Reading Room

ADT Q3 2026 results; guidance withdrawn pending the Thrive transaction.

Target company press release announcing the definitive agreement.

Acquirer statement on the ADT agreement; source of the ">75 businesses" figure.

Acquirer announcement of its first acquisition.

Definitive agreement at approximately $7.7 billion enterprise value: about $4.6 billion equity purchase price and $3.1 billion net debt. Expected close Q1 2027.

Published September 2026. Latham & Watkins announced it is representing Sequence Holdings in the take-private acquisition of The Baldwin Group (Nasdaq: BWIN). Under the definitive agreement, an entity to be formed by Sequence Holdings and DFO Management — the family investment office of Dell Technologies founder, chairman, and chief executive Michael Dell — will acquire the company in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $7.7 billion, or $32.50 per share, an approximately 88 percent premium to Baldwin's unaffected closing price on June 17, 2026, the day before media reports that the company was exploring a take-private. The enterprise value comprises roughly $4.6 billion of equity and about $3.1 billion of net debt assumed or refinanced, implying approximately 20 times trailing-twelve-month adjusted EBITDA of about $396 million. Baldwin becomes privately held on completion, with eligible colleagues retaining a significant minority equity stake and the option to roll over existing holdings. Sequence is described as a permanent holding company acquiring established enterprises in the service economy. The Latham corporate deal team is led by New York partner Ian Nussbaum, Chicago partner Sean Parish, and New York partner Julian Az. Morgan Stanley, Barclays, and Wells Fargo are financial advisors to Sequence and DFO; Sullivan & Cromwell is counsel to DFO.

Announces an October 10 London event with Anthropic, ElevenLabs, General Catalyst, and EQT as partners; challenges focus on messy operating cases and escalation.

Reports over 1,000 August maintenance tasks, with human work reduced from roughly three hours to 15–20 minutes. More than 80% of payments are recognized automatically.

Announced September 1, 2026, from Salem, Utah. Current announced that Preferred CFO joined the platform. Based in the greater Salt Lake City metro area, Preferred CFO provides fractional CFO, controller, outsourced accounting, strategic finance, and capital-raising support to businesses nationwide, and has operated for more than a decade, with the firm dating its founding to 2013. Its work covers forecasting and financial modeling, cash flow management, budgets and operating plans, capital preparation and raises, and strengthening controller functions. Current framed the addition as advancing its strategy to build one of the country's leading advisory organizations and as a milestone in its national expansion, positioning the combination of experienced professionals, modern technology, specialized expertise, and strategic advisory as the direction of the profession. Preferred CFO said clients should expect near-term continuity with the same professionals, while joining Current gives the firm access to broader technology, AI systems, national resources, and collaboration across the network. Existing client relationships, local leadership, and culture are retained.

Announced August 25, 2026, from San Francisco. Crescendo launched the Crescendo Customer Experience Platform (CXP), consolidating software categories historically sold separately — CCaaS, ticketing, workforce management, quality assurance, voice of the customer, and knowledge — into a single system run end to end by specialized AI agents. The named agents are Concierge, which handles customers across phone, chat, email, and messaging and hands off to a person with the full thread intact; Agent Assist, which supports human specialists during live conversations and delivers escalations as decision packets rather than raw transcripts; Applied Insights, which analyzes conversations and outcomes; Quality, which scores 100 percent of conversations for accuracy, empathy, compliance, and completion; and Workforce, which forecasts volume and optimizes staffing at five-minute granularity. Beneath them sits what Crescendo calls the Agentic Foundation, an orchestration and optimization layer the company says automates 95 percent of deployment work. Crescendo cited backend integration from a natural-language prompt in under 30 minutes and full production in as little as 30 days, 600 percent growth in AI-handled volume, a 200 percent increase in AI customers year over year, and one customer reporting a 60 percent reduction in CX stack costs. Andy Lee, co-founder, was chief executive at launch, having been appointed in July 2026.

Announced August 25, 2026, from Palo Alto. Eudia announced a partnership with Google to launch industry-specific AI capabilities on Google Cloud's Gemini Enterprise for Legal, as a launch partner. Eudia's agent is built on Google's Agent Development Kit and connected via MCP, combining specialized agents with digital twins of domain-scoped institutional knowledge, orchestrated with legal-specific reasoning and access to legal databases. The stated use cases cover legal, compliance, procurement, and revenue teams: drafting and reviewing contracts, analyzing marketing assets for compliance, assessing risk across thousands of executed contracts, and managing obligations across a company's contract portfolio. The release frames the value as giving large enterprises a faster path to governed legal AI inside a platform they already run, with an illustrative example of an employee querying Gemini Enterprise about the compliance implications of a proposed product feature. Eudia is described here as the augmented intelligence platform for enterprise legal, contracting, and compliance.

