Venture secondaries have opened the floodgates to the most coveted private companies in the world, giving even new and unsophisticated investors a chance to buy into SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic.

There is just one problem: Many of these startups never authorized these trades and have never been in contact with the so-called sellers. So, who is actually on the other side of these deals?

We have seen this dynamic before. In 2020 and 2021, SPACs promised efficient access to a market that traditional channels could not unlock fast enough. Capital flooded in. Discipline did not. Our DeSPAC index is down 75% since its peak—not because the idea was wrong, but because there was more capital than quality opportunities, with the weakest structures capturing the most flows under the guise of "access to private markets." Venture secondaries are at risk of following the same arc.

 

The infrastructure that would make this market trustworthy—standardized policies, verified ownership, regulatory oversight—has not kept pace with the capital pouring in, and that needs to change sooner rather than later.

Special purpose vehicles have been a valuable tool for faster, more accessible transactions, but they have also become the preferred vehicle for outright fraud. When the marquee names eventually go public, the gap between perceived and actual ownership will no longer stay hidden. Even a handful of bad actors will be enough to shake confidence in the entire secondary market.

That does not mean secondaries are broken. It means they are at a crossroads.

At their best, venture secondaries are a durable liquidity mechanism that benefits every participant in the ecosystem. At their worst, they risk becoming the next chapter in a familiar story.

The same forces that fueled their rise—demand, opacity and financial engineering—will determine whether they mature into infrastructure or collapse into the background. Now is the time for the market to determine its legacy.

Read more in our analyst note: When Access to VC Becomes a Liability.

Global enterprise SaaS M&A hit $270.6 billion in 2025, making it the largest dealmaking year since the pandemic-era peak of 2021. This was propelled by Q4’s $83.7 billion across 245 transactions, including 17 multibillion-dollar mega-deals, which matched Q3’s record.

 

The reacceleration signals that the software consolidation cycle is back in force, bolstered by both strategic acquirers and financial sponsors deploying meaningful premiums for category-defining platforms. The bid for scaled, AI-enabled enterprise software assets is intensifying, and the competitive window for both acquisitive growth and exits remains wide open.

Corporate acquirers drove the Q4 surge, with deal value skyrocketing 168.5% quarter-over-quarter to $51.8 billion. This restored the PE-to-corporate deal value ratio to its historical 1:2 after Q3's anomalous 2:1 split favoring PE.

The quarter's largest transactions include IBM's $11 billion acquisition of Confluent and the $8.4 billion Clearwater Analytics take-private led by Permira and Warburg Pincus. These show a hearty appetite at both ends.

PE remained robust at $32 billion despite moderating from Q3's exceptional pace, and for the full year, PE-backed M&A surged 102.2% year-over-year while VC-backed M&A rose 64.4%.

Segment-level data shows us where capital is concentrating. Enterprise resource planning dominated at $136.6 billion, or 50.5% of 2025 deal value, while the sharpest growth came from analytic platforms, up 222.6% year-over-year, and supply chain management, up 115.7% over the same period.

At the subsegment level, financial management systems and manufacturing & operations commanded the most activity in Q4, reinforcing that buyers are targeting mission-critical, workflow-embedded software where AI-driven automation can deliver step-function efficiency gains.

Into 2026, we expect a more permissive regulatory environment, rate stability, and an accelerating enterprise imperative to integrate AI into core operations. These should sustain elevated dealmaking, with the highest valuations reserved for vendors at the intersection of deep workflow integration and demonstrable AI-native capability.

For more data and analysis on the bustling deal activity, download our Q4 2025 Enterprise SaaS M&A Review.