Déjà vu all over again: Dealflow wilts with worst Q2 since 2020
Q2 2026 was yet another slow quarter for dealmaking. According to PE Hub’s analysis of S&P Global Market Intelligence data, Q2 saw 937 private equity deals, 560 of which were exits. Though there was a modest reduction from last quarter, when we saw 1,067 deals and 636 exits, it’s in comparison with other second quarters where the slump really shows.
This Q2 fall is not dissimilar to what we had reported for Q2 of last year. The optimism from the start of the year simply had not materialized into plentiful deals by the second quarter in 2025. This again seems to be the case for 2026. The comparison last year doesn’t end there – this year’s second quarter overtook Q2 2025’s record for the worst second quarter since the start of the pandemic. While this may be impetus enough to throw optimism out the window, there is a data-backed reason to be more hopeful for the second half of the year: with the exception of 2022, H2 has performed better than the first half for the period studied.
Something similar may yet happen for 2026, validating some of the optimism we have heard from dealmakers. PE Hub senior reporter Michael Schoeck, who has been tracking companies coming to sale, has also been briefed on 150-plus companies coming to market in the near term.
Of course, the reasons for a slow dealmaking in 2025 – Liberation Day and tariffs – were quite different from this year, when a number of ongoing global events, from AI disruption to downstream effects of the blockaded Strait of Hormuz, may have made the market more turbulent for otherwise eager dealmakers.
PE Hub editor-in-chief Mary Kathleen (MK) Flynn sat down with Clearlake Capital co-founder José E. Feliciano earlier this year at PEI Group’s NEXUS 2026 conference and had a chance to talk about the effects of AI disruption in the private equity world.
Feliciano noted: “In the short term, doing a buyout of a software business or a take-private of a software business right now is probably a four-letter word.”
This idea is certainly borne out by the data – of all industries this quarter, TMT saw the biggest drop in the number of deals relative to this time last year.
Most other industries saw a minor drop in deal count and largely held onto their positions relative to last year, regardless of war and global trade disruptions. Healthcare, a sector that has recently seen deal sizes climb, saw its median deal size for the quarter shoot up to over $1 billion (this number is high, but tamer when we look at the median value for all of 2026 so far).
For the overall 2026 numbers, other top industries – such as financials and industrials – are seeing robust deal sizes at the 75th percentile. These two industries both came close to the $1 billion mark for the 75th percentile, with healthcare nearing $2 billion. For financials, this upward move is a continuation of what we saw last year. Industrials, however, tells a slightly different story – despite modest deal sizes last year, the sector has seen a significant leap up at the 75th percentile mark. This, of course, is not unrelated to global events as defense firms would fall into this category.
That interest in defense assets is increasingly seen in the naval branch of the armed forces, as PE Hub recently wrote.
TMT has had a more subdued version of this trend of larger deal sizes. With modestly growing deal sizes, both its median and 75th percentile marks sit well below the $1 billion mark.
But TMT has always taken the lead on sheer number of deal sizes, and this quarter has been no different, despite the headwinds.
Despite this lead in volume, TMT has seen its total deal value drop relative to other industries. The healthcare, financials and industrials sectors have seen higher total deal values, despite having less deal activity than TMT.
The healthcare industry saw the biggest deal of the quarter. Blackstone, TPG Global and others bought Hologic, a women’s healthcare company, in a take-private acquisition for $18 billion. PE Hub first covered the deal announcement in 2025.
Other large healthcare deals include Biogen’s acquisition of Apellis Pharmaceuticals for $6.3 billion, Gilead Sciences’ acquisition of Tubulis for $5 billion and GTCR’s completion of its $4.8 billion acquisition of Zentiva, a European generics pharmaceutical company, from Advent International in April.
The pharmaceutical sector is attracting investors due to high demand and rising costs that are straining Medicare, as PE Hub wrote in our Sector Spotlight on healthcare in June.
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Methodology
This data on private equity and venture capital deals was provided by S&P Global Market Intelligence, and it was last accessed on July 20, 2026. The attached spreadsheet and the underlying data have undergone additional review in order to exclude deals not relevant to PE Hub editorial coverage.
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