Reports over $2 billion in new capital at a $12 billion valuation, over $3 billion raised since inception, and more than 70 businesses. Announces expansion into built-environment services.

Announces a $35 million Series B led by The General Partnership and Allen Shim joining as president/CFO. Describes a permanent holdco with embedded technologists.

Clarifies that the $170 million financing comprises $95 million equity and a $75 million debt facility. Funds support platform development and agency acquisitions.

Reports nearly $70 million committed equity, a first closed acquisition, and work with ten agencies before acquisition. Describes a specialty brokerage growth platform.

Names cofounder Andy Lee CEO, with founding CEO Matt Price moving to strategic adviser to the board.

Announced July 9, 2026, from Somerset, New Jersey. RRBB announced its fifth tuck-in acquisition since joining Current in August 2023, growing from roughly $20 million in revenue at the time it joined to a $44 million platform. RRBB was Current's first partner firm. Two months after joining, it added Mendonca & Partners Certified Public Accountants LLC, an international tax firm in Union, New Jersey with import/export expertise and approximately $8 million in revenue. The release frames RRBB as a pioneer within the network, presenting its sequence of tuck-ins as a repeatable model combining integration, technology enablement, access to capital, and global service delivery to drive both inorganic and organic growth. RRBB offers accounting, advisory, and consulting services from offices in New Jersey and New York. Current, founded by Jake Sloane and Frank Zhang and backed by Thrive Holdings, is described as a national partnership of more than 30 accounting and advisory firms built on local leadership and entrepreneurial autonomy, and was named to Accounting Today's list of best firms for technology.

Announced June 25, 2026, from Palo Alto. Eudia announced a collaboration with Microsoft covering product integrations across Microsoft 365 via add-ins and APIs, technical deployment on Microsoft Azure infrastructure, and joint go-to-market with Microsoft's enterprise sales organization. The stated purpose is to bring Eudia's Expert Digital Twins and specialized agents to in-house legal departments and adjacent business teams inside the applications they already use. Enterprises named as already running Eudia within Microsoft 365 — including Word, Outlook, SharePoint, and OneDrive — are ServiceNow, Cargill, Toshiba, Ecolab, and Bayer. The release describes Eudia's platform as built around the Enterprise Brain, which captures and codifies the judgment of an organization's top experts across contracts, policies, precedents, and prior decisions, and embeds it into the systems where legal work happens. Eudia positions the combination of domain-specific AI with enterprise governance and self-serve access as a way to accelerate deal cycles, strengthen compliance, and reduce reliance on outside counsel.

Describes a strategic partnership, joint development, and Alorica’s ability to resell and deploy Crescendo’s platform.

Announced June 18, 2026, from Washington, DC. Consilio and Eudia announced a strategic partnership pairing Eudia's Expert Digital Twins and AI agents with Consilio's operational and technology capability across eDiscovery, document review, risk and compliance, and legal transformation for large corporations and law firms. The two companies will co-develop AI tools powered by Eudia's digital twin technology, with stated aims of faster contract and matter cycles, more defensible review, stronger compliance posture, and reduced reliance on outside counsel. As an additional element, both sides will explore future integrations between Eudia and Aurora Legal AI, Consilio's legal intelligence platform. The release cited Consilio's 2026 Global Survey, in which 54 percent of legal professionals named technology selection and deployment as their top challenge, ahead of work volume for the first time. Emron Pratt is Consilio's chief strategy officer. Eudia was founded by Omar Haroun with chief technology officer Ashish Agrawal and chief operating officer David Van Reyk, and its named clients include ServiceNow, Cargill, Toshiba, Ecolab, Bayer, and the US Air Force.

Confirms the rename and continuity of the accounting platform. Describes local ownership, branding, leadership, and the Tax AI initiative.

