A year ago, on August 13, 2025, Dakota Marketplace had 6,916 deals in its transaction database. Today that number is 28,396, a 311% increase in twelve months. The database itself is barely older than that: tracking began in the middle of 2024, and the first full year produced fewer than 1,000 deals.
The story here is not steady accumulation. It is a slow start followed by a sharp acceleration, and the acceleration is still building.
Dakota's transaction database covers M&A, buyouts, venture rounds, growth equity, credit deals, and real assets transactions, each one identified by a single primary deal-defining role (the buyer on an acquisition, the lead investor on a financing round). That structure is what makes an accurate count possible: 28,396 unique deals, not 99,690 (the number you get if you count every buyer, seller, lender, and advisor row tied to those same deals separately).
Something changed after mid-2025. The database went from 4,876 deals at the end of Q2 2025 to 15,651 by the end of Q4, more than tripling in six months. It then added another 12,745 deals in the first seven and a half months of 2026, keeping pace with, if not exceeding, the prior period's rate.
That is not a database catching up on backlog once. It is a sustained increase in the rate of new deal capture, quarter over quarter, for a full year running.
DEAL FLOW, AS IT POSTS
21,480 deals were added in the past twelve months, and the rate is still climbing. Book a demo to see what is landing in your sector →
Five categories, Venture, Acquisition/Merger, Buyout/Private Equity, Growth Equity, and Real Assets, are anchored on a Buyer or Lead Investor role and show a clean year-over-year comparison. Their growth rates over the past year tell different stories about where deal activity has expanded fastest. Credit works differently and is addressed separately below.
Venture rounds are still the largest single category by count (10,658, or 38% of all transactions), and were the largest category a year ago too. But Venture's growth rate, 116%, is the slowest of the major categories precisely because it started from the biggest base.
Acquisition/Merger activity is the standout. It grew 604% in a year, more than any other type, going from a minor category (988 deals, 14% of the database) to the second-largest (6,955 deals, 24% of the database). Real Assets more than quintupled (416%) off a smaller base. Buyout/Private Equity more than quadrupled (326%).
M&A IS NO LONGER THE SMALL COLUMN
Acquisition/Merger coverage grew 604% in a year and is now the second-largest category. Book a demo to screen it directly →
Credit transactions, direct lending, asset-based lending, mezzanine, and structured credit deals, work differently from the other five categories. Where an acquisition has a buyer and a financing round has a lead investor, a credit deal is defined by its lender. Counting Credit activity means anchoring on that role rather than on Buyer or Lead Investor.
Dakota's transaction database contains 1,898 Credit-type rows. Because syndicated loans and multi-lender deals produce several rows per transaction, an accurate count requires deduplicating by transaction name and date. Doing this across a 74% sample of those rows (1,400 of 1,898, spanning August 2025 through July 2026) produced a consistent duplication ratio of 1.85x, yielding an estimated 1,029 unique Credit transactions.
Source: Dakota Marketplace transaction records, transaction type Credit, sample of 1,400 of 1,898 rows deduplicated by transaction name and date, as of August 13, 2026. Figure is a sample-based estimate.
At roughly 1,029 deals, Credit represents about 3.5% of all transactions tracked, comparable in scale to Real Assets (2,205). Combined with the five categories above, Dakota Marketplace tracks approximately 29,400 unique transactions in total.
ANCHOR CREDIT ON THE LENDER
Credit deals are defined by their lender, not a buyer or lead investor, so the role you filter on changes the count. Book a demo to see how the roles resolve →
Recency bias is real and by design. Because tracking started in mid-2024, the database is thin on anything before that, by construction, not by gap. Do not read the absence of a 2022 or 2023 deal as evidence it did not happen.
Acquisition/Merger coverage grew the fastest, and is now a core category, not an afterthought. If you were treating this database as venture-and-buyout-only a year ago, that assumption is now six months out of date at minimum.
The growth rate has not slowed. Six of the last seven quarters each added more deals than the one before it. Whatever coverage gap exists today is likely to close further, not persist, if the current trend holds.
Credit is a meaningfully sized category, not a blind spot. At roughly 1,029 deals it is comparable in scale to Real Assets. Any transaction-type analysis on this database should anchor Credit deals on the Lender role, since Buyer and Lead Investor, the roles that work for the other five categories, do not apply to lending transactions.
Dakota Marketplace now tracks approximately 29,400 unique transactions across venture, buyout/private equity, growth equity, acquisition/merger, real assets, and credit deals, with new deals added every quarter at an accelerating pace.
Filter by transaction type, deal status, transaction value, and participant role, then connect each deal directly to the firms and fund relationships behind it.