Lower Middle Market Private Equity Research Report

Lower middle market private equity, the buyout of smaller private companies typically below $100 million in enterprise value, enters 2026 with the lowest entry pricing of any U.S. buyout size segment and the strongest pooled gross deal-level returns of any size band since 2009.^{1, 2} Platform buyouts of $10 million to $25 million averaged 5.9x EBITDA through the first nine months of 2025, against 10.0x for platforms of $100 million to $250 million, per GF Data.¹

This report maps the lower middle market private equity statistics behind that position: entry pricing, deal activity, returns and dispersion, the ownership-transition pipeline, and the buyers and capital reaching the segment.

The data below separates what the segment costs, what it has returned, who is selling, and who is buying. It draws on GF Data’s contributor-reported transaction data, PitchBook’s market-wide middle market estimates and its SPI by StepStone deal-level return integration, Cambridge Associates’ deal-level operating metrics, McKinsey’s ownership-transition research, Census Bureau owner demographics, SBA program data, and platform disclosures from Axial. Because these providers define the segment differently and measure different universes, every figure on this page names its provider, its universe, and its period.

Current market context: 2025 was a split year. Market-wide U.S. middle market deal count rose 16% and deal value reached $410.7 billion, while GF Data’s contributor-reported volume in the $10 million to $500 million range fell 23% as financing costs pressed hardest on the smallest platform deals.^{4, 5} Pricing held: GF Data’s full-year average stayed at 7.2x EBITDA.⁵ The two volume readings measure different universes, and the article resolves that divergence directly in the deal activity section.

Key Statistics at a Glance

Metric note: GF Data figures are averages of contributor-reported, PE-sponsored completed transactions; PitchBook activity figures are market-wide estimates that include announced deals, and its multiples are medians; Axial counts deals marketed on one platform, which is earlier in the funnel than a closing. The SPI by StepStone return figures are pooled, gross, deal-level results and sit in a different lane from PitchBook’s fund-level IRR and DPI data. One gap deserves stating plainly: no provider publishes fund-level statistics for the lower middle market alone, so every fundraising, IRR, and DPI figure on this page describes PitchBook’s broader $100 million to $5 billion middle market fund universe, the wider bracket that contains the segment. None of these series can stand in for another, and the definition ladder below maps the universes before any of them are compared.

Contents

1. Five Definitions, One Segment: What the Lower Middle Market Covers
2. Entry Pricing: The Size Discount in 2025
3. Deal Activity: A Split Market in 2025
4. Returns and Dispersion: Where the Big Winners Live
5. The Ownership-Transition Pipeline
6. Who Is Buying: A Widening Buyer Base
7. The Capital Formation Paradox
8. What This Data Tells Investors
9. How Accredited Investors Access the Lower Middle Market
10. Lower Middle Market Private Equity FAQ
11. Methodology and Caveats
12. Sources & References

Five Definitions, One Segment: What the Lower Middle Market Covers

Lower middle market private equity refers to buyouts and control investments in smaller private companies, but the cutoffs vary meaningfully by data provider, and that variation is the single largest source of confusion when comparing statistics on this page or anywhere else. GF Data tracks PE-sponsored transactions between $10 million and $500 million of total enterprise value and breaks out tiers inside that range; Capstone Partners calls $10 million to $100 million the lower middle market; PitchBook’s middle market covers deals of $25 million to $1 billion; Axial’s platform serves the $2.5 million to $250 million range; and the National Center for the Middle Market defines companies by revenue rather than deal size.^{1, 4, 6, 24, 26}

The economic weight underneath these definitions is large however it is cut. NCMM counts nearly 200,000 U.S. middle market companies representing one third of private-sector GDP and roughly 48 million jobs, and J.P. Morgan Asset Management counts roughly 147,000 companies with $10 million to $300 million of revenue, about 96% of the privately held companies in its analyzed universe.^{24, 10} Through the third quarter of 2025, the middle market accounted for nearly 69% of U.S. PE buyout count, per PitchBook.¹³ Whatever cutoff a reader prefers, most U.S. private equity buyouts by count happen in the middle market bands rather than at megadeal scale, and the lower middle market is the entry end of that range.

