News: Press Releases, Industry News & Events

It’s been an eventful and disruptive year in tech, with our expert analysts at Hampleton Partners keeping a close eye on M&A trends and transactions across sectors such as AI and Enterprise Software. 

Now, as we prepare to step into 2026, it’s a good moment to pause and take stock of some of the most significant highlighted by our sector-specific market reports, and the deals which have exemplified these developments. Let’s dive in.

Such is the pace of development and disruption in the AI space that it can be tricky to keep up with the milestones as they come and go. One such threshold was crossed recently, with two of the biggest players, OpenAI and Perplexity, both introducing agentic shopping assistants designed to optimise how users browse and buy online. 

These rival assistants work in much the same way, leveraging a natural conversational back-and-forth which allows them to feel out user requirements, refine their recommendations and remember buying histories to find provide a tailored experience. This is all in marked contrast to the lists of non-curated links yielded by traditional search.

Last month came the exciting news that an astronaut from Europe – specifically, Germany – will have a seat on an upcoming mission to the Moon. 

The announcement was made at a European Space Agency press conference, where Dorothee Bär, Germany's Federal Minister of Research, said: "We can now, for the very first time, send a European astronaut flying 360,000 kilometres away. This means that a European astronaut will be traveling for approximately three days until for the first time he sees the Earth as a whole. No European has ever seen that before.”

Jonathan Simnett is a managing director at Hampleton Partners, co-host of The Difference Engine tech strategy podcast, and an M&A dealmaker with decades of experience helping tech founders and investors to scale, fundraise, merge and exit. We spoke to him about one of the most significant, yet currently undervalued and under-hyped, aspects of the AI revolution.  

Last month, Sesame – a startup co-founded by one of the people behind Oculus – secured USD 250m in Series B funding. Sesame has developed a voice AI agent which it pitches as an “ever-present brilliant friend” that is lifelike enough to traverse the uncanny valley feeling which once dogged verbal interfaces. Sesame intends to embed in lightweight eyewear to provide constant companionship to users as they go about their daily business. What made the deal stand out to us was not so much the size of the investment (significant though it is), the notable track record of its founders or even Sesame’s specific product per se, but rather how the nature of its technology was framed in evolutionary terms by lead investor Sequoia Capital.

The record deal volume noted in our latest Healthtech M&A report stems from momentum makers which include AI-fuelled innovation in everything from digital therapeutics to health record management, and active consolidation within the industry. There’s also the critical necessity of security solutions which are fit for purpose in an age of ever-smarter online threats. As our report puts it, “Increasing digitalisation is driving demand for robust cybersecurity solutions, with research showing a majority of healthcare organisations are actively enhancing this aspect of operations in 2025.”

Earlier this month, DHL Group opened its new Europe Innovation Center in Troisdorf, Germany. The flagship of a network of similar facilities dotted across the world, it serves to “identify emerging trends, engage with customers, test new technologies, and scale high-impact solutions across regions and business units”, as well as foster collaborations with other academic researchers and startups.

This move caught our attention because, as part of the announcement, DHL Group laid out the “three most important trend clusters that will shape supply chains in the coming years”, determined by its survey of over 2,500 supply chain professionals across a spectrum of industries and regions. The trends in question are AI, robotics and Environmental, Social & Governance (ESG) imperatives – all of which were recently emphasised in our newly published Supply Chain Management Software M&A Report. 

Healthtech dealmaking is surging, with our latest M&A report on the sector revealing that 1H25 saw the highest number of disclosed deals on record, surpassing even the much-discussed acquisition boom during and just after the pandemic. 

While economic conditions improved slightly, and high investor interest in AI innovation have certainly set a favourable context for M&A across the tech landscape, there are specific trends propelling acquisition and investment activity in Healthtech. Let’s look through some of those identified by the Hampleton Partners report, along with fundraises exemplifying each trend.   

The recently published IT & Business Services market report from Hampleton Partners has revealed strong M&A momentum in the first half of this year – a surge partly propelled by the acquisitions of business service providers partnered with the likes of Microsoft, Salesforce and ServiceNow. 

Not only has there been a high number of deals targeting such companies, but the median EBITDA multiple for this segment has soared to the highest point on record, indicating unprecedented investor confidence in the growth prospects of service providers aligned with major enterprise software ecosystems.

The latest Artificial Intelligence market report from Hampleton Partners, the international M&A and corporate finance advisory firm for software and technology companies, reveals strong fundraising momentum for AI companies, with the total deal value for the sector reaching almost USD 52.4bn in 1H25 – the second-largest amount ever invested in a half-year reporting period.