New York, NY. Private equity investment in US healthtech ventures is undergoing a structural shift, pivoting toward fewer, but far larger transactions, according to a new report from Nixon Peabody LLP utilizing PitchBook data.
The report, HealthTech PE Monitor 2026, finds that the first half of 2026 generated $18.4 billion in healthtech PE deal value across 72 deals—exceeding the 2025 full-year total of $18.2 billion spread across more than twice as many deals (160). The average buyout size has surged from $760 million in 2025 to $3.4 billion year-to-date, signaling that a handful of megadeals are driving the market rather than a broad pickup in activity volume.
The sector is maturing and bifurcating rather than retreating, according to the report. Sponsors with scale and access to capital are writing bigger checks, holding assets longer, and increasingly favoring platform consolidation over smaller, standalone acquisitions.
Add-on acquisitions have become the default deployment strategy, representing nearly 80% of all buyout activity by count in the first half of 2026. This also marks the highest share of such deals in more than five years. The report finds that cumulative add-on value is running more than 60% above the full-year 2025 figure as investors pay premiums for assets that extend a platform’s capabilities or geographic reach.
Deal count at the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and healthtech more than doubled year-over-year in 2025, and that figure is on pace for a new full-year high in 2026. Sponsors are gravitating toward lower-risk, high-ROI use cases that are a step removed from direct patient care and are less complex to underwrite amid ongoing regulatory scrutiny. Many of these use cases focus on administrative workflow automation, such as revenue cycle management and billing accuracy, and clinical decision support tools like AI scribes and diagnostic triage. The report notes that sponsors are growing more comfortable underwriting AI-enabled healthcare businesses as the technology matures and use cases are commercially proven.
“We expect deal concentration and an add-on-driven strategy to persist into 2027, with AI’s role in healthtech continuing to expand as administrative-automation and workflow tools deliver provable ROI for even the most cautious sponsors,” according to the report’s authors at Nixon Peabody. “With the IPO window still closed and legal and regulatory complexity growing alongside deal size, sponsors and operators stand to benefit meaningfully from experienced counsel across the full deal lifecycle.”
You can download a full copy of HealthTech PE Monitor 2026 on Nixon Peabody’s website. Nixon Peabody partners Jéna Grady, Michael Schnipper, Andrew Share, and Rebecca Simone co-authored the report utilizing PitchBook data.
