How to find companies with a new private-equity owner

Search for the deal first, then check the company. A private-equity acquisition leaves a public trail: the buyer announces it, the company often announces it too, and trade press covers it. Each of those gives you the two things you need, the company and the date the deal closed.

There are two events worth tracking. A new owner is a platform deal: a firm buys a company it did not own before. An add-on is a smaller company bought by an existing portfolio company to grow it. Add-ons are the most common kind of buyout. PitchBook’s Q2 2026 US PE Breakdown (published Jul 6, 2026) estimates that 885 add-ons made up roughly three-quarters of all US buyout deals in the quarter, against 289 platform buyouts.

• Key takeaway: record the close date, not the announcement date. The window runs from the close.
• Key takeaway: an add-on creates work at two companies, the platform that bought it and the business being folded in.
• Key takeaway: check who decides. After a deal, some decisions move to the new owner or the platform company.

Step by step: build a list of new PE-backed companies

1. List the private-equity firms active in your market. Trade press deal columns show who buys in your industry.
2. Check each firm’s news page for new investments and closed deals. Note the close date and the company.
3. For every platform company in your market, check its newsroom for add-on acquisitions.
4. Search press wires for phrases such as “completed the acquisition of” together with “private equity” or “portfolio company”.
5. For public targets, search EDGAR full-text search for 8-K filings that mention Item 5.01 or Item 2.01.
6. Check the FTC early termination notices for the acquiring party’s name.
7. For each company, record the owner, the deal type (platform or add-on), the close date and the source link.

The FTC list is live: as of Oct 8, 2026 it showed grants through Oct 5, 2026. But it only includes reportable deals where the parties asked for early termination and received it, so many acquisitions never appear there. Treat it as one source among several.

New owners usually arrive with a plan for the first 100 days. In a Grant Thornton and PitchBook survey of more than 170 senior executives at private-equity firms (Oct 2013), almost 90% of firms said they use a 100-day plan. The report says that during those first 100 days, firms usually make changes to financial operations and reporting systems, working capital lines, IT systems, supply chain and purchasing agreements.

The plan is not only about cost. In a survey of 79 private-equity investors with combined assets of over $750 billion, Gompers, Kaplan and Mukharlyamov found that investors expect to add value with a greater focus on increasing growth than on reducing costs (NBER working paper, 2015).

Results differ by deal type. A study of thousands of US buyouts from 1980 to 2013 found that employment shrinks 12% over two years after buyouts of publicly listed firms, relative to control firms, but expands 15% after buyouts of privately held firms; productivity gains at target firms are large on average (Davis, Haltiwanger, Handley, Lerner, Lipsius and Miranda, NBER, revised 2024).

For a seller, the point is timing. Reporting, systems and purchasing are reviewed early, and the owner has targets to hit. A supplier that helps hit those targets has a reason to be heard; one that arrives after the plan is set has to wait for the next review.

Within about 180 days of a new owner and about 120 days of an add-on. Those are the default response windows S1 agents use. They are shorter than the time the work takes: an acquisition can drive integration work for up to two years, but the first plan, and the first vendor review, comes early.

Match the message to the phase. In the first months, offer help with what the 100-day plan covers, such as reporting, systems or purchasing. Later in an integration, offer help with the clean-up: duplicate systems, contracts and teams that now overlap.

A new owner is a reason to reach out, but ownership can also be a reason not to. A company that has just been folded into a platform may no longer buy on its own. A company with a sale pending may hold decisions until the deal closes. A subsidiary may buy through its parent.

S1 agents record the owner on every account, with the sponsor and the year, and turn companies down when ownership rules them out. In SalesOne research runs (Sept–Oct 2026), 9.7% of rejected companies (78 of 802) were turned down as a subsidiary, an acquired company, a pending sale or under an ownership rule in the ICP. Where the fit is uncertain, the doubt is recorded on the account instead of hidden.

S1 agents start every account from a dated event inside its window, such as a closed platform deal or an add-on announced by a portfolio company. They check the company against your ICP, confirm the event is about this company and still holds, and keep the source link and date. Companies without a trigger in its window are turned down with a reason.

Accounts with an open window go first, with the date to reach out by. A person approves every message before it is sent. S1 agents do the homework. Your team builds the relationship.