Industry M&A Weekly: Merck's $11.3B Bio-Techne Deal, Qualcomm's Modular Bet, and Four More (2026)

Merck KGaA set the size bar for this deal week, agreeing to pay $11.3 billion for Bio-Techne. The more useful pattern sits outside the headline number: buyers are paying for control layers, the software, data, payments and workflow assets that sit between infrastructure and customer operations.

This issue covers disclosed transactions and one strategic infrastructure commitment announced from June 24 through June 30, 2026, the main window for the week ending July 1.

Deal snapshot

Deal	Sector	Disclosed value and structure	What the buyer is trying to own
Merck KGaA to acquire Bio-Techne	Biotech / life-science tools	$73 per share in cash, or about $11.3 billion enterprise value; expected close by late 2026 or early 2027. 1	Multi-omics, spatial biology, analytical instruments, diagnostics and cell-and-gene-therapy workflow tools.
Qualcomm to acquire Modular	AI software / compute infrastructure	All-stock