2026年冬季网络安全行业并购洞察

M&A Industry Insights Winter 2026 Cybersecurity Sector M&A Industry Insights, Winter 2026 Cybersecurity M&A activity surged in 2025, representing a new yearly high for both deal volume (with 303 announced transactions) and value at $78.8billion. Q4 saw several $1 billion-plus transactions, including investments from Palo Alto Networks, ServiceNow, Francisco Partners and Veeam, acrosssegments including observability, exposure management, endpoint protection and data protection. The breadth of buyer interest in the quarter wasnotable, spanning financial and strategic as well as non-cybersecurity buyers. A key feature of the 2025 resurgence in cybersecurity deal-making has been the increasing activity of non-cybersecurity buyers. Technology providersacross the board are responding to their customer demands by establishing or bolstering security divisions, including in 2025 with Mitsubishi’sacquisition of Nozomi Networks, ServiceNow’s acquisitions of Armis and Veza, and Twilio’s acquisition of Stych, and in 2024 with MasterCard’sacquisition of Recorded Future. Sectors in focus throughout 2025 included risk management and compliance, with market tailwinds such as tightening regulation, rising cyber andoperational risk, and a shift to AI-enabled tooling to reduce manual compliance costs. Identity management deals also surged in 2025, driven by theemergence of identity as a primary attack vector, the need for foundational controls for cloud transitions, and the need to manage agentic and machineidentities. AI security continued to drive activity in Q4 2025, with Zscaler picking up SPLX for AI asset discovery and management as just one example. In public markets, Q4 saw continued downward pressure on share prices, with the top quartile for EV/next twelve months revenue multiples continuingto trade down from 10.7x to 9.5x over the quarter, while only the bottom quartile saw a slight uptick in median multiples from 3.5x to 3.7x. Entering 2026 with a busy M&A environment, we expect to see continued focus on key sectors such as AI-enabled threat detection, identitymanagement, and cloud security, and platform consolidation continuing to drive deals in conjunction with a broadening of the “cybersecuritization”theme we are seeing as non-traditional buyers play more of a role in M&A. Cybersecurity M&A Peaks in 2025, Outpacing the 2021 Record Market for Cybersecurity M&A deals continued to remain strong in Q4, concluding a solid 2025 Largest Cybersecurity Acquisitions in Q4 2025 ServiceNow led Q4 deal volume with c.$9bn across two deals, followed by Palo Alto’s acquisition of Chronosphere Armis offers agentless cyber-exposure management and security software thatdiscovers,classifies and monitors managed,unmanaged,IoT,OT andcyber-physical assets over the entire attack surface in real time for enterpriseorganizationsworldwide.Software offers continuous real-time monitoring,vulnerability assessment, risk prioritization and threat detection (integrating withexistingsecurity and IT infrastructure)and includes hybrid on-premisesprotection for air-gapped OT and CPS environments. 492ServiceNow’s acquisition of Armis marked a strategic expansion into OT and IoTsecurity, adding agentless asset visibility to extend its workflow-driven platformbeyond traditional IT and enhance enterprise-wide risk management. Precedent Transactions – Cybersecurity Software Software cybersecurity deals since Jan-24 have had median EV / revenue multiple of 9.9x Precedent Transactions – Managed Security Services Recent managed cyber services deals have had median EV / EBITDA multiple of 11.1x Public Comparables – Cybersecurity Through the Cycle Upper-quartile multiples reached 9.5x, while the median declined to 5.0x, below the 3-year median Performance of Our Technology Investment Banking Practice Cybersecurity Index over the Past 3 YearsEV / Next 12 Months Revenue Public Comparables – Benchmarking Cloudflare and CrowdStrike trading at highest revenue multiples of c. 25x and 20x respectively Top Strategic Acquirors of Cybersecurity Software Most active strategic acquirors of cybersecurity software businesses over the last 5 years Cybersecurity Software Ecosystem Selected Kroll tracked cybersecurity software universe Security Services Market – Value Chain Security services vendors are building out new technology-enabled service and MSSP offerings by leveraging best-of-breed software capabilities Cybersecurity Market Overview Cybersecurity represents a large $200bn+ market Market trends Exponential growth of data The rapid increase in security-related data is overwhelming traditional tools and analysts, requiringadvanced analytics and automation for effective processing. Security teams are struggling to monitor themassive volume of telemetry across their expanding infrastructure, underscoring the urgent need forsophisticated data processing and threat detection tools. Increasing sophistication of threat actors While AI de