Entry Pricing: The Size Discount in 2025

Smaller companies sell for fewer turns of EBITDA than larger ones, and in 2025 that discount widened. GF Data’s first nine months of 2025 show platform buyouts averaging 5.9x EBITDA in the $10 million to $25 million tier, 6.6x at $25 million to $50 million, 8.7x at $50 million to $100 million, and 10.0x at $100 million to $250 million.¹ Larger platforms in the $100 million to $500 million range commanded an average 9.8x against 7.0x for sub-$100 million platforms, a 2.8-turn spread that sits above GF Data’s 2.6x long-term average and up from 2.4x at mid-year.¹

The discount holds in medians as well as averages, which matters because averages can be skewed by a handful of large deals. PitchBook’s 2024 data puts the median EV/EBITDA multiple at 15.5x for buyouts of $1 billion or more, 12.8x for deals under $1 billion, and under 10x for deals below $100 million.⁹ Over a longer window, J.P. Morgan Asset Management finds that since 2010 the median acquisition multiple for companies valued under $1 billion has run 15% below companies in the $1 billion to $2.5 billion range and 22% below companies above $2.5 billion, with roughly 20% less acquisition leverage.¹⁰ Lower leverage cuts both ways: it reduces financial risk and interest burden, and it also reflects that lenders extend fewer turns of debt to smaller companies.

The discount is compensation as well as opportunity, and 2025 made that explicit. GF Data’s contributors attributed the widening spread to investors’ renewed preference for scale and creditworthy assets as lending conditions tightened, with total platform debt easing to 3.2x EBITDA through Q3 2025 from 3.3x in 2024.¹ The starkest reading in the dataset: companies with above-average financial performance received only a 2% pricing premium over other buyouts, 7.3x versus 7.1x, the lowest spread in GF Data’s tracked history.¹ In 2025’s market, buyers were paying for size, not performance. For a disciplined buyer of small companies, that is mispricing to underwrite against; for the owner of an excellent small company, it is the discount problem in one number.

Deal Activity: A Split Market in 2025

U.S. middle market deal activity grew in 2025, and the growth was uneven across deal sizes. PitchBook’s market-wide estimate puts middle market deal value at $410.7 billion across roughly 4,018 transactions, up 8.5% by value and 16% by count, with exits recovering to an estimated 1,022 transactions worth $140.4 billion, above pre-pandemic averages for the first time since 2021.⁴ On the supply side, a record 12,856 deals came to market on Axial in 2025, up 17.1% from 2024 and the platform’s highest annual total.¹² The backdrop was strong across all of U.S. private equity, where full-year deal value reached $1.2 trillion, the second-highest annual total on record.²⁵

GF Data’s contributors reported the opposite direction inside their universe: 297 completed transactions for full-year 2025, down 23% from 2024 and 41% below the 2021 record of 501, with activity concentrated in larger, well-capitalized deals as financing constraints pressed on smaller platforms.^{5, 11} The two readings are not in conflict; they measure different things. PitchBook estimates the whole $25 million to $1 billion market, including announced deals, while GF Data reports completed PE-sponsored closings from 437 contributing firms in the $10 million to $500 million range, a sample that skews toward exactly the smaller platform deals that 2025’s credit conditions hit hardest.^{1, 4} Read together, the split is the finding: the broad middle market grew while the small end of it got cheaper to enter and harder to finance. GF Data’s first quarter of 2026 showed a directional turn: contributors reported 80 completed transactions at a 7.3x average multiple, with both readings running above their full-year 2025 levels as debt availability improved.²⁸

Pricing stability through that volume swing is itself notable. GF Data’s full-year average held at 7.2x EBITDA in both 2024 and 2025, below the 7.6x recorded in the 2021 peak year, while the cost of the debt underneath those deals moved from about 6% to nearly 10% as SOFR-based pricing replaced the old regime.^{5, 11} Sponsors absorbed the rate move with more equity and less leverage rather than with lower headline prices, which compressed the margin for error in underwriting rather than the multiple.¹¹ For add-on dynamics inside this activity picture, the private equity roll-up statistics report covers buy-and-build volume and returns in depth.

