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The Wild Ride of Insurance Exchange/
MGA Accelerant:
From 55x Growth Story to 12x Buyout Target
by Managing Partner, Mike Fletcher
Overview
Accelerant is a specialty insurance platform connecting MGAs with capital partners through a proprietary, data-driven Risk Exchange. Rather than just another AI play on insurance, Accelerant is the real deal: the Exchange has already run $1.3 billion of premium through it in the first half of this year alone. To us, Accelerant clearly represents the future of specialty insurance distribution.
The Wild Ride: An EBITDA Ladder
Getting here has been a wild ride, and Adjusted EBITDA multiples tell the story better than dollars alone. Accelerant went public on July 24, 2025, at $21.00 per share, valuing the company at about 42x trailing Adjusted EBITDA ($4.7 billion against $112.8 million of fiscal 2024 Adjusted EBITDA). Investors kept buying shares closed as high as $30.05 on August 22, 2025, pushing the multiple to north of 55x that same trailing Adjusted EBITDA base (an implied $6.4 billion). Then came the reversal. Accelerant's stock, like much of the insurance-distribution sector, got swept up in the AI insurance scare that hit insurance broker stocks in February 2026, after a ChatGPT-powered rate-comparison tool from Insurify spooked the market (Willis Towers Watson fell 12% and Arthur J. Gallagher fell nearly 10% in a single session).
Accelerant kept sliding in the months that followed, eventually touching a low of just 7x trailing Adjusted EBITDA ($9.18 per share, or roughly $2.0 billion, against $281.8 million of by-then-reported fiscal 2025 Adjusted EBITDA), a fraction of where it started.
What makes the drop remarkable is that it happened while the business kept compounding. Adjusted EBITDA nearly tripled, from $112.8 million in fiscal 2024 to $281.8 million in fiscal 2025 (up 149%) and has continued climbing to $338.6 million on a trailing-twelve-month basis through the second quarter of 2026 (Q2 2026 alone: $93.1 million, up 46% year-over-year). Exchange written premium reached $1.3 billion in the first half of 2026, up 23% year-over-year. In short, the multiple the market was willing to pay collapsed even as the underlying numbers got dramatically better.
Thoma Bravo Steps In
Thoma Bravo, the $172 billion software-focused private equity firm famous for its technology bets, is not someone we typically see in the specialty insurance market at all. Yet on August 13, 2026, it agreed to take Accelerant Holdings (NYSE: ARX) private in an all-cash deal valuing the specialty insurance platform at more than $4 billion in enterprise value, with shareholders receiving $20.25 per share.
This valuation represents a nearly 50% premium on the $13.61 closing price the day before the deal, or a value that circles right back to its IPO price a little over a year earlier, except Adjusted EBITDA has nearly tripled since. Effectively, Thoma Bravo bought the business at roughly 12x trailing Adjusted EBITDA ($338.6 million of TTM Adjusted EBITDA), a fraction of the roughly 42x trailing Adjusted EBITDA the company went public at, though still an improvement over the roughly 7x trailing Adjusted EBITDA the stock touched at its low.
Chairman and CEO Jeff Radke framed the deal as access to “Thoma Bravo’s technology and software expertise” to further build “our unique, data-fueled platform.” Senior Partner A.J. Rohde said the firm has “invested in insurance technology for years” and sees an opportunity to “unlock rapid growth” alongside Accelerant’s underwriting network, while Principal Matt LoSardo pointed to the Risk Exchange’s ability to give underwriters and capital providers better data to price risk.
The deal also reads two ways at once. Thoma Bravo is best known as a technology buyer, and Accelerant's proprietary underwriting and pricing software fits that mold. But functionally, Accelerant also operates as an MGA-style distribution platform, which puts the deal squarely in specialty insurance M&A as well, and extends Thoma Bravo's existing push into insurance technology; its Nearmap subsidiary previously acquired claims-technology firm itel for more than $1.3 billion.
Altamont Capital Partners, which controls roughly 82% of outstanding stock, has agreed to vote in favor of the deal and, along with company founders, will retain equity alongside Thoma Bravo after closing. The transaction carries no financing conditions and includes a 6% annual ticking fee if closing is delayed by insurance regulatory approvals. It is expected to close in the first half of 2027. Morgan Stanley advised Accelerant's board, Houlihan Lokey advised the special committee, and BMO Capital Markets and Wells Fargo advised Thoma Bravo.
Peer Comparison
Ryan Specialty Group (parent of RT Specialty, NYSE: RYAN) is the closest direct public comp, a specialty and wholesale insurance distribution platform that has followed a similar high-growth path off a much larger base. It reports on its own non-GAAP metric, Adjusted EBITDAC (which adds back interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization, and change in contingent consideration, plus stock compensation and certain other items): Adjusted EBITDAC was $811.2 million in fiscal 2024, growing 19.2% to $966.7 million in fiscal 2025 at a 31.7% margin. That growth continued into 2026: Q2 2026 Adjusted EBITDAC was $326.9 million (up 6.0% year-over-year, 35.7% margin) and first-half 2026 Adjusted EBITDAC was $558.9 million (up 9.8% year-over-year, 32.7% margin), with margin growth moderating on higher compensation costs. Converted to the standard EBITDA basis used for market comps, Ryan Specialty currently trades at approximately 12.6x EV/EBITDA (about $14.6 billion EV on about $1.16 billion TTM EBITDA, as of 8/31/2026).
Widening the comp set beyond Ryan Specialty to five more publicly traded insurance distribution platforms puts peer EV/EBITDA multiples in a roughly 10.8x to 18.0x range, averaging about 14.3x with a median of about 14.5x.
*USI Insurance Services is a non-specialty, middle-market broker included as a timely M&A comp, and its multiple reflects an announced, not yet closed, transaction.
Sources: Business Insurance; Thoma Bravo press release; Reinsurance News; S&P Global Market Intelligence; Yahoo Finance; The Motley Fool; StockAnalysis.com; MacroTrends; Accelerant investor relations; Ryan Specialty investor relations; valueinvesting.io; GuruFocus; Multiples.vc; Insurance Journal; Bloomberg; CNBC; Aon and KKR press releases (USI transaction).
Thoma Bravo's implied ~11.8x multiple for Accelerant sits in the lower half of that range: above the two large, diversified brokers (Brown & Brown and Marsh & McLennan, both around 10.8x to 10.9x) but below Ryan Specialty and the higher-growth, more specialty-concentrated names (Arthur J. Gallagher, Goosehead, and Baldwin Insurance Group, all 16x to 18x), and below the peer set's average and median overall.
For a live read on the market: Aon's pending $17.0 billion acquisition of USI Insurance Services, a non-specialty, middle-market broker, from KKR is priced at roughly 16.8x trailing EBITDA.