Our Private Equity Info Research Database shows 228 portfolio companies held by private equity firms in the Supply Chain space, with PE firms showing a substantial increased interest in Supply Chain companies in recent years.
The graph below shows the trend of private equity platform investments in Supply Chain companies over the last 20 years.
Private equity firms acquired 40 Intelligence companies as platform investments in the first half of 2021 (plus a number of add-on acquisitions).
Although Intelligence companies span a spectrum of applications and end markets, many of the 2021 Intelligence acquisitions group into three categories:
The trending private equity investment sectors for June 2021 were Healthcare Services, IT Solutions and Software Security.
We highlighted the sub-sector Software Security because there were multiple transactions in this segment. It’s worth noting that software companies, in general, represented 22% of private equity platform acquisitions in June.
Instead of providing a general list of the Top 10 Private Equity Firms with the largest, well-known firms, I wanted to identify formidable acquirers that may be lesser-known. To do this, I normalized the number of platform acquisitions for each firm (over the last 12 months) by the number of deal makers at each firm (titles of Vice President and higher).
The lists below show the top 10 most acquisitive private equity firms per deal maker, grouped into categories by deal team size.
Years ago, we reported on the trend of private equity firms moving down market, closing smaller deals and moving away from the more competitive landscape of the larger deal space.
To see the effects of this trend now, I grouped the private equity firms from our M&A Research Database into four categories, based on the enterprise value of their typical platform acquisitions (add-on investments excluded).
Size Categories
Small ($0 – $50 million EV)
Mid ($50 – $250 million EV)
Large ($250 – $500 million EV)
Mega ($500+ million)
Interestingly, approximately half of the private equity firms now focus on smaller deals, with an enterprise value range of $0 – $50 million.
Most middle market investment bankers I talk to are reporting record deal flow. Likewise, private equity firms, industry wide, are saying they are inundated with deal opportunities. In fact, May (2021) was likely a record month for most private equity firms, in terms of the number of inbound deal opportunities coming across their desks. Why is that?
Seven converging factors driving the abundance of M&A deals…
