Healthcare Buyouts Are Back: $191B, Healthtech’s 2.3x Edge & Pharma’s Next Winners

Good morning, ! Healthcare buyouts are back—with $191B in global deal value and larger transactions driving the rebound. Meanwhile, healthcare IT continues to lead the sector’s return stack, and pharma’s next growth cycle is concentrating around a narrower set of therapeutic areas.

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DATA DIVE

Healthcare Buyouts Are Back

Healthcare private equity entered 2025 with renewed momentum. Global healthcare PE deal value reached an estimated $191 billion, up 52% from $126 billion in 2024 and more than triple the 2023 trough. Deal count also increased to approximately 445 buyouts, though it remained below the 515 transactions recorded in 2021.

The gap between value and volume tells the bigger story. The recovery is increasingly being driven by larger transactions, rather than simply more deals. North America alone recorded 26 healthcare deals above $1 billion through November 2025, compared with 14 during all of 2024.

For investors, this signals a different healthcare PE cycle. Capital is moving again, but scale and sponsor selectivity increasingly matter. Large managers with the capital and sector expertise to underwrite scaled healthcare platforms appear best positioned to capture the reopening.

Bottom line: Healthcare buyouts are back—but the rebound is being led from the top end of the market.

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HEALTHTECH CORNER

Healthcare IT Still Leads the Return Stack

Healthcare IT has been the strongest buyout category in healthcare, delivering a median MOIC of 2.3x from 2017 to 2025. That compares with 2.1x for biopharma and life sciences, and 1.9x for both provider services and medtech.

The IRR spread is even more telling. Healthcare IT generated a median IRR of 26%, ahead of biopharma at 22%, provider services at 20%, and medtech at 17%. The gap suggests that investors have historically been rewarded for backing models with greater software exposure, scalability, and lower capital intensity.

Why it matters: Healthcare IT enters the next investment cycle with a stronger historical return profile than the rest of the sector. That could keep competition elevated for high-quality assets, particularly platforms with recurring revenue and defensible workflow integration.

Bottom line: Healthtech has earned its premium. The next question is whether entry valuations allow buyers to keep earning it. (More)

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Interested in attending? Register or request the full agenda here.

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COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE SNAPSHOT

TREND TO WATCH

Pharma’s Growth Map Is Being Redrawn

Global medicine spending is still heading higher—but the next leg of growth will be increasingly concentrated. IQVIA expects obesity therapies to remain the clear outlier through 2030, while oncology combines high-single-digit growth with one of the industry’s largest spending pools.

The divergence matters. Mature categories such as cardiovascular, diabetes and HIV antivirals are projected to grow considerably slower, while obesity, oncology, ophthalmology and CNS capture a disproportionate share of incremental momentum.

The investor takeaway: Pharma’s growth story is becoming less about broad market expansion and more about therapeutic-area exposure. Pipeline allocation, licensing activity and M&A should increasingly follow the categories where growth and addressable spending overlap.

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