How the rankings and the buyer score are built.

The unit is a verified ownership leg: one fund holding one company, with an entry year and, when exited, an exit year, exit type and buyer. Legs come from hand-reviewed GP records (our review-gate pipeline) plus legacy records kept visible pending audit; quarantined managers are excluded everywhere. Investors are ranked by entries, sellers by exits, buyers by acquisitions of PE-backed companies.

Lending positions (private debt, mezzanine, unitranche) are not ownership: they never count as an entry, an exit, a hold or a sponsor era.

Every buyer resolves to one canonical entity — name variants merge into a single record with one type: Sponsor, PE-backed platform, Corporate, Family office, Bank / Insurer, Pension / Sovereign, or Asset manager. Generic placeholders ("institutional investors", "undisclosed", management buyouts, IPOs, liquidations) are excluded from every buyer ranking.

PE-backed platforms.When a buyer is itself a portfolio company doing add-on M&A (a buy-and-build platform), the acquirer of record is the platform company — and its sponsor is attached from our ownership data ("Hg-backed Visma"). The label applies only while the platform has an active private-equity owner; once it goes public or independent it is a corporate buyer again.

Sponsor eras.Attribution is era-scoped: a deal in year Y credits the sponsor(s) actually holding the platform in year Y, from equity legs only. Co-holds credit each sponsor; a secondary buyout ends the previous sponsor's era.

The default window is all time — every verified deal, no year filter. Explicit windows (last 3 years, last 5 years, since 2020) filter on the deal year: entry year for investors, exit year for sellers and buyers. Deals with an unknown year appear in all-time views only.

Strength labels. Very High ≥ 70 · High ≥ 50 · Medium ≥ 30 · Low < 30. A buyer needs at least 2 relevant deals (sector- or geography-matching) to appear at all.

Sparse data is neutral, never penalised. Dimensions we cannot compute for a buyer (no country set on the target, no current-portfolio concept for a corporate) score a neutral 0.5. Missing evidence lowers confidence, not the verdict.

Size-aware weighting. When a target size band is set, the weights shift to sector 36 · geography 14 · recency 18 · exposure 9 · timing 13 · size 10 (still summing to 100), so size evidence earns its points from the other components proportionally instead of inflating the scale. Without a size band the default weights above apply unchanged.

Sensitivity. Each dimension has three published settings. Balanced treats sector and geography as bonuses; Strict turns the axis into a requirement, so buyers without 2 deals matching it leave the list; Broad widens what counts as a match. The per-deal values behind each setting: sector, same family scores 0.4/0.7/0.85 under Strict/Balanced/Broad (exact sub-sector always 1); geography, same region scores 0.3/0.6/0.8 and rest of Europe 0.1/0.3/0.6 (target country always 1). The weights above never change with the setting.

Dossier facts and insight lines.Each buyer's expanded dossier shows only deterministic aggregates of its own verified history, each behind a published floor: realized-hold and exit-route stats need at least 5 data points; the check band is 2 to 15 percent of the latest fund whose strategy is Buyout or Growth (continuation, debt or infrastructure vehicles never anchor timing or capacity); the deal-pace chart covers the last 6 years. Insight sentences (at most 3) fire only past hard thresholds: "accelerating" needs at least 4 deals in the last 2 years at 1.5x the prior 4-year average; the deployment stage compares entries since the latest vintage against the firm's own average per fund (needs 2+ funds averaging 3+ entries), with 50% and 100% of that base rate as the stage cuts; a route mix is called a skew only past 55% of typed exits; the "pace has stalled" line uses the same 2-year activity gate that already halves the timing score. The market route-shift line splits exits at 2020 and shows only when both periods hold at least 30 typed exits, falling back to the sector-wide cut when the exact profile is too thin.

Buyer universe.Financial buyers are Buyout and Growth investors (their platform entries are revealed appetite — they buy from founders, not only from other sponsors) plus every entity that actually acquired a PE-backed company: corporates, PE-backed platforms, family offices, banks, sovereigns. Pure venture investors are excluded unless they actually bought a company. Verified add-on acquisitions from our platform census count as buy-side evidence alongside exit-side purchases, so a serial consolidator scores on its full program, not only the deals that crossed a covered fund's exit.

Deal counts are counts of verified records — never extrapolations. Monetary figures (EV, MOIC) appear only where publicly disclosed or clearly sourced, are labelled as estimates when derived, and are never blended into a ranking. Where a figure is unknown we show a dash, not a guess.

Spotted a wrong buyer, a mis-typed entity or a deal that should not count? Write to hello@gp-intel.com with the page URL. Verified corrections ship with the next data refresh; the record and the affected rankings update together.