The Most Active Middle Market Firms

Schwarzman and Kravis duke it out on the front pages of the Wall Street Journal. JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs jostle for position atop the annual league tables. Google and Apple regularly close billion dollar deals, often just to keep the other from having the acquisition.

But what about the middle market – who is the most active private equity group, investment bank or corporate acquirer? Gene Lee, of Cove Point Holdings, recently said that “one of the attributes of the lower middle market is that it is a highly fragmented space with thousands of regional and local M&A advisors and brokers.” Finding consistent data about the active participants can be a challenge, especially as you start trying to aggregate different regions and verticals.

Last year on Axial more than 9,000 Members – qualified investors, advisors and companies – connected around nearly 6,000 deals in the middle market. As a way to start answering the question about who has the biggest impact, we ranked everyone based on their normalized activity level and created lists of the top 15 boutique investment banks, lower middle market private equity groups and small-cap corporate acquirers.

Once a quarter we’ll be updating the activity level rankings with data from the prior quarter, helping you sort out how your firm is doing, which firms you should be connecting with, and to better understand how the market looks generally.