Four deals closed or cleared a vote on October 22. They sit in very different markets: credit data, metro fiber, Medicare advice and Italian grocery delivery. Line them up and you see what buyers paid for. In three of the four it was something hard to rebuild from scratch, whether a dataset, a duct in the ground or a team that has already shipped agents at scale. The fourth is a SPAC.
LSEG agreed to buy Octus for $3.535 billion in cash from funds advised by Permira and from management, including founder Kent Collier. Octus, which used to be called Reorg, turns loan covenants, financing agreements and restructuring terms into structured data for private, illiquid and distressed credit. It has more than 900 staff, about 750 institutional clients and over 40,000 users. LSEG expects it to bring in more than $300 million of revenue in 2026 at roughly a 40% adjusted EBITDA margin, which puts the price near 12 times revenue. The deal is debt-financed and should close in the first half of 2027. LSEG says it’s EPS-neutral in the first full year and expects leverage to drift toward the top of its 1.5 to 2.5 times range by end-2027. The same morning, LSEG raised its full-year income growth forecast to at least 8% after 8.8% organic growth in the third quarter.
The strategic read is simple. Private credit documents are mostly unstructured, privately shared and hard for a general-purpose AI model to get at, never mind verify. Whoever owns the structured version owns the input that hedge funds and alternative managers can’t scrape. LSEG is buying a moat, and paying a multiple that says so.
Pilot Fiber agreed to buy Boldyn Networks‘ New York and New Jersey enterprise and wholesale fiber business, backed by more than $330 million of new financing led by an equity investment from Fengate. The price wasn’t disclosed. The combined network will cover about 1,600 route miles, 1,200 buildings and 50 data centers, with the biggest gains in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island and northern New Jersey. Boldyn keeps its venue, in-building and transit wireless business and gets long-term access to the fiber through a partnership with Pilot. That’s a clean split. Wireless and enterprise fiber need different customers, different capex and different construction crews, and Boldyn decided it only wants one of them. Fiber that reaches 50 data centers in the New York metro is worth more every quarter the AI build-out keeps going.
Chapter, the Medicare guidance company, bought Ridgeway, a small AI startup that had raised $2.8 million from Emergence Capital and Susa Ventures. Terms weren’t disclosed. The asset is the people. Founder Hamza Mostafa built and evaluated agent systems at OpenAI, including ChatGPT Agent and Deep Research, and he joins Chapter with part of his engineering team. Chapter’s pitch is that AI helps licensed advisers ask the right questions and surface answers while the adviser stays in the conversation. It says back-office AI let it grow several times over each year with nearly flat corporate headcount, though it doesn’t say which metric grew. This is an acquihire, and in a regulated retirement market a team that has shipped agents at scale is rarer than the code.
Melar Acquisition Corp. I shareholders approved its business combination with Everli Global, the Italian e-grocery marketplace that links shoppers with grocery chains and handles picking and last-mile delivery. The combined company will be Everli Global Holdings, expected to trade on Nasdaq as EVRL and EVRLW once remaining conditions are met. The merger agreement dates from July 2025 and was amended twice that year. The release gives no vote counts, no redemption figures and no valuation. Those numbers will come in the 8-K, and for a SPAC they’re the ones that matter.
So three buyers paid for things that take years to build, and one deal still has to show its numbers. Watch the Everli 8-K.