Five Platforms, 112 Deals, and the Gravitational Pull of PE in Accounting
Deal Tracker: Mega-aggregators dominate money flow.
Cold, hard facts: Of the 400 verified transactions logged in the CPA Trendlines PE-CPA Deal Tracker™ since 2016, a verifiable 112 — 28 percent — are concentrated in just five platforms,
CPA Trendlines
By CPA Trendlines Research
The frantic pace of deal-making in March has officially transitioned the accounting industry from a “consolidation phase” into a “platform war.”
As the first quarter concludes, the narrative is no longer just about who is buying whom, but about which investment philosophy—and which technology stack—will dominate the next decade.
The conventional narrative about private equity in accounting says capital is flooding in, the profession is democratizing, and every CPA firm in America can access institutional money for the first time.
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But the cold, hard data tells a different story. Of the 400 verified transactions logged in the CPA Trendlines PE-CPA Deal Tracker™ since 2016, a verifiable 112 — 28 percent — are concentrated in just five platforms: Crete Professionals Alliance, Ryan, Aprio, Sorren, and Ascend.
The ratio turns the democratization thesis on its head.
What looks like a broad revolution is, in the actual deal flow, a rapid gravitational implosion around a handful of mega-aggregators that are vacuuming up firms faster than the rest of the market combined.
The acceleration curve alone should unsettle anyone clinging to the idea that this market is still nascent.
The tracker recorded nine deals in all of 2021, the year TowerBrook Capital Partners took its majority stake in EisnerAmper on July 20 and shattered the profession’s private-equity virginity.
By 2022, the count climbed to 17. In 2023, it hit 42. In 2024, 73. Then came 2025, with 180 verified transactions, a record that nearly tripled the prior year and marked the moment PE capital stopped knocking politely on accounting’s door and kicked it open. Through March 2026, the tracker shows 71 deals, a pace that, if sustained, would blow past 2025 before autumn.
“The rate of change in the last five years has been insane,” says Allan Koltin, the CEO of Koltin Consulting Group, who has advised on more of these transactions than anyone in the profession.
But velocity alone does not capture the market’s true shape. All five of those dominant platforms — Crete, Ryan, Aprio, Sorren and Ascend — were active buyers in the first quarter of 2026. They are not pausing, and the firms orbiting outside their gravitational pull are running out of room.
“The dirty, dark secret is there are way more buyers than eligible firms,” says Koltin, who has personally advised EisnerAmper on a majority of its post-TowerBrook deals.
That paradox — a market drowning in capital but starving for qualified sellers — is the engine driving concentration. When eligible targets are scarce, the platforms with the earliest head starts, the largest war chests, and the most developed integration playbooks win disproportionately. READ MORE →
