North American M&A Market Update with Special Guest Kyle Walters, PitchBook

The North American M&A market entered 2026 with strong momentum after a robust 2025, but renewed uncertainty around AI disruption, tariffs, energy prices, and interest rates tempered activity during the first half of the year. In this episode of Bundy Group Insights, Managing Director Stewart Carlin is joined by Kyle Walters, a private equity analyst at PitchBook, to examine what the latest transaction data says about the health of the market.

The conversation explores the gap between headline deal value and underlying deal count, the different behavior of strategic acquirers and private equity sponsors, and sector trends across healthcare, technology-enabled services, energy, and infrastructure. They also discuss how AI is disrupting some business models while creating new demand for power, data-center infrastructure, and related services.

They close with a look at privately held, founder-owned businesses, which continue to represent the largest source of private equity deal activity. Kyle and Stewart discuss why these companies remain attractive to buyers and how owners can strengthen value through a defensible growth story, recurring revenue, leadership depth, reduced owner dependency, and better historical backlog and pipeline records.

Key Takeaways

1. Deal count remains relatively strong even when fewer mega-deals make aggregate M&A value appear softer.
2. Strategic acquirers have been more active than private equity sponsors during periods of heightened uncertainty, though sponsor activity could rebalance as visibility improves.
3. Private equity interest is concentrating on resilient, moat-protected businesses with recurring revenue, hard-to-replace assets, embedded workflows, or other defensible characteristics.
4. Founder-owned and privately held businesses continue to account for the largest share of private equity deal sourcing and remain attractive across market cycles.
5. Owners can improve transaction readiness by reducing owner dependency, strengthening the management bench, documenting historical backlog and pipeline trends, and clearly articulating a durable growth story.

Key Insights

• Headline deal value can distort the market picture. Fewer mega-deals do not necessarily mean overall transaction activity has weakened to the same degree.
• AI is creating a bifurcated market, pressuring low-switching-cost workflows while supporting infrastructure and businesses with entrenched data, systems, or complexity.
• Healthcare M&A remains uneven: physician practice management has faced reimbursement and regulatory headwinds, while healthcare technology has shown greater resilience.
• The 'picks and shovels' around AI are drawing capital, including energy, grid infrastructure, data-center support, and related service businesses. Predictable revenue, high switching costs, team quality, low owner dependency, and a defensible moat can matter as much as rapid top-line growth.

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