The deals exist. Finding the right target is the bottleneck.
More than 16,000 companies globally have sat in buyout portfolios for over four years, about 52% of all buyout-backed inventory as of 2025 and the highest share on record. That backlog has to move, feeding secondary buyouts, sponsor-to-sponsor sales, and a corporate M&A market that pushed buyout-backed exit value up 47% year over year to $717 billion. (McKinsey Global Private Markets Report 2026; Bain Global Private Equity Report 2026)
The hard part is not appetite. It is segmenting the targets: which private companies are already sponsor-owned and approaching an exit window, and which are still founder or family held and open to a first institutional conversation. That split usually lives in scattered filings, news, and analyst memory, not in one place you can query.
The full private-company universe, cut by ownership.
Dakota Marketplace maps close to 1 million private companies in one queryable dataset, each classified by Ownership Type. Around 161,000 carry the sponsor-backed tag, and about 772,000 are independently held. Close to one in six private companies in the dataset already sits behind a financial sponsor; the rest are the independent universe where proprietary, off-market deals tend to start.
Sector coverage across the dataset.
A record backlog of owned companies has to transact.
Buyout and growth deals larger than $500 million rose 44% in 2025 to more than $1 trillion in value — the highest year on record for deals of that size — and total PE-backed exit value rose more than 40%. Buyout funds are also sitting on a record $3.8 trillion in unrealized value, with average holding periods drifting toward seven years.
Two things follow for sourcing. The sponsor-backed segment is in motion: with almost one-third of US buyout-backed companies held five years or longer, a large set of assets is approaching a forced decision to sell or recapitalize — the natural ground for secondary-buyout origination. And with entry multiples high, more buyers are working the independently held universe for proprietary deals at saner prices.
Demand is also concentrated by sector. Health care, technology, and energy saw the largest increases in buyout deal value in 2025, which maps onto Dakota's sector tags for steering a target list toward where capital is actually moving.
From ownership filter to outreach list
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Separate sponsor-backed from independently held targets in a single filter, then layer sector and geography to build a focused list.
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Move from a company to its context: each record links to Dakota's transaction history, investor relationships, and named contacts.
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Screen the independent universe for founder and family-owned businesses that have never taken outside capital — the segment hardest to assemble from public data.
Dakota Marketplace
Dakota Marketplace maps close to 1 million private companies, including roughly 161,000 sponsor-backed targets, each linked to transaction history, investor relationships, and named contacts. Filter by ownership type, sector, geography, and size to build a sourcing list in minutes instead of weeks.
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