Returns and Dispersion: Where the Big Winners Live

The best available deal-level data shows the smallest buyouts have produced the strongest pooled gross returns of any U.S. middle market size band since 2009. PitchBook’s Q1 2026 US PE Middle Market Report, the first to integrate SPI by StepStone deal-level data, finds that realized and partially realized lower middle market deals returned a pooled 39% gross IRR and 3.3x gross TVPI, ahead of every larger size band, with the largest cohort at 28% and 2.7x.² The finding that cuts against the usual assumption is on the downside: the lower middle market band showed a nearly identical share of poor outcomes and fewer outright losing deals than the upper middle market.² On this dataset, the smallest band earned more without losing more often.

Cambridge Associates’ deal-level operating metrics, drawn from an earlier window, tell a consistent story with one sharper edge. Small and mid-cap deals in its database averaged a 2.8x MOIC against 2.4x for large companies, and small companies produced both the largest percentage of big winners returning more than 5x invested capital and the highest percentage of losses returning under half of invested capital.¹⁴ On that dataset, both tails were wider at the small end. The SPI data, covering deals since 2009, complicates the downside half of that picture in the segment’s favor, but the two datasets cover different periods and samples, so the honest summary is that the upside tail advantage is documented twice and the downside profile depends on the dataset and window.^{2, 14}

The fund-size evidence points the same direction as the deal-size evidence. StepStone’s emerging-manager research finds 67% of first-time funds under $500 million delivered above-median returns, against 44% for first-time funds between $500 million and $1 billion, an advantage it ties to smaller portfolio companies, valuation inefficiencies, and lower leverage.¹⁶

The Ownership-Transition Pipeline

The lower middle market’s supply of sellers is demographic, quantified, and specific to this end of the market. McKinsey’s Institute for Economic Mobility estimates that by 2035 about six million U.S. small and medium-size businesses will face ownership transitions as baby boomers retire, that more than one million of those firms are viable candidates for sale representing up to $5 trillion in enterprise value, and that annual small-business exits could climb to as many as 665,000 per year, 42% above 2011 levels.³ These are modeled estimates; McKinsey notes that retirement rates are not directly measured in any official U.S. statistical database and are proxied from labor-force and benefits data.³

The government and nonprofit data underneath the projection points the same way. The Census Bureau’s Annual Business Survey found over half of responding employer-business owners were age 55 and over as of data year 2018, and McKinsey’s 2026 analysis of Census data puts more than half of small-business owners over 55 today, up from roughly 30% in 2002, with one in four owners 65 or older.^{17, 3} Project Equity, a nonprofit that advocates employee ownership, counts 2.9 million U.S. employer firms with owners 55 and over, employing about 32 million people and generating roughly $6.5 trillion in annual revenue.¹⁸ A larger figure of 10 to 12 million boomer-owned businesses circulates in coverage of this topic; it bundles in non-employer sole proprietorships and does not describe companies an acquirer could buy, so this report does not use it.

No comparable mechanism supplies the large-cap market. Companies at billion-dollar scale come to market through sponsor exits, carve-outs, and take-privates, all of which track the deal cycle. Founder and family retirements generate sellers on a demographic clock instead, and nearly all of those companies sit at lower middle market size. Scale matters for perspective: even at McKinsey’s projected peak of hundreds of thousands of exits per year, most transitioning businesses are far below institutional size, many will close or pass to family rather than sell, and PitchBook counts only about four thousand U.S. middle market PE deals in a strong year.^{3, 4} The pipeline guarantees deal flow at the small end of the market. It does not guarantee that any particular deal is good.

