The Death of the Tech Premium: Why Q3’s Biggest Cheques Went to Brokers and Accountants, Not SaaS

Our Q3 2026 Global M&A Report only counts a price when it appears in a filing or a company release we have actually read. On that basis the quarter produced US$60.4bn of disclosed value across 9 deals with a published price.

Two of those deals did most of the work. Aon’s US$17.0bn acquisition of USI Insurance Services and Uber’s US$14.8bn offer for Delivery Hero together made up 52.6% of the total. Six of the nine priced deals were paid entirely in cash.

The sector split is the real story. 49.2% of disclosed value went to insurance, wealth and professional-services targets. Three of the four largest deals were for firms that sell advice and distribution, not products.

The common thread across Aon / USI, Baldwin and CBIZ is not glamour. It is the shape of the cash flow. Insurance commissions and accounting fees renew every year, client retention is high and the businesses need little capital to grow. That profile supports acquisition debt, which is why the biggest cheques were written in cash.

• Aon / USI, US$17.0bnAon disclosed a cash payment in an 8-K exhibit (opens in a new tab) that includes repayment of USI’s debt. It buys tens of thousands of mid-market client relationships Aon could not build organically at any reasonable speed.
• The Baldwin Group, US$7.7bnSequence Holdings and DFO Management agreed US$32.50 a share, an 88% premium to the unaffected close and the richest premium we recorded all quarter. Our full teardown is in The Baldwin Group take-private.
• CBIZ, US$5.0bnGrant Thornton Advisors, majority-backed by New Mountain Capital, offered US$55.00 a share in cash, about 54% above CBIZ’s 30-day volume-weighted average price, according to CBIZ’s filing (opens in a new tab).

AI capital did not leave the market. It changed address. The AI deals we tracked in Q3 were about the layers around models rather than consumer apps: model routing, billing, agent databases and inference silicon.

Those deals are often private and unpriced, which is exactly why they barely register in disclosed-value tables. Stripe’s purchase of OpenRouter carried a reported US$7.5bn figure that we kept out of our totals because no filing confirms it. See our analysis of Stripe and OpenRouter and, for the October follow-through, Inside the Agentic Stack.

The result is a split market. Infrastructure that agents depend on is attracting strategic buyers at scale. Application-layer software without a clear moat is being priced on fundamentals, which we cover in The AI-Washing Audit.

The tech premium has not died for everyone. It has stopped being automatic. Buyers now apply the same test to software that they apply to a broker book: how much of next year’s revenue is already contracted, how sticky are the customers, and how cleanly does profit turn into cash?

• Show the renewal curveNet revenue retention, gross retention and cohort data matter more than headline growth. Our quality of revenue framework sets out what buyers test.
• Clean up earningsNormalised EBITDA with defensible add-backs is what lenders finance. See the EBITDA add-back standard.
• Look at services-like buyersVertical software serving brokers, accountants and wealth managers sits directly in the path of the consolidators who wrote Q3’s biggest cheques.