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.

The trending private equity investment sectors for May 2021 were Software, Manufacturing, and Retail. Sample transactions are highlighted below.

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.

Previous Related Posts:

• Private Equity Moving Down Market
• Growth in Private Equity Firms Over Time

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.

Global PE Firms

The trending private equity investment sectors for April 2021 were Financial Services, Food & Beverage, Home Healthcare, and Cloud Based Software. Sample transactions are highlighted below.

The Private Equity Info Research Database currently tracks 348 current portfolio companies in the Packaging space. These companies are collectively held by 259 private equity firms.

16 of these private equity firms hold at least 3 platform investments in packaging companies in their current portfolio.

Covid-19 forced a tectonic shift in how we work and where we work. With more people working from home, many companies took this opportunity, while already disrupted, to relocate their corporate headquarters.

A common sentiment heard on zoom calls, “The home office approach is working better than we expected. Maybe we don’t really need an office downtown.”

“Maybe we don’t need to be in this state,” was the reply.

Consequently, some firms relocated.

Anecdotal conversations around the M&A community suggest a lot of firms left New York and moved to Florida, Texas and Colorado. But what does the data show?

We compared the headquarter locations of private equity firms in our M&A Research Database in January 2000 to March 2021. The chart below shows the migrations of private equity firms over the past 15 months, by state.

I thought it would be interesting to look at the trends in private equity platform acquisitions year-by-year, since 2000. The graphs below represent 47,394 private equity platform acquisitions over the last 21 years.

We can clearly see the dip in new acquisitions during the dot.com bust (2001 – 2003), the last recession (2009), the skittishness of 2019 (Q4 mostly), and the pandemic of 2020.

As we reported in our year-end review: Top 10 Industries for PE Platform Investments in 2020, Software was the #1 industry of interest for private equity firms in 2020, as a percentage of all PE platform acquisitions.

The graphs below show the steep increase in private equity acquisitions in both Software and SaaS companies.

While private equity firms acquired considerably fewer companies in 2020, PE investments in healthcare, as a percentage of total PE platform acquisitions, increased significantly in 2020, now pushing 9% of total PE platform acquisitions.

Private equity firms are increasingly interested in scalable companies with lower CapEx requirements. Consequently, private equity acquisitions of manufacturing companies has steadily declined as a percentage of the total number of private equity platform investments.