Who Is Buying: A Widening Buyer Base

The lower middle market’s buyer base set participation records in 2025 and diversified while it grew. Axial added 2,635 new buyside members during the year, a 36% increase and an all-time high, following a 38% increase to 1,942 in 2024.⁶ The composition shifted as much as the count: private equity funds and independent sponsors together accounted for 61% of closed deals on Axial in 2021 and 45% in 2025, with family offices, holding companies, search funds, and individual investors taking a growing share of completed transactions.⁶ Individual investors took 13% of closed deals in both 2024 and 2025, search funds reached an all-time-high 14% share in 2025, and family offices and holding companies averaged 15% and 10% of transactions across the five-year window.⁶ Those figures describe one platform’s deal flow rather than the whole market, but no other public source tracks buyer composition at this end of the market across five years.

Independent sponsors, sponsors who find a company first and then raise the equity to buy it, without a fund behind them, have grown into a counted segment of this buyer base. McGuireWoods, which runs the segment’s largest conference and benchmarking survey, estimates the independent sponsor market now includes approximately 1,400 firms, roughly double its count when the firm began tracking the segment in 2019, and its October 2025 conference drew about 1,600 participants against a couple hundred eight years earlier.⁷ That count is a practitioner estimate rather than a registry, and it is the best available proxy for the segment’s growth.

Two more formation channels round out the picture. The SBA’s SBIC program, which licenses privately managed funds that invest in small businesses with government-guaranteed leverage, closed fiscal 2025 with a record $53 billion in combined private capital and SBA leverage, up from $46 billion in fiscal 2024, approving 48 new fund licenses during the year; roughly 360 SBIC funds now manage more than $55 billion.^{8, 19} And Stanford GSB’s 2026 study now tracks 862 search funds formed in the United States and Canada since 1984, with new fund formation reaching record levels in 2023 and staying strong through 2025; the fuller picture of that buyer category sits in the search fund statistics report.²⁰

The Capital Formation Paradox

The lower middle market’s capital is increasingly raised deal by deal, and 2025 made the shift measurable. On one side of the ledger, buyer formation set records, half of the first-time private equity funds closed globally in 2025 focused on the lower middle market or SME segment, and 72% of limited partners in Adams Street’s 2026 survey said they favor middle market funds over large and mega buyout funds.^{6, 23, 22} On the other side, U.S. middle market fund capital formation fell more than 40% to $94.8 billion, the weakest year since 2020, with only 88 middle market funds closed on $71 billion through the first three quarters.^{4, 21}

The distribution drought explains the gap between what LPs say and what they fund. No U.S. middle market vintage newer than 2016 has achieved DPI above 1.0, PE-backed middle market companies represent more than $1 trillion in unrealized value awaiting exits, and stated preference does not become a commitment when the capital to recommit has not come back.⁴ PitchBook’s own read is that middle market fundraising peaked in 2023 and 2024 before the lack of exits caught up with it.²¹

For sellers and sponsors, the practical consequence is that the marginal dollar in this segment now often comes from an investor who underwrites the specific company rather than a fund manager’s track record. Family offices averaged 15% of closed deals on Axial across the past five years and search funds hit an all-time-high 14% in 2025, independent sponsors raise equity per transaction by definition, and SBIC leverage attaches to individual funds investing in individual small businesses.^{6, 7, 8} The segment’s capital formation did not stop in 2025; it changed shape.

What This Data Tells Investors

The segment’s advantages are deal-level and its weaknesses are fund-level. Entry pricing (5.9x to 8.7x under $100 million), pooled deal-level gross returns (39% IRR, 3.3x TVPI since 2009), and the seller pipeline all attach to individual transactions, while the fundraising drought and the post-2016 DPI record attach to blind-pool vehicles.^{1, 2, 4} An investor who can evaluate a specific company, sponsor, purchase price, and financing structure is positioned to capture what the data says is attractive here; an investor buying segment averages inherits the fund-level record too.

