Who private equity is buying on Main Street.

A deal here is the purchase of a US company in one of the six industries, by a private equity firm or by a company a firm owns or backs. Minority stakes, debt deals, a sale of some of a company's locations and deals outside the six stay off the page. So far that's 24 minority stakes, 25 deals of other kinds, 130 deals outside the six industries and 10 deals outside the US.

We read the news pages of the groups and firms we follow, plus press release wires, trade press and deal listings. For the months before the first weekly run we also searched the web, group by group and industry by industry. Each row is one business named as bought, so a purchase of six named shops takes six rows. We can reach 133 of the 153 groups we follow, and we can't read AIR Control Concepts, Archway Dental Partners, Aria Care Partners, Beacon Oral Specialists, Chord Specialty Dental Partners, First Choice Dental, J.S. Held, LADD Dental Group, Lone Peak Dental Group, MAX Surgical Specialty Management, Oral Surgery Partners, Parkview Dental Partners, Rock Dental Brands, Smile Partners USA, T Management, The Smilist, Today’s Dental Network, Vitana Pediatric & Orthodontic Partners, beBright and dentalcorp right now. A deal nobody announces, or one on a page we can't read, isn't here, so these counts are a floor. Some sites refuse automated readers, and we don't work around that.

A row needs an announcement saying a private equity firm backs the buyer. Failing that, the buyer has to be a group we hold as owned or backed by private equity, including through a minority stake, and that has to have begun on or before the deal date. Those groups come from our ownership study and from our own web searches. The owner shown is the firm the announcement names, then the firm we hold for that group when we're sure of it. Otherwise the row says "private equity" with no firm.

Some pages give only a month. Those rows print the month and count from its first day, so a count that starts partway through a month can miss them. Lately means since the first day of the month three months back. A deal whose pages give no date stays off until one does.

The changes at the top compare August through October with May through July, the last three full months and the three before. An industry needs at least 10 deals in the earlier months to get one, and a buyer has to move by at least 3 deals to be named. These are deals we found, so a change can come from what gets announced as well as from what gets bought.

Each point on the pace chart counts the deals in the three full months ending there, so one busy or empty month can't spike a line. Each line runs from zero to its own highest point, so the same percentage fall looks the same in every industry. A line is gold when its last three months beat the three before.

AI agents do this work. One agent reads each announcement without seeing what an earlier model said about it, and a second checks each row against its pages before it publishes.

Email us and we'll take a row down or fix it the same day.

Fulkerson Advisors (2026). Private Equity Buying Main Street Businesses: Deal Tracker. Read November 5, 2026. https://www.fulkersonadvisors.com/research/private-equity-deals

The data is also on Zenodo, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23990401.

Use any of these numbers or charts. Credit Fulkerson Advisors and link to this page. The data is under a CC BY 4.0 license.