deals

Deals (w/e 11/21/25)

Lee McCabe

24 Nov 2025 — 3 min read

Leonard Green Buys the Golf Circus Back

Topgolf Callaway is carving off the fun part: it’s selling a 60% stake in its Topgolf venues and Toptracer business to Leonard Green & Partners at a $1.1 billion valuation, generating about $770 million in cash to de-lever and buy back stock. Callaway paid roughly double that headline value when it folded Topgolf in during the stimulus-golf sugar high, so this is effectively a do-over: LGP gets a distressed experiential asset with real brand equity, and Callaway gets to pretend the last five years were just a very expensive bridge loan. Structurally this is classic sponsor math: stabilize build costs, slow roll new sites, lean on pricing and event traffic, then sell the story as “disciplined growth” instead of “we overbuilt driving ranges at peak rates.” Link

CD&R Wraps Up Bubble Wrap

Sealed Air, the packaging name everyone only remembers when they pop Bubble Wrap, has agreed to a $10.3 billion all-cash take-private from CD&R, at $42.15 per share – a fat premium to the pre-rumor tape and about a 41% uplift to the “unaffected” stock. Top line is tired in parts of the portfolio and activists were already rattling the cage, so CD&R is basically betting that public markets were mis-pricing a regulated, cash-generative dullard. The playbook writes itself: simplify SKUs, push automation and higher-margin systems, and re-gear a global footprint out of the quarterly-earnings spotlight. The risk is you’re still tied to industrial capex and e-commerce volumes, but that’s exactly the kind of macro noise you’d expect a value-oriented fund to underwrite. Link

News (w/e 1/9/26)

Eir Partners Closes $1 Billion Fund Focused on Healthcare Technology Miami-based Eir Partners closed its third fund at $1 billion, blowing past its $800 million target in just a few months. The raise reinforces a clear LP preference: specialist healthcare investors with repeatable playbooks still get paid attention, even as

Deals (w/e 1/9/26)

Veritas Capital Buys Majority Stake in Global Healthcare ExchangeVeritas Capital is acquiring a majority stake in Global Healthcare Exchange (GHX), the healthcare supply-chain software platform used by hospitals and suppliers across the U.S. GHX sits in the unglamorous but essential plumbing of healthcare, where scale and data matter more

Private equity has quietly entered a new sport: competitive talent hoarding.

Every firm now appears to be stockpiling operators the way children collected Pokémon cards. Operating Partners, Senior Advisors, Venture Partners, EIRs—hand out a title, add them to a slide, declare victory. LPs love the imagery. It signals “capability.” It looks sophisticated. It gives the impression of a tightly coordinated

AI isn’t coming for middle management. It’s already rearranging the job description.

The layer of people whose primary function is aggregating information, writing summaries, building decks, and “managing up” is about to feel the shift first. Not because AI is more insightful than they are, but because it’s cheaper, faster, and doesn’t need three pre-meetings to prepare for the meeting.