Vanguard Buys Altruist for $4 Billion, Plus Nine More Big M&A Deals of the Week

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Vanguard Group agreed to acquire Altruist, a wealth technology and custody platform serving independent financial advisers, the companies announced Wednesday. The transaction is worth approximately $4 billion (with Axios reporting the actual price at $4.6 billion in cash), representing the largest acquisition in Vanguard’s history and a control premium of more than 100% over Altruist’s last private mark of $1.9 billion set in a $152M Series F round in April 2025.

Altruist’s platform combines a self-clearing brokerage with tools covering account opening, trading, portfolio management, billing, and reporting for independent wealth-management firms, competing with Charles Schwab and Fidelity in providing custodial services to independent financial advisers. Following the close, Altruist will operate as a standalone business retaining its leadership and brand, giving Vanguard direct access to 6,500 financial advisors and a stable of RIAs who can distribute Vanguard index funds. Analysts describe the deal as an aggressive Vanguard entry into the RIA custody market, likely triggered by recent platform fees imposed by Schwab and Fidelity that pushed Vanguard to own its point of sale.

Source: Yahoo Finance

Tonner Drones Expands Defense & Security Exposure With Acquisition of Azur Drones

Paris-based Tonner Drones announced it has signed a binding protocol to acquire Azur Drones, a pioneer in autonomous surveillance and defense solutions based in Mérignac (Gironde), whose flagship “Skeyetech” Drone-in-a-Box systems enable automated continuous perimeter guard for sensitive infrastructure, military facilities, and high-security sites. The acquisition, made possible through close collaboration with Drone Volt, will create a leading European autonomous “Drone-in-a-Box” solution for critical security and defense markets.

Azur Drones’ technology has benefited from over €50 million in past research and development investments, representing a mature offering in the rapidly growing defense technology ecosystem. The global market for drones in a box is estimated at approximately €1 billion in 2026 and expected to reach €6-7 billion by 2034-2035, with a compound annual growth rate of around 20%. Under the deal structure, Tonner Drones will handle corporate and finance, while Drone Volt will lead industrial development, and Azur Drones will focus on defense industry and government customers.

Source: Manila Times

Navitas Semiconductor acquires power management firm Claros for $232.8m

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: DataCenter Dynamics

DAZN accelerates U.S. expansion with acquisition of EverPass Media

UK-based global sports streaming platform DAZN announced its agreement to acquire EverPass Media, marking the full global launch of DAZN for Business and DAZN’s biggest push into the U.S. commercial sports market to date. Founded in 2023 by 32 Equity (the NFL’s strategic investment arm) and RedBird Capital Partners, EverPass holds the exclusive commercial distribution rights for NFL Sunday Ticket and delivers premium live sports to bars, restaurants, hotels, and other commercial venues. Financial details were not disclosed.

As part of the deal, RedBird Capital Partners, TKO Group Holdings, and 32 Equity will become minority shareholders in DAZN. EverPass will be rebranded as DAZN for Business, with CEO Alex Kaplan continuing to lead the division and taking on a broader role at DAZN. EverPass’s portfolio includes commercial rights to the English Premier League, UEFA Champions League, MLB, NBA, WNBA, NWSL, NASCAR, PGA TOUR, MLS, Formula 1, plus distribution partnerships with Peacock, Netflix, Paramount, and Apple.

Source: TV Technology

Amazon acquires DuckLabs, adding the team behind DuckDB amid broader shakeup in cloud data

Amazon has agreed to acquire DuckLabs, the Amsterdam-based company behind DuckDB, the fast-growing open-source analytical database that records more than one million downloads a day and has become a favorite of developers looking to analyze large amounts of data without the cost and setup of a cloud data warehouse. Financial terms were not disclosed. The DuckLabs team of 30+ engineers will join AWS while remaining in Amsterdam.

DuckDB creators Hannes Mühleisen and Mark Raasveldt, who co-founded DuckLabs, will continue leading both the team and the open-source project’s technical direction. Notably, Amazon is not acquiring the DuckDB open-source project itself: DuckDB and related components (“Duck Stack”) will remain free and open source under the MIT license, independently governed by the nonprofit DuckDB Foundation. AWS VP Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec wrote that “DuckDB ends up being naturally optimized for AI agents to use,” signaling AWS’s intent to integrate DuckDB deeper into its analytics stack including S3 Tables and SageMaker Lakehouse.