The size discount pays only through growth or discipline. The 2.8-turn spread between small and large platforms is entry pricing, and GF Data’s collapsed quality premium means the market in 2025 was pricing scale rather than performance.¹ Buying a good small company cheap works when the plan grows it toward the tier that commands more turns, or when the entry price alone leaves room for error. Buying a mediocre small company cheap is how the wide loss tail in the Cambridge Associates data gets populated.¹⁴

Underwrite the exit before the entry. The 2025 record shows small deals were the hardest to finance and the slowest corner of an otherwise growing market, private equity holding periods remain extended, and more than $1 trillion of middle market value sits unrealized.^{4, 5} The pricing and dispersion data reward the buyer whose base case works even if the exit takes longer or the exit multiple lands below plan.

The demographic pipeline is the patient variable in all of this. Sellers arriving on a retirement clock, at a scale institutions largely do not reach, with a widening set of buyers competing to meet them, is a structure that outlasts any one year’s credit conditions. The 2025 evidence says the structure held while the financing cycle did not, and evaluating an individual opportunity against that structure is covered step by step in how to evaluate an independent sponsor deal.

How Accredited Investors Invest in the Lower Middle Market

Most of the data above describes institutional activity, and individual accredited investors reach this market through a short list of routes with different diligence and diversification profiles. Fund commitments buy a manager’s future portfolio, put the manager selection problem first, and inherit the fund-level liquidity record documented above. Direct investment means buying or backing a company outright, which most investors cannot staff. Deal-by-deal co-investment sits between them: the investor reviews specific transactions, usually alongside a sponsor, and builds exposure one company at a time.

CapitalPad is a private equity co-investment group that lets accredited investors invest in individual lower middle market acquisitions, reviewed deal by deal rather than through a blind-pool fund. CapitalPad focuses on lower middle market acquisitions led by independent sponsors, and pools participating investors into a deal-specific SPV. CapitalPad lets individual accredited investors participate from $25,000 per deal.²⁷ Deal-by-deal co-investment makes a specific company easier to evaluate against the pricing, dispersion, and supply data in this report, but it does not turn a private investment into a liquid security.

Lower Middle Market Private Equity FAQ

What is lower middle market private equity?

Lower middle market private equity is the buyout and control investment of smaller private companies, typically below $100 million in enterprise value, though cutoffs vary by provider. GF Data tracks PE-sponsored deals from $10 million to $500 million of enterprise value, Capstone Partners defines the lower middle market as $10 million to $100 million, and Axial’s platform serves deals from $2.5 million to $250 million.^{1, 26, 6}

What EBITDA multiples do lower middle market companies sell for?

Lower middle market platform buyouts averaged 5.9x EBITDA at $10 million to $25 million of enterprise value, 6.6x at $25 million to $50 million, and 8.7x at $50 million to $100 million through the first nine months of 2025, per GF Data, whose full-year 2025 average across its $10 million to $500 million universe was 7.2x.^{1, 5} These are averages of PE-sponsored transactions; multiples vary widely by sector and company quality.

Do lower middle market deals outperform larger buyouts?

On pooled, gross, deal-level data since 2009, yes: lower middle market deals returned a 39% gross IRR and 3.3x gross TVPI, ahead of every larger size band, with fewer outright losing deals than the upper middle market, per SPI by StepStone data in PitchBook’s Q1 2026 report.² Recent fund-level results run the other way: U.S. middle market funds posted a 7.6% rolling one-year IRR in 2025 and no vintage newer than 2016 has DPI above 1.0.⁴ Deal-level gross returns and net fund returns answer different questions.

How big is the lower middle market?

No provider counts the lower middle market by itself, so its size is measured through overlapping universes. At the segment level, a record 12,856 deals came to market on Axial’s $2.5 million to $250 million platform in 2025, and GF Data’s contributors reported 297 completed PE-sponsored transactions in its $10 million to $500 million range.^{12, 5} The broader middle market that contains the segment is larger still: NCMM counts nearly 200,000 U.S. middle market companies ($10 million to $1 billion in revenue) representing one third of private-sector GDP, and U.S. middle market PE deal value reached $410.7 billion in 2025, per PitchBook.^{24, 4}

Who buys lower middle market companies?

