Exits

Stripe Buys OpenRouter, Plus Nine More Big M&A Deals of the Week

Ben Boissevain22. August 2026, 15:09

Stripe has confirmed its acquisition of AI model exchange and routing platform OpenRouter at a deal price reported variously at $7.5 billion by the New York Times — with $1.5 billion going to OpenRouter’s founders and $6 billion to investors — and above $8 billion, mostly in stock, by Axios. The deal comes as Stripe is simultaneously rumored to be in talks to acquire PayPal, and brings OpenRouter’s model routing infrastructure into Stripe’s ecosystem at a moment when financial firms are actively searching for ways to cut their growing AI costs.

„This isn’t a standard valuation. It’s a control premium for an AI infrastructure chokepoint after outbidding Databricks.“ – Ben Boissevain, Founder, Ascento Capital

OpenRouter sits between developers and hundreds of AI models, routing requests based on cost, performance and availability — a function CEO Patrick Collison described as „economic infrastructure for AI.“ Investors had valued the company at $1.3 billion only three months earlier following a $113 million Series B in May.

Source: American Banker

Mitsubishi Electric to buy US-based PCI Energy Solutions for $1.4bn

Mitsubishi Electric has signed an agreement to acquire PCI Energy Solutions, a US-based provider of enterprise software for energy management and optimisation, in a transaction valued at $1.4 billion. The deal, expected to close in 2026 subject to regulatory approvals, will see Mitsubishi Electric obtain all equity interests in PCI Energy Solutions, which will become a wholly owned subsidiary.

PCI Energy Solutions develops software platforms supporting power trading, generation and transmission operations, risk management, supply-demand planning and settlement services — with approximately 60% of US power generation managed through its platform. Mitsubishi Electric cited the growing complexity of power system operations driven by renewable energy growth, distributed energy resources and rising electricity demand as driving demand for the acquisition, which aligns with the company’s stated Smart Energy strategic priority announced in May 2026.

Source: Energy Monitor

Anthropic-Backed Ode Acquires Casper Studios to Expand Corporate AI Deployments

Ode with Anthropic, an enterprise AI transformation company launched through a partnership including Anthropic, Blackstone, and Hellman & Friedman, has acquired AI services firm Casper Studios. Casper helps companies put Anthropic’s Claude to work inside the systems they already use, building skills, connectors and context within Anthropic products to drive AI adoption across an organisation.

Ode CEO Chris Taylor said the acquisition follows a period of collaboration with Casper on shared clients, during which both teams found they had built solutions using the same Claude Code setup and could instantly use each other’s tools. The deal expands Ode’s capacity to serve enterprise demand for Claude deployments — a market Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao previously described as significantly outpacing any single delivery model when Ode was first launched in May.

Source: PYMNTS

Munich Re to acquire Israeli startup At-Bay for $575 million

Munich Re has agreed to acquire At-Bay, the Israeli-founded insurtech that combines cyber insurance with cybersecurity services, for an enterprise value of $575 million — less than half the $1.35 billion valuation At-Bay commanded in its 2021 funding round. The German insurance giant said the deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2027, subject to regulatory approvals, with At-Bay set to become part of HSB, Munich Re’s technology-focused and cyber-oriented insurance subsidiary that has been a strategic partner since the company’s founding in 2017.

At-Bay, which primarily serves small and medium-sized businesses in the US, has gross written premiums of $278 million and employs approximately 280 people across the United States and Israel. The acquisition reflects a broader shift in the insurance industry from paying for cyber losses toward actively preventing them — At-Bay’s platform continuously monitors insured companies‘ cyber exposure throughout the life of a policy, using the resulting data both to reduce customer risk and improve underwriting precision.

Source: CTech

Equans acquires highways tech specialist Mway

Equans UK has acquired highways technology specialist Mway Communications, a company serving National Highways and Tier 1 contractors throughout the UK’s Strategic Road Network delivering critical technology and engineering solutions. The company employs 100 people and generates an annual turnover of £26 million.

Bouygues-owned Equans said the deal will expand its expertise in connected infrastructure, operational technology, and communications networks. Mway’s portfolio includes technology deployment, electrical engineering, street lighting, traffic signals, inductive loop installation and highways civil works — capabilities that complement Equans‘ end-to-end offering across digital infrastructure, energy systems and asset management.

