Davide Boiardi, Founder of AssetMax, spent the day at the M&A and Private Equity Forum Italy 2026 at the Principe di Savoia, Milan (17 September) — the senior gathering of Italy’s deal market. This is not a conference brochure. It is what the room is actually working through, read through the question that matters to an investment committee: can this deal be underwritten?
1. The record year is a mid-market story
Italy has posted roughly €130bn of transaction value this year — a figure, as Chiomenti’s Filippo Modulo put it, few had ever heard applied to Italy. But Emanuela Petteno of PwC Italia spent her opening dismantling the “falling deal count” narrative: on Mergermarket data to 12 September, announced Italian deals are up in number as well as value. The value story is not only banking consolidation; she counted 27 announced deals above €1bn in 2026 against 17 in 2022, and for the first time outbound value has exceeded inbound once international private equity buyers are stripped out.
The count, though, is growing in only one place. Deals above €1bn are stable; those between €250m and €1bn are stable. The growth is below €250m, and within that in the smaller tickets and the add-ons. Valentina Franceschini of Wise Sgr sees roughly 200–250 potential deals a year — a quarter of the last twelve months’ flow was in companies below €10m of EBITDA, and that share is rising.
Her warning matters for how these deals are underwritten: abundant small opportunities tempt funds to lower the bar on leadership, differentiation and customer concentration — ending up with assets that performed financially but carry no strategic value at exit.
2. Buy-and-build: the returns fall off a cliff after the second add-on
Add-ons are now 65% of the roughly 350 leveraged deals a year in Italy, and buy-and-build features in around 85% of platform deals. Daniele Moscato of BPER, who sees almost every Italian LBO, then produced the number that should worry anyone running a roll-up on autopilot: on the bank’s analysis, deals with up to two add-ons show far stronger median returns than those with more, and vertical add-ons in the same sector outperform diversifying ones by a wide margin.
The structural implication: post-deal leverage now sits below 3.5x EBITDA in 53% of cases. With leverage no longer doing the work, funds have to go back to private equity’s origins and take on industrial projects where the value levers are inside the company.
Moscato’s inference was that industrial and synergy logic has to drive every bolt-on — and that funding for a two-to-three-year acquisition programme should be structured at day one, with accordion facilities, rather than negotiated deal by deal. Elena Busson of Chiomenti added how deals are being built: carve-outs are now planned at acquisition, and earn-outs close the price gap nominally but feed the litigation department later.
3. AI in dealmaking: the shortlist will be the same for everyone
Giovanni Calia of Fortlane Partners opened the AI session with the clearest version of the strategic problem. WeCap Capital, a $7bn Boston fund, uses an AI agent system called Petra to automate pre-diligence — what used to take weeks now takes hours. In twelve to twenty-four months, he argued, every fund in the room will have a Petra equivalent. The short list will be the same for everyone, because the models are the same and the public data is public.
His answer had three parts: proprietary and experiential data accumulated over decades of investments and non-investments; the relational soft skill of being chosen by an entrepreneur; and the judgment of the investment team. Federica Sallorenzo of Fondo Italiano d’Investimento described the prerequisite the room had either done or was doing — spending more than a year standardising data architecture into a single ERP repository before turning AI on the data.
Infrastructure and private credit: where conviction is built or lost
On infrastructure, the panel explained why Italy’s deal count has grown from 80 a year to more than 200 while the hard assets lag. Lorenzo Prada of EQT described how EdgeConneX reached final investment decision on 300 MW in Italy — around €3bn — after six years of looking for sites. Training-scale facilities are almost impossible on Italy’s grid; inference sites of around 50 MW are the realistic institutional product.
On private credit, the panel agreed hybrid capital is no longer alternative — and that the Italian market is still several years behind the conversation. Marco Prono of JP Morgan drew the distinction he finds underused: whether the borrower is a private equity-owned company or a family-run one changes everything about what private credit can achieve. Gregorio Consoli of Chiomenti set out the five points that must align for a hybrid structure to create value: coupon, principal treatment, governance and decision rights, upside participation, and exit mechanics.
What this means for AssetMax clients
Read together, the day described an Italian deal market where the evidence bar has moved and most processes have not. Whether it is the industrial logic of the third add-on, the readiness of a data-centre platform, or the governance rights written into a hybrid structure, conviction now has to be built on evidence rather than narrative. That is the work AssetMax exists for: reducing execution risk before ownership transfers, validating complexity during diligence, and turning execution into measurable outcomes.
If a theme from Milan applies to a deal you are already working, Davide is continuing the conversation. Twenty minutes, no qualification process, and a shared read on where sharper evidence changes the answer.
Book a 20-minute conversation with Davide →
Davide Boiardi is Founder of AssetMax, working across pre-deal intelligence, technology and operational due diligence, value creation tracking and exit readiness.