The Market Is Finally Confirming What We’ve Been Saying
Two bullish calls landed within a week of each other. Goldman is projecting pure M&A volume hitting $3.8 trillion in 2026, topping both the 2025 and 2021 peaks. EY Parthenon’s deal barometer is forecasting 8% growth in US M&A deal volume for transactions over $100M.
The framing that matters most: M&A cycles run six to seven years, and Goldman’s view is that we’re in year four. Momentum like this is very hard to interrupt. This is the exact dynamic we’ve been discussing for months, where some of the published data has been trailing what we’re actually seeing in the market in real time.
The split inside the number is the real story. Corporate M&A volume is projected up 11% this year and already surged 22% year-over-year in Q1. The flat-to-down growth that other reports have flagged is concentrated entirely in PE deal volume, which is dropping. Strategics are the ones out in the market right now.
There’s a reason for it. Goldman notes that PE distributions are near a 16-year low, which means LP payouts are the smallest they’ve been in a long time given the state of PE-backed portfolios. That makes financial buyers tepid. Corporates see this and are pouncing.
Goldman calls it “the tyranny of terminal value” — buyers can no longer milk their way to success through financial engineering. They have to buy terminal value. EY’s CEO survey backs it up: 65% of US CEOs are pursuing M&A for technology, talent, and operating capabilities, and 73% say geopolitical and economic cross-currents are reshaping their growth strategy this year.
As EY’s Mitch Berlin put it: disruption is not a reason to pause. It’s a catalyst to act.
The Deep Dive: Sprinklr Acquires ViralMoment
On Thursday, May 28th, Sprinklr, the publicly traded customer experience management platform announced it had acquired the assets of ViralMoment, an AI-powered social video intelligence and analytics company. Terms weren’t disclosed.
The stated rationale: the acquisition strengthens Sprinklr’s leadership in “modern multimodal customer intelligence,” extending the platform’s ability to analyze video, images, and audio—not just text.
The translation: a public company that hasn’t made an acquisition in nearly five years just restarted M&A. And what it chose to buy first tells you exactly where the market is heading.
The gap it fills: Social engagement has moved decisively to short-form video — TikTok, Reels, Shorts. But the social listening and voice-of-customer tooling that brands run is still overwhelmingly text-based: comments, reviews, mentions. If your brand blows up in a reaction series or an unboxing video, a text-only stack misses it entirely or catches a fraction of it. ViralMoment built video-native AI that analyzes content frame by frame visuals, audio, on-screen text ,and turns it into structured customer intelligence.
The seller: ViralMoment was founded by Chelsea Hall, a Carnegie Mellon alum who raised a seed round in early 2024 led by Supernode Global, with Techstars and Carnegie Mellon itself participating. Industry coverage had the product working with major agency holdcos and entertainment brands. Real technology, real customers, smaller company.
The context that matters: Sprinklr reported Q1 earnings this week; revenue of roughly $219M, up about 7%, but full-year guidance down 1%. This is the new world order for software. CEO Roy Reed has been explicit that this is a transition year and a multi-year turnaround, with margins and free cash flow prioritized first and growth acceleration targeted for the next fiscal year. Management said ViralMoment was paid for with cash on hand and is already baked into guidance.
That’s not a company swinging big. It’s a company choosing to buy the capability rather than build it, at a price that doesn’t meaningfully move the balance sheet.
Everyone will write this up as Sprinklr finally fixing its video listening loop. That’s the small story. The real story is the price tag nobody is saying out loud: this was an asset deal for a seed-stage company that raised about $2.5M. The platforms have figured out they don’t have to buy AI companies anymore. They can wait and acquire the capability — the talent and the piecemeal tech — from early-stage AI companies on asset-deal terms.
A note for anyone who corporate development: Sprinklr is actively hiring for an M&A role right now. It’s titled Senior Director of M&A,with no Head of M&A above it. Christian’s editorial: a perfect example of a large public company deciding it needs to do M&A but not wanting to pay for a VP or SVP, so it hires at the Senior Director level and asks them to do all the same work.
The Tale of Two Cities: Asana Acquires StackAI
Here’s the other side of the coin, and it’s the most instructive comparison of the week.
StackAI raised approximately $16.5M and its last round was posted at a $75M valuation. Asana paid $75M.
Where ViralMoment was an asset deal for a seed-stage company, StackAI is the opposite: the right tech, the right team, the right investor at the table — and instead of an asset sale, the acquisition cleared the preference stack at the last round’s valuation. Both are AI capability acquisitions. One was bought for almost nothing on asset terms. One cleared $75M. Same category of trade, two completely different outcomes.
This is the tale of two cities in AI M&A. At the top, the 1% of AI startups with real clients, strong fundraising, and a herd of funders chasing them are getting bought for 20x cash raised, or 10x ARR. Everyone else, not because they aren’t smart people, not because they didn’t try hard, but because luck didn’t break their way is getting acquired in quiet tuck-in and asset deals.
StackAI is an MIT startup, co-founded by Bernardo Aceituno and Antoni Rosinol. Announced May 28th, the same day as Asana’s earnings. The strategic logic: StackAI is a no-code platform for building and governing AI agents that read and write across outside enterprise systems Salesforce, Oracle, AWS giving Asana’s AI teammates the execution layer to run workflows end-to-end, beyond Asana itself.
Quick Hit: Peer39 Acquires Adloox
On Tuesday, June 2nd, Peer39, the contextual data platform, acquired ad verification company Adloox from Scope3. The rationale: Adloox brings MRC-accredited verification and measurement inside the walled gardens of Google and Meta, where Peer39 hasn’t historically played. It positions them against DoubleVerify and IAS. Terms weren’t disclosed, and the deal is already closed. CEO is Mario Diaz.
Same trade, different vertical: buy the capability you don’t have rather than build it.
Quick Hit: Interluxe Group Acquires adMixt
On June 1st, Interluxe Group, the luxury marketing platform backed by Mountaingate, acquired adMixt, a performance marketing agency founded in 2012 that runs paid search, paid social, and performance creative for premium lifestyle and luxury brands. The rationale: it bolts measurable performance-side firepower into Interluxe’s brand, experiential, and first-party luxury audience data business. Terms weren’t disclosed.
This is the agency-world version of the exact same logic and we were lucky enough to have adMixt’s outgoing CEO Kevin Simonson join us for an after-show to break the whole deal down in detail. Worth the listen.
The Thread Tying It All Together
Four deals on one episode. One disclosed price.
Sprinklr bought multimodal listening. Asana bought agent execution. Peer39 bought walled garden measurement. Interluxe bought performance firepower. Different categories, different verticals, different price points — but every one of them was about buying a capability, priced quietly if at all.
Build is losing to buy. That’s where the market is going, and the macro data ($3.8 trillion in projected M&A, corporate buyers surging while PE stays tepid) only reinforces it. Goldman calls M&A contagious. This week was proof of concept.
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