US venture capital investors and corporate buyers are pursuing M&A opportunities as well as helping start-up and scale-up companies fuel the Scottish market.
The latest trading updates from the investment banking giants will have made for welcome reading for dealmakers in Scotland as they look ahead to what 2026 may hold.
With the likes of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley highlighting strong pipelines for their corporate finance teams, hopes are high that the ripples from the US deals pond will be felt far beyond.
Recent activity in the Scottish market has highlighted how US buyers in particular are actively pursuing M&A opportunities, with a clutch of high-profile acquisitions. They include food services behemoth Aramark’s deal to buy a 90 per cent stake in Aberdeen-based Entier, and a US consortium of sports investors acquiring a majority stake in Rangers Football Club.
The latest big-ticket transaction saw an £83m deal for San Francisco-based ride-hailing company Lyft to buy Glasgow’s TBR Global Chauffeuring, which specialises in high-end transport services for major companies and events across the world.
Ambitious, outward looking Scottish business are attractive to ambitious international buyers- Brian Moore
Brian Moore, the Edinburgh-based Dentons corporate partner who acted for TBR on the deal, says there is no shortage of international buyers eyeing Scottish targets.
“Ambitious, outward looking Scottish businesses – particularly with a technology or consumer services angle – are attractive to ambitious international buyers looking to make transformative acquisitions. That is not a trend I see stopping,” says Moore, whose team has worked on a number of cross-border deals involving Scottish firms, including last year’s acquisition of Ascensos by India’s Firstsource.
US venture capital investors have also played an active role in helping start-up and scale-up companies in Scotland raise bumper levels of investment so far this year.
The standout deal in recent weeks saw University of Glasgow spin-out Chemify raise more than £37m in Series B funding to help accelerate its digital chemistry technology and open a Silicon Valley facility. The oversubscribed round was co-led by California’s Wing Venture Capital and Insight Partners, with participation from a syndicate of investors including 8VC and existing backers Triatomic Capital, Blueyard, Rockspring and Eos.
Latest figures show Scottish businesses raised £116.1m in the third quarter of 2025, a rise of more than 200 per cent from £36.2m in the previous quarter.
Amy Burnett, emerging giants Scotland lead for KPMG which compiled the figures, says Scottish companies are demonstrating “real innovation and global growth potential”.
“This diversity and drive are helping to attract investors’ attention and strengthen Scotland’s position as a leading hub for enterprise.”
Despite the strong international appetite for Scottish businesses, 2025 has been seen as a relatively subdued period for dealmakers in Scotland.
Although this time last year saw very high levels of activity ahead of a reduction in tax breaks for the sale of business assets, Tom Faichnie, of Quantify Advisors in Aberdeen, says that doesn’t appear to be a factor this year.
“Owner managers are perhaps waiting to sell when they are ready because they’ve hit a certain age or feel they can’t take the business any further rather than it being a tax-driven decision,” he says.
Although Faichne, who established Quantify after a career with KPMG, Deloitte, Barclays and RSM, reports a record pipeline for his own firm, but he says the wider deals market in Scotland seems “relatively quiet”.
For those businesses who are looking to sell in 2026, Faichnie argues that getting themselves ‘sale ready’ is critical.
“In many cases owner managers have taken a level of management out of the business during Covid – perhaps a financial controller or director – and never replaced them,” he argues.
“That means we are coming across firms which haven’t got management accounts so their directors may just be seeing the year-end figures and not the trends that are important to a buyer. That can often lead to delays in a transaction getting over the line.”
Barring global shocks, Denton’s Moore is optimistic about prospects for Scottish dealmaking in 2026.
“Despite disruptive geo-political headwinds there has been encouraging level of M&A activity in Scotland in the last 10 months and our outlook is for a strong year ahead,” he says,
“Private equity players need to exit investments in their portfolios and then invest in new ones, and corporates need to accelerate growth through acquisitions.
“The tech and digital sectors remain very hot, particularly where there is an intersection with higher-value sectors such as healthcare or consumer products.”