Announced June 2, 2026, from Tampa. Crete Professionals Alliance rebranded as Current. The company is a national platform for independent accounting firms, with close to 30 partner firms across the US, more than 2,000 employees, and over $500 million in annual revenue. The stated rationale for the name change is that AI now lets local firms compete with large incumbents and bring enterprise-grade advisory work to smaller businesses. Partner firms retain their own brands, ownership, leadership, and client relationships while drawing on a shared platform of technology, global delivery, and strategic capability. Chief executive Steve Stagner contrasted the model with conventional roll-ups, describing Current's holding period as effectively permanent and its focus as topline growth rather than cost extraction on a deadline. Current was formed by combining Thrive Holdings' technology capability with founders Jake Sloane and Frank Zhang's work backing founder-led businesses. The release cited a commissioned April survey in which 65 percent of accounting firm clients said AI would improve their perception of a firm while 75 percent still preferred personal interaction to automated experiences, and noted that a Tax AI pilot was being rolled out across the portfolio. Current is an Accounting Today Top 10 Firm for Technology and a 2026 Fastest-Growing Firm.

Announced May 20, 2026, from Jacksonville. FIS announced that BankSouth, a $1.6 billion-asset community bank based at Lake Oconee, Georgia, selected the FIS core banking platform to power its retail and business banking lines. The bank framed the conversion as part of a broader data and technology strategy. The selection followed BankSouth's March 2026 announcement of a strategic partnership with Sequence Holdings, the permanent holding company deploying engineers and AI tooling into the bank's operations, and coverage connected the two moves as parts of the same modernization effort.

Announced May 2026. OpenAI and Eudia formed a strategic partnership to co-build for the legal and acquisition teams of the Department of War and other US government agencies, integrating OpenAI's frontier models into Eudia's platform. The stated aim is to improve efficiency for contracting officers, legal counsel, and program managers. The partnership expands and formalizes work already underway: in August 2025 Eudia had won a $1.25 million contract-handling engagement with the US Department of the Air Force. Eudia characterized the collaboration as government-focused and purpose-built for the mission space, distinct from its broader commercial footprint, and declined to comment on OpenAI's product roadmap when asked about Codex for Legal. Eudia also operates an alternative legal services provider in Ireland and an alternative business structure law firm in Arizona, and had recently signed a partnership with ServiceNow, which it describes as the workflow layer government already runs on. Coverage noted the timing against a contemporaneous dispute involving Anthropic and the former Department of Defense over use of its models.

Announced May 4, 2026. Long Lake Management agreed to acquire American Express Global Business Travel in an all-cash take-private valued at approximately $6.3 billion, with support from General Catalyst and Alpha Wave; Koch Equity Development was also reported in the syndicate. Shareholders receive $9.50 per share, a 60.2 percent premium to the May 1 closing price. The transaction is expected to close in the second half of 2026, subject to customary conditions and regulatory clearances. American Express is selling its roughly 30 percent stake for $1.5 billion and expects to record a pre-tax gain of about $975 million; its brand license and other commercial agreements with Amex GBT remain in place. Paul Abbott is chief executive of Amex GBT, which operates in more than 140 countries. Ken Chenault, General Catalyst chairman and former American Express chief executive, commented on the deal. Long Lake was founded in 2023.

Announced May 4, 2026, from Tampa. The Baldwin Group (NASDAQ: BWIN), an independent insurance brokerage and advisory firm, announced an expanded enterprise relationship with Anthropic to deploy Claude firm-wide. Baldwin will integrate Claude across its business segments and functional groups, giving advisors, client experience staff, and operational leaders an enterprise-grade platform intended to improve productivity, speed decision-making, and support end-to-end workflows. The agreement followed several months of active deployment in targeted parts of the business, which Baldwin said produced measurable gains in the quality of client-facing insights, productivity, and workflow efficiency. Chief executive Trevor Baldwin framed the tool as augmenting rather than replacing professional judgment, describing the core skill in the industry as synthesizing complex risk and anticipating unasked client questions. The release also emphasized governance, training, and cross-functional collaboration as part of Baldwin's approach to AI adoption. Baldwin was subsequently the target of a take-private agreement by a consortium led by Michael Dell's DFO Management and Sequence Holdings.

Announced April 22, 2026, from London. Crescendo launched its expansion into the UK and Europe, positioning the move as the introduction of an AI-native customer experience category into a large and, in its framing, underserved market. The company cited more than $100 million in annual recurring revenue reached in under two years, a global footprint built partly through acquisition, and delivery across six continents under a 24/7 model. UK and European customers named include Dr. Martens, Funky Pigeon, Mention Me, RealVNC, and Sweet Bee Organics. London was chosen as the European anchor on the basis of its talent and technology base; co-founder and chief executive Matt Price was raised in the UK and previously scaled Zendesk's European operations. The release framed European demand around fragmented legacy infrastructure, multi-market and multi-language operations, and regulatory pressure on trust, accountability, and demonstrable AI performance. A UK launch event in London was planned to mark the expansion. Crescendo was founded in 2023 and is headquartered in San Francisco.