Private Equity Map — who owns what, and since when

40 private equity firms, 175 companies they have owned across the United States and Canada, from 1989 to 2025. 96 are still held. Every record carries an acquisition date and a citation.

The map draws them as a tunnel where depth is time: the present is the mouth, and flying forward is flying into history. Each company sits in its industry’s wedge at the depth of the month it was bought. It is a way of seeing an ownership pattern that is otherwise buried in filings — which industries a firm concentrates in, when the buying happened, and how long things are held before they are sold.

If you would rather read than fly, the pages below are the same records as plain lists.

Browse

Industries

Groups

Data & methodology

Records are assembled from public sources — company and firm announcements, SEC filings where a deal reaches one, and encyclopedia references where it does not. Every record must carry an acquisition date and at least one source URL to ship; undated records are held back rather than drawn at the wrong depth. Deal values are as reported at the time and are not adjusted for inflation. Full methodology →

This is a hand-curated seed, not a finished dataset. Most citations are still placeholder encyclopedia references pending replacement by SEC filings and primary press. Coverage is partial by construction: deals between two private companies never reach a public filing at all. Treat any figure here as a starting point to verify, not an answer — and nothing here is investment advice.

Questions

What is private equity?
A private equity firm raises money from institutions and wealthy individuals, buys companies outright or takes a controlling stake, holds them for a few years while trying to increase their value, and then sells or floats them. The companies are usually not listed on a stock exchange while they are held, which is why ownership can be hard to trace from the outside.
How current is the data?
This is a hand-curated seed rather than a finished dataset. Every record carries an acquisition date and a citation, but most citations are still placeholder encyclopedia references pending replacement by SEC filings and primary press. Coverage is partial by construction: a deal between two private companies never reaches a public filing at all. Treat anything here as a starting point to verify.
How do I look up who owns a company?
Search the company name in the map, or open the companies index and pick it from the list. Each company page names the firm that owns it, when it was acquired, what was paid, whether it has since been sold, and the source the record came from.
What do the colloquial searches do?
Industry taxonomies do not match how people actually describe businesses. Searching “fast food”, “vets”, “gyms” or “sub sandwiches” resolves to the underlying industry codes, so you can start from the words you would actually use.