Buyers of lower middle market companies include private equity funds, independent sponsors, family offices, holding companies, search funds, individual investors, and strategic acquirers. On Axial, private equity funds and independent sponsors together fell from 61% of closed deals in 2021 to 45% in 2025 as the other categories grew, and McGuireWoods estimates roughly 1,400 independent sponsor firms are active, about double its 2019 count.^{6, 7}

What is the private equity size premium?

The private equity size premium is the pricing gap between larger and smaller companies: buyers pay more turns of EBITDA for scale. Through the first nine months of 2025, platforms of $100 million to $500 million averaged 9.8x EBITDA against 7.0x for sub-$100 million platforms, a 2.8-turn spread above the 2.6x long-term average, per GF Data.¹ The premium reflects deeper management teams, more diversified revenue, and easier debt access at scale.

How does the baby boomer retirement wave affect lower middle market private equity?

Retiring owners are the lower middle market’s structural supply of sellers. McKinsey estimates about six million U.S. businesses will face ownership transitions by 2035, with more than one million viable sale candidates worth up to $5 trillion, and Census data shows over half of responding employer-business owners were 55 or older as of data year 2018.^{3, 17} Most of those companies sit at lower middle market size or below.

Why did middle market private equity fundraising fall in 2025?

U.S. middle market fundraising fell more than 40% in 2025 to $94.8 billion, the weakest year since 2020, primarily because slow exits left limited partners without distributions to recommit: no middle market vintage newer than 2016 has returned more than its paid-in capital, per PitchBook.⁴ Capital continued reaching the segment through deal-by-deal structures, family offices, SBIC vehicles, and first-time funds, half of which focused on the lower middle market or SME segment in 2025.^{6, 8, 23}

How can accredited investors invest in lower middle market private equity?

Accredited investors can invest in lower middle market private equity through fund commitments, direct investment, or deal-by-deal co-investment in individual transactions. CapitalPad is a private equity co-investment group that lets accredited investors invest in individual lower middle market deals instead of committing to a blind-pool fund, with minimums generally starting at $25,000 per deal.²⁷

Methodology and Caveats

CapitalPad Research analyzed the U.S. lower middle market data in this report from primary market-data providers, institutional and academic research, government statistics, and platform disclosures, with CapitalPad’s public materials used only in the investor-access discussion. Because the providers define the segment differently, the report keeps GF Data’s contributor-reported averages, PitchBook’s market-wide estimates and medians, SPI by StepStone’s deal-level gross returns, and Axial’s marketed-deal counts in separate lanes instead of merging them into a single continuous series.

The volume series measure different universes. GF Data’s 297 deals in 2025 came from 437 contributing PE firms reporting completed $10 million to $500 million transactions; PitchBook’s roughly 4,018 middle market deals are an estimate of the whole $25 million to $1 billion market including announced transactions; Axial’s 12,856 deals are marketed listings rather than closings.^{1, 4, 12} The same year can show volume falling and rising at once because the universes differ, and this page reports each with its provider named.

Averages, medians, gross, and net are never interchangeable here. GF Data reports averages of contributor deals; PitchBook’s multiple comparison uses medians; the SPI by StepStone return figures are pooled, gross, deal-level results that exceed what a fund investor receives net of fees and carry; and PitchBook’s IRR and DPI figures are fund-level. Each figure in this report is labeled with its metric type in the sentence where it appears.

The succession projections are modeled. McKinsey states that retirement rates are not directly measured in any official U.S. statistical database and models exits from proxies such as labor-force participation and benefit claims; its six million, one million, and $5 trillion figures are estimates, and this report uses estimate verbs with them throughout.³ The Census owner-age reading is authoritative but dated: it covers responding owners of employer businesses in data year 2018.¹⁷

Several publishers have interests adjacent to their findings. Project Equity advocates employee ownership; Adams Street Partners and J.P. Morgan Asset Management manage middle market strategies; StepStone manages small-buyout strategies and its SPI data reaches this report through PitchBook; Axial reports its own platform; and Capstone Partners is an investment bank subsidiary of Huntington Bancshares. Their figures are used where they are the best or only public source, with attribution that lets the reader weigh the interest.