Source: Construction Enquirer

Fortinet’s Virtue AI acquisition rebalances the agentic AI security equation

Fortinet announced its intent to acquire Virtue AI, and though the financial aspects are interesting, what is more significant is how this will help businesses with their next big security challenge: how do you secure agentic artificial intelligence? Generative AI raised new concerns about data leakage, unsanctioned use and inaccurate outputs — agentic AI raises the security stakes further because it is significantly harder to secure and the impact of breaches is greater.

These systems can retrieve information, call APIs, trigger workflows, interact with applications and increasingly act on behalf of people, making an AI agent less like a chatbot and more like a digital employee with access credentials, permissions and the ability to affect business processes. That is why Fortinet’s acquisition of Virtue AI — which brings AI runtime protection, automated AI validation and agentic AI security capabilities — is strategically important.

Source: Silicon Angle

Datavault AI to acquire CyberCatch in $94.5m all-cash deal

US-based data science company Datavault AI has signed a definitive agreement to acquire all outstanding shares of CyberCatch in an all-cash transaction valued at $94.5 million, paying $3.53 per share for approximately 26.8 million common shares. The deal replaces an earlier all-stock proposal from a May 2026 binding letter of intent, which had originally intended to issue 49.9 million Datavault shares.

CyberCatch, a US-based cybersecurity company, provides an AI-enabled, patented platform designed for continuous compliance and cyber risk mitigation. The acquisition is expected to enable Datavault AI to incorporate CyberCatch’s solutions into its Quantum Private Network GPU ecosystem, including the MARS-MABE encryption technology being upgraded to support quantum resistance.

Source: Yahoo Finance

TTM Technologies Strikes $1.1 Billion Deal to Acquire Epiq Solutions

TTM Technologies (NASDAQ: TTMI) announced a definitive agreement to acquire Epiq Design Solutions for approximately $1.1 billion in an all-cash transaction, adding open-architecture, AI-enabled software-defined radios, high-performance RF products and radiation-tolerant space compute solutions to its portfolio. Epiq, a Veritas Capital portfolio company founded in 2009 and headquartered in Rolling Meadows, Illinois, supports mission-critical signals intelligence and electronic warfare applications.

The synergy-adjusted transaction multiple is estimated at 17.4x expected 2027 adjusted EBITDA. TTM secured $1.1 billion in committed financing from JPMorgan, Barclays and Bank of America, expects net leverage of approximately 2.3x at close with a target reduction to 1.5–1.7x within 12–18 months, and projects the deal to be immediately accretive to adjusted EBITDA margins and accretive to non-GAAP diluted EPS during 2028.

Source: Yahoo Finance

Citi to acquire US rewards tech company Kard Financial

Citi has agreed to acquire rewards technology company Kard Financial through its Consumer Cards business in the US. Terms of the transaction and a timeline for completion have not been made public. Based in New York City, Kard operates a platform that integrates cash-back rewards into banking apps using predictive AI and transaction data to sharpen merchant-funded offers across a retail partner network.

Citi says it will use Kard to deliver more personalised credit card rewards to its 70 million cardholders — an objective previously outlined by head of US consumer cards Pam Habner at Citi’s 2026 Investor Day, where she described the bank’s intent to reduce dependency on expensive points-based rewards in favour of a commerce ecosystem built around merchant-funded benefits.

Source: FinTech Futures

Accelerant Enters into Definitive Agreement to be Acquired by Thoma Bravo

Accelerant (NYSE: ARX), the data-driven risk exchange platform transforming the specialty insurance marketplace through the Accelerant Risk Exchange, announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement with Thoma Bravo to become a privately held company in an all-cash transaction with an enterprise value of more than $4 billion. Under the terms of the agreement, Accelerant Class A and Class B stockholders will receive $20.25 per share in cash, representing a 49% premium to the closing share price on August 12, 2026.

Entities affiliated with Altamont Capital Partners holding shares representing approximately 82% of the company’s outstanding voting rights have agreed to vote their shares in favor of the transaction. Thoma Bravo described Accelerant as having built something rare in specialty insurance — a risk exchange that connects underwriters with risk capital and gives both sides the data to price risk better than either could alone. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2027.

Source: Finviz

About the author: Ben Boissevain [in] [𝕏] is the founder of Ascento Capital Invest (www.techbanking.com), a boutique investment bank providing M&A, capital raise and valuation advisory to technology companies in the U.S. and internationally. He compiles the weekly Top Ten Tech M&A Transactions list and is a contributor to TechCrunch.