Source: GeekWire

Accenture Edge deepens SAP bench with overseas purchase

Accenture will acquire Netherlands-based SAP consulting and services firm McCoy, adding more than 380 ERP modernization professionals to Accenture Edge, the consulting giant’s midmarket services unit that launched in June 2026. The deal marks Accenture Edge’s first acquisition and advances two objectives the unit was created to address: adding midmarket enterprise clients and expanding outside North America. Financial terms were not disclosed.

McCoy, founded in 2012, has satellite offices in Spain and the Philippines and offers SAP integration and managed services. Its engineers will contribute to Advance, a joint initiative Accenture rolled out with SAP last year to help drive adoption of the software giant’s cloud-based ERP and business suite. The deal reflects a broader trend of systems integrators moving further into managed services while larger MSPs add more project-based work, with EMEA MSP deals nearly tripling year-over-year to 17 in Q1 2026 and North American MSP acquisitions reaching 37 in Q1.

Source: Channel Dive

Gamma acquires Accel-backed design startup Lica

Presentation startup Gamma has acquired Accel-backed design startup Lica in a bid to build out its own design research lab, with Lica’s co-founders leading the new effort. Founded by Priyaa Kalyanaraman and Purvanshi Mehta in 2023, Lica had raised $4 million from Accel, South Park Commons, and Village Global to build AI tools that turn screenshots and recordings into project presentations. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The deal continues a wave of consolidation in AI presentation startups, following OpenAI’s acquisition of NextSlide earlier this month and Prezent’s $50M raise across two rounds. Gamma itself raised $68 million at a $2.1 billion valuation in November 2025 and reports $100M ARR. Gamma CEO Grant Lee said the acquisition will enable Gamma to explore multimodal communication formats beyond presentations, with Lica’s founders leading research into personalized AI presentation and communication styles.

Source: TechCrunch

Kavaliro Acquires The Oakleaf Group’s FinTech Consulting Practice

Orlando-based Kavaliro, an award-winning professional services firm, announced the acquisition of The Oakleaf Group’s FinTech Consulting practice. The deal strengthens Kavaliro’s position in the financial services sector and expands its consulting capabilities in the Government-Sponsored Enterprise (GSE) market, bringing an experienced team with deep expertise supporting GSEs and other leading housing finance organizations. Financial terms were not disclosed.

By combining Oakleaf’s FinTech and business consulting practice with Kavaliro’s national workforce solutions platform, the company is positioned to deliver greater value across mortgage finance, capital markets, risk management, regulatory compliance and technology transformation. As part of the transaction, Sally Pak will join Kavaliro and continue leading the consulting team, providing continuity for employees and clients. The deal follows Kavaliro’s March 2025 sale of its Salesforce division to Accordion, part of an ongoing strategy to streamline operations and focus on core workforce and federal defense businesses.

Source: Staffing Industry Analysts

WellStack Announced the Acquisition of DeLorean AI

Madison-based WellStack announced the acquisition of DeLorean AI, a healthcare artificial intelligence company specializing in predictive analytics, clinical risk stratification, and prescriptive decision support. The transaction unifies WellStack’s agentic healthcare data management platform and modular Decision Hubs with DeLorean AI’s predictive intelligence and next-action recommendation engine, bridging the gap across the healthcare analytics maturity curve from retrospective analysis to predictive foresight and prescriptive operational execution.

DeLorean AI continuously ingests and evaluates multi-source clinical records, insurance claims, and operational data directly from data lakes and electronic medical records to predict adverse events, mitigate avoidable acute utilization, and optimize revenue integrity. WellStack CEO Rich Waller framed the acquisition as building the foundation for the next generation of healthcare innovation, expanding WellStack’s ability to help health systems identify risk earlier, intervene more effectively, and continuously measure impact.

Source: HIT Consultant

Nvidia Fires a $7 Billion Warning Shot at OpenAI, DeepSeek and Kimi With Poolside Deal

Nvidia is making an aggressive push into AI models, striking a multibillion-dollar deal with Poolside to develop a powerful open-weight system aimed at rivals including OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, and Kimi. Per the Wall Street Journal, Nvidia will pay $6 billion to license Poolside’s AI technology and invest another $1 billion in the startup at a $12 billion pre-money valuation, for a total of $7 billion committed to the partnership.

More than 100 Poolside employees, including engineers, are expected to join Nvidia and work on its Nemotron open-weight AI project. Poolside will remain independent, with founders Eiso Kant and Jason Warner staying outside Nvidia while continuing unspecified research work. The deal underscores Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s growing focus on open-weight AI models, putting Nvidia directly in competition with Chinese open-model developers such as DeepSeek and Moonshot AI’s Kimi, while also potentially challenging U.S. AI leaders such as OpenAI and Anthropic.

Source: Yahoo Finance

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.