Each caveat limits how far a single number can be pushed. Read together, the sources still point the same way on the segment’s pricing, supply, and participation, and every figure on this page stays tied to its own provider, universe, and period.

Cite this research: CapitalPad Research, “Lower Middle Market Private Equity Statistics and Research.” Reviewed July 2026. https://capitalpad.com/lower-middle-market-private-equity-statistics/

Sources & References

1. GF Data, “The Size Premium Returns to 2.8x” (January 2026), reporting Q3 2025 M&A Report data. Source
2. PitchBook (Steven Buibish), “Smaller Checks Are Winning in the Middle Market” (June 2026), citing the Q1 2026 US PE Middle Market Report with SPI by StepStone deal-level data. Source
3. McKinsey Institute for Economic Mobility, “The Great Ownership Transfer: A New Era of Business Stewardship” (February 2026). Source
4. PitchBook, “2025 Annual US PE Middle Market Report” (2026). Source
5. GF Data, “Year-End M&A Volume Hits Multi-Year Low as Market Navigates Choppy Conditions” (February 2026). Source
6. Axial, “Who’s Buying in the Lower Middle Market in 2026? Key Buyer Trends From Axial Data” (February 2026). Source
7. McGuireWoods, “Buyouts Quotes Partner Jon Finger on Evolution of Independent Sponsor and Emerging Manager Segments” (June 2026). Source
8. U.S. Small Business Administration, “SBA’s SBIC Program Delivers Record Capital in FY25” (November 2025). Source
9. PitchBook, “Middle-Market PE Offers Fertile Ground for Multiple Arbitrage” (February 2025), citing PitchBook’s 2025 Allocator Solution. Source
10. J.P. Morgan Asset Management, “A Big Role for Small and Middle-Market Private Equity Investments” (2024). Source
11. GF Data, “Private Equity’s Five-Year Rollercoaster” (February 2026). Source
12. Axial, “Top 25 Lower Middle Market Investment Banks | 2025” (January 2026). Source
13. PitchBook, “Q3 2025 US PE Middle Market Report” (December 2025). Source
14. Cambridge Associates, “US Private Equity Looking Back, Looking Forward: Ten Years of CA Operating Metrics” (November 2022). Source
15. Cambridge Associates, “US PE/VC Benchmark Commentary: First Half 2025.” Source
16. StepStone Group, “The Case for Emerging Managers.” Source
17. U.S. Census Bureau, “Business Owners’ Ages: Over Half of U.S. Business Owners Were Age 55 and Over,” 2019 Annual Business Survey, data year 2018 (2020). Source
18. Project Equity, “The Small Business Closure Crisis” (United States factsheet). Source
19. Small Business Investor Alliance, “Small Business Committee Hearing Highlights SBIC Success” (June 2026). Source
20. Stanford Graduate School of Business, “2026 Search Fund Study: Selected Observations” (2026). Source
21. PitchBook, “Middle-Market PE Feels the Chill of Fundraising Slowdown” (December 2025). Source
22. Adams Street Partners, “2026 Global Investor Survey” (March 2026). Source
23. With Intelligence, “Private Equity Outlook 2026: The Beginning of a Durable Recovery.” Source
24. National Center for the Middle Market, “Year-End 2025 Middle Market Indicator” (2026). Source
25. PitchBook, “2025 Annual US PE Breakdown” (January 2026). Source
26. Capstone Partners, “2025 Middle Market M&A Valuations Index” (April 2026). Source
27. CapitalPad public investor and sponsor materials. Source
28. GF Data via ACG, “GF Data Reports Show Stronger Financing Markets Fueled M&A Gains in Q1” (May 2026). Source