Q3 2026: the deals that defined the quarter

Aon disclosed a US$17.0bn cash payment for USI Insurance Services in an 8-K exhibit filed on 11 September. The figure includes repayment of USI’s debt, so it is closer to an enterprise value than an equity cheque. That matters when you compare it with the other deals in this report. It is not an overpayment on the equity.

USI serves commercial property and casualty, employee benefits and personal-risk clients across the United States. For Aon, whose core has long been large corporate and specialty risk, that is a distribution footprint it could not build organically at any reasonable speed. The deal follows Aon’s US$13.4bn purchase of NFP in 2024, which pointed the same way.

All-cash consideration at this size says two things. Aon is comfortable taking on leverage against broking cash flows. And the seller wanted certainty over a share-based structure. Both fit a market where broking assets have traded as quasi-infrastructure: recurring commission income, low capital intensity and pricing power that follows premium rates.

Acquiry’s read

This is a distribution deal wearing a broking badge. Aon is buying tens of thousands of mid-sized client relationships it can sell analytics, reinsurance and benefits consulting into.

The Baldwin announcement sets the price at US$32.50 per share, an 88% premium to the unaffected close on 17 June. That reference date is nearly three months before signing. It tells you the shares had already moved on speculation, and that the board wanted credit for the full run-up.

The Tampa-based broker, which rebranded from BRP Group in 2024, built itself through a long run of acquisitions and embedded-insurance partnerships with homebuilders and lenders. Public markets never fully rewarded that model. Integration costs and earnout liabilities kept reported margins below the private-equity-owned peers Baldwin was competing with for deals.

A majority take-private removes the quarterly scrutiny and lets the buyers keep consolidating without explaining every adjusted-EBITDA bridge to the market. Read it next to Aon and USI: strategic buyers and private capital are chasing the same broking cash flows from opposite directions.

Acquiry’s read

An 88% premium is not a signal that Baldwin was cheap. It shows how much further private buyers will stretch for scaled US distribution than the public market would.

CBIZ’s filing confirms a US$55.00 cash offer, about 54% above its 30-day volume-weighted average price, for a US$5bn enterprise value. The buyer is Grant Thornton Advisors, the US firm that took a majority investment from New Mountain Capital in 2024.

Two years ago this deal could not have happened. Partnership structures and independence rules kept outside capital away from audit firms. The fix was to split the advisory business from the attest practice, and that opened the door. CBIZ had already used the same logic to absorb Marcum in 2024, so Grant Thornton is buying a platform that has done this before.

The prize is scale in tax, advisory and outsourced finance for mid-market clients: annuity-like revenue with high retention. Pricing is the question. Private equity will need to raise utilisation and cross-sell without losing the partners who own the client relationships.

Acquiry’s read

Of every deal this quarter, this is the clearest proof that sponsors have found a way to own professional-services partnerships at listed-company scale.

Uber’s 8-K exhibit lays out a voluntary takeover offer at EUR 41.50 per share. That puts the equity value at US$14.8bn for 100%, or US$13.7bn once you strip out the stake Uber already owns. The decisive line is the irrevocable undertaking from Prosus, Delivery Hero’s largest shareholder, which takes Uber to about 53%.

That structure makes the offer effectively unlosable on control. Minority holders who don’t tender stay in a company that Uber runs and consolidates. The price only has to be good enough for Prosus, which has spent two years looking for a clean exit from its food-delivery holdings.

Strategically, it gives Uber scale in Asia, the Middle East and parts of Europe where Delivery Hero brands lead, all at once. It also brings antitrust exposure wherever the two already overlap. Expect remedy negotiations market by market, not a single clearance.

Acquiry’s read

The headline is US$14.8bn, but the real cheque is closer to Prosus’s block. Uber buys control first and can decide later whether it wants the rest.

The number comes from Linklaters’ announcement that it is advising Grab on a proposed US$1.49bn acquisition of a majority stake in Atome Financial. We have not yet retrieved the SGX notice or a Grab release, so treat the terms as reported rather than filed.

Atome built its business on buy-now-pay-later and consumer credit across Southeast Asia. Grab already runs payments and a digital-banking push. Owning a scaled lending and underwriting operation closes the loop: Grab sees the transaction, and now it can fund the credit behind it.

The risk is the one that has hurt every BNPL operator since 2022: credit losses in a slowing consumer cycle, and regulators treating instalment credit as lending. Control means Grab owns that book outright rather than sharing it with a partner.

Acquiry’s read

Like Uber, Grab is buying a customer relationship it already sees at checkout. The difference is that this one comes with a balance sheet.

Integer’s announcement sets the price at US$127 per share, about US$5.7bn of enterprise value and a 51.8% premium to the unaffected close on 29 April. As with Baldwin, the unaffected date is months before signing, a sign the market had already priced in some chance of a bid.

Integer, formerly Greatbatch, sits deep in the medical device supply chain. It makes the leads, batteries, catheters and assemblies that big OEMs put their names on. It is sticky, regulated work: switching a qualified supplier on a Class III device can take years.

Those qualities suit private ownership. Long customer contracts support leverage, and a sponsor can fund capacity and tuck-ins without explaining lumpy quarters to public investors.

Acquiry’s read

KKR is paying for switching costs. Every regulated product line Integer supplies is a contract its customers cannot easily walk away from.

Weave’s press release exhibit confirms a US$7.40 cash price, about 34% above the undisturbed level, for roughly US$650m of equity value. It is the smallest disclosed deal in our sample, and one of the most typical.

