PitchBook published its Q2 middle-market numbers in September, and buried in the deal section is the most encouraging line a founder-owner has had all year.
Private equity bought less of almost everything last quarter. Middle-market deal value fell to $92.4 billion, down 8.7% from Q1. Publicly held targets collapsed — $7 billion, a 77.3% drop in a single quarter and 82.7% below the 2022 peak. Take-privates fell to just 18 deals against a five-year average of 31 a quarter.
One category grew. Founder-owned businesses generated $23.2 billion of deal value, up 48.3% from Q1 and 8% above the same quarter last year. It was the only backing category to grow at all.
The size data points the same direction. Deals between $25 million and $100 million were the only band to grow in both value and count, up 70.6% in a quarter. The median middle-market deal has shrunk from $179.0 million in 2025 to $151.9 million so far in 2026. PitchBook's own read: buyers “continued to favor lower-risk and lower-priced assets.”
More buyers looking at businesses like yours is not the same as a higher price. Axial's closed-deal data — real transactions, not survey opinion — puts the median at 4.3x EBITDA, with the middle half of deals landing between 3.2x and 5.7x. That has not moved because PE got more interested.
And the rotation does not lift the ceiling. Entry multiples at the top of the middle market are still climbing — 13.2x for deals between $500 million and $1 billion — while the median middle-market entry multiple fell to 9.6x in the first quarter, ending a seven-year run of double digits. Those are different businesses in a different market, and they are not a benchmark for yours.
What moves your number is who you reach. In Axial's data the spread by buyer type is wider than the spread by company size:
| Who buys you | Median | Closed below 3x |
|---|---|---|
| Private equity fund | 5.1x | 6% |
| Independent sponsor | 4.4x | 18% |
| Holding company / strategic | 4.3x | 25% |
| Search fund | 4.1x | 21% |
| Individual buyer | 3.8x | 26% |
| Family office | 3.6x | 33% |
A private equity fund pays a 5.1x median and closes below 3x only 6% of the time. An individual buyer pays 3.8x and goes below 3x on a quarter of deals. Same business, different room.
That is the whole opportunity in this quarter's data. The funds paying the top of that table are the ones rotating toward founder-owned businesses right now. Whether you are in the room when they do is a function of how your sale is run — not of how good the quarter was.
Write down the buyer types your sale would actually reach today if you ran it yourself — the strategic down the road, the family office a friend introduced, the individual who keeps calling. Now find those rows in the table above. The gap between that list and a private equity fund is roughly a turn and a half of EBITDA, and it is the part of your outcome you still control.
No pitch this week and nothing to download. Reply to this email with your sector and roughly what you do in revenue, and I will send back which buyer types are actually closing deals in your band right now, and what they have been paying. One email, no call, no obligation.
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