which can trail the release by a few days. A deal first announced before July 1 and completed in the quarter is excluded where we found the earlier announcement. Location is the target's state or province as stated in the announcement or on its website; when neither stated it, the location is recorded as not stated. A deal backed by more than one sponsor counts once for each sponsor in the sponsor ranking. Rankings keep firms tied at the cut-off when that adds no more than five rows, and otherwise stop above the tie. Deal values are reported only where the announcement stated a price.

Laurent Capital Research compiled this dataset from public sources. It is not drawn from a proprietary database or a survey.