Weave has what sponsors look for in sub-scale public software: a focused customer base, recurring revenue, and a product that sits at the front desk of every practice it serves. Public investors wanted faster growth or higher margins. Francisco Partners can pursue either without the quarterly stock reaction.

Expect bolt-ons. Payments, patient engagement and AI reception agents are all adjacent products a private owner can buy and cross-sell into the installed base.

Acquiry’s read

This is the template for a mid-2020s software take-private: a real product, a stalled share price, and a buyer who can move faster than the market’s patience.

CNBC reported the acquisition on 19 August. Neither party gave a price. The roughly US$7.5bn figure comes from an anonymous source quoted by the New York Times, so we treat it as reported, not disclosed, and it is excluded from every total in this report.

OpenRouter is a routing and billing layer for large language models. Developers call one API, and OpenRouter picks the model, provider and price and settles the bill. Every AI request that flows through it is also a payment. That is why Stripe wants it.

The fit is billing, not intelligence. Stripe already processes usage-based subscriptions for a large share of AI companies. Owning the router lets it see, meter and settle model consumption at the source, and potentially offer credit and fraud controls on top of it.

Acquiry’s read

Stripe is betting that AI spend becomes a payments category of its own, and it wants to own the checkout for it.

The ADI filing confirms a US$1.35bn all-cash purchase of Alif Semiconductor. It is small by ADI’s standards, but it answers a gap in its portfolio: low-power processors that run machine-learning models directly on the device.

ADI’s strength is the analog edge, the sensors, converters and power parts that turn the physical world into data. Alif sits one step up, running inference on that data locally without a cloud round trip. Put together, ADI can sell a sensing-to-decision reference design rather than components.

For context on how silicon strategy has shifted this year, see our analysis of AMD and World Labs, which came at the same problem from the model end.

Acquiry’s read

Cash, not shares, and a price below US$1.5bn. ADI is buying a roadmap it could not build fast enough, and it isn’t reaching for scale.

CoinDesk reported that Circle agreed to buy Tazapay for US$400m. We retrieved the article text and the terms matched. We have not seen the figure in a Circle filing.

Tazapay handles collections and payouts for businesses trading across Asia, the Middle East and beyond. The hard part of that business is not the software. It is the licences, banking partners and compliance stack in each corridor. Circle is buying those so USDC can settle real invoices, not just crypto trades.

Set it next to Grab and Atome: in both cases, the buyer is paying for regulated access to Asian payment flows.

Acquiry’s read

Stablecoin issuers are becoming payment companies. This is Circle buying the corridors rather than waiting to be invited in.

BitGo’s 8-K exhibit references an Equity Purchase Agreement dated 27 August and shows that part of the consideration is paid in BitGo Class A shares. The share counts in the filed form are blank, so no value can be inferred.

BitGo’s core is custody and wallet infrastructure. Adding NYDIG’s institutional trading operation lets it offer execution alongside safekeeping, which is what asset managers and corporates holding bitcoin increasingly ask for.

Paying partly in stock also makes NYDIG’s owners BitGo shareholders, an alignment choice that is common when the buyer’s shares are liquid and the seller believes in the combined platform.

Acquiry’s read

A small deal on paper. It shows custody businesses turning into full-service prime brokers for digital assets.

ONEOK’s release sets the purchase price at US$4.425bn for Brazos Midstream’s Permian Midland Basin assets. We retrieved the text through a syndication site and the terms matched.

ONEOK has spent three years turning itself from a natural-gas-liquids specialist into a diversified midstream major, through Magellan in 2023 and EnLink and Medallion in 2024. Brazos adds gathering and processing capacity in the same basin, feeding volumes into pipes ONEOK already owns.

These are some of the most predictable deals in M&A: fee-based contracts, known geology and obvious synergies. Execution risk sits with producer drilling activity, not integration.

Acquiry’s read

Bolt-ons like this are the cleanest synergy maths of the quarter. ONEOK is buying volume for its own pipes.

The deal surfaced in the subsequent-events note of P&G’s 10-K: an agreement dated 4 August to acquire Thorne for US$3.8bn. For a company that has mostly shrunk its brand portfolio over the past decade, that is a notable reversal.

Thorne was taken private by L Catterton in 2023. If the headline holds, the sponsor has multiplied its money in about three years, a strong reference point for anyone selling a premium consumer-health brand.

For P&G, Thorne adds a practitioner channel and a direct-to-consumer data relationship its mass-market vitamin lines lack. The integration risk is cultural: a clinical, science-led brand inside a mass-marketing machine.

Acquiry’s read

P&G rarely buys. When it does, it pays for categories where it believes premium pricing will hold through a downturn.

The WaFd filing describes an all-stock combination in which EverBank holders will own 59.2% of the combined company and WaFd holders 40.8%. The US$3.9bn headline value circulating in press coverage does not appear in the text we retrieved, so we hold it as reported.

The ownership split is the story. WaFd is the listed filer, but economic control goes to EverBank’s owners, making this effectively a reverse merger that gives a private bank a public listing and a Pacific Northwest franchise in one move.

Regional bank consolidation has been held back for years by slow approvals. A deal of this size is a test of how quickly regulators are now willing to clear mid-sized combinations.

Acquiry’s read

Count this as EverBank buying WaFd, whatever the filing header says. The ownership split decides who is really in charge.