DEAL ROOM: The M&A Window Is Wide Open — Here’s How We Play the Back Half of 2026
This week PwC put a number on what many of us have felt since January: global M&A is on track to clear roughly $4 trillion in 2026, the strongest year since 2021 and up about 13%. The headlines are all megadeals: SpaceX buying Cursor for $60bn, Salesforce taking Fin at $3.6bn, AI infrastructure swallowing capital at a pace that’s hard to wrap your head around.
I read these reports the way I read a P&L: the top line tells you the mood, the mix tells you the truth.
Here’s the truth. Deals over $5bn are now roughly half of all global deal value, that’s double their share two years ago. Strip them out and the rest is down a few points; volume is off about 13%. PwC calls it a “K-shaped” market, and that’s right. Bigger is winning. Cheap and easy is gone.
Why should anyone reading a hospitality newsletter care? B/c the same dynamic is playing out in our corner of the world, just at our scale, and with our names on the marquee.
The restaurant side is busy and not slowing. Lately: Pizza Hut to LongRange Capital; Hopdoddy to Founders Table (behind Chopt and Dos Toros), a ~200-unit, ~$500mm platform; Tilman Fertitta taking Caesars Entertainment for $5.7bn. Before that: Denny’s private at $620M, Dave’s Hot Chicken to Roark Capital north of $1bn, and Wingstop franchisee roll-ups at 7–8x EBITDA.
Step back a few months and you’ve got Denny’s taken private in a $620mm deal, Potbelly absorbed by RaceTrac, Dave’s Hot Chicken selling a majority stake to Roark Capital north of $1bn, and a steady drumbeat of franchisee aggregation (Wingstop operators trading at 7–8x EBITDA).
Two stories are running at once: chain consolidation at the top, dominated by a dozen strategics and a handful of mega-funds, and franchisee roll-ups in the lower-middle market, where most of the actual deal count lives.
Distressed assets feed the pipeline, and here’s the part I want you to hear: technology has stopped being a line item and become a valuation driver. Buyers are pricing operational capability, unit-level data, and digital maturity directly into the multiple. Brands that can’t show clean unit-level reporting and integrated systems are getting marked down.
ResTech M&A jumped 45% in the first half of last year, per PitchBook, and consolidation is the defining theme of 2026. The bellwether closed in January: Thoma Bravo took Olo private for roughly $2bn. Thoma Bravo is a roll-up shop by nature, and Olo is the foundation they build on, which should tell you the next eighteen months are going to be about absorbing a long tail of point solutions into a few end-to-end ecosystems. DoorDash already swallowed Deliveroo ($3.9bn) and SevenRooms ($1.2bn). The Access Group took Paytronix. Just this week, Miso Robotics, the Flippy folks, picked up Zume’s pizza technology.
Here’s the set-up underneath all of it. A lot of ResTech was funded between 2017 and 2021, and those clocks are running out. The sector is still wildly fragmented, with focus on front-of-house, back-of-house, enterprise, all point solutions, and all are seeing depressed multiples which has kept everyone frozen (pun intended).
That freeze is thawing. Aging vintages plus improving operating performance equals a forcing function: acquire, or be acquired.
Then there’s the overlay on everything: agentic AI.
The conversation has officially moved from “if” to “how.” Owner.com raised a $120mm Series C at a $1bn valuation; SlangAI closed a $36M Series B; Chowbus pulled in $81mm; SpotOn has raised over $900mm to date. Loop’s “Samantha,” Miso’s “Zippy,” Olo’s Shopify-style agentic commerce layer — the back office is where value is being created right now. Acquirers are increasingly judging targets on how well they use AI internally, not just what they sell.
A few things I’d tell anyone at the table — operator, founder, or investor:
Operators: get your data house in order before you take a meeting. The multiple now lives in your unit-level reporting, integrated stack, and retention story — clean data is worth real turns of EBITDA. The “Rule of 40” crossed over from software: buyers want growth and profitability, not growth at any cost.
Founders: decide which end of the barbell you’re on. You’re either a platform that consolidates or a point solution that gets absorbed. The dangerous place is the muddy middle. Pick a lane.
Investors: relationships built now are the deals you close in 2027. The edge goes to whoever finds targets early, builds the relationship before the asset hits the market, and arrives with a plan. Once it’s banked, you’re paying full freight.
Watch the non-traditional buyers. Payment providers, c-store operators, and adjacent platforms are moving closer to the operator and will pay for data and distribution. The best bids may not come from the usual strategics.
Mind the macro. Rates are higher-for-longer, capital is tight relative to ambition, and the PE exit backlog is real. Not a reason to sit out, a reason to be the prepared one in the room.
The window is open. It’s just not open the way 2021 was open (to everyone, on easy terms). It’s open to the prepared, the differentiated, and the early. That has always been our lane.
To learn more about Branded Hospitality’s work and focus on the M&A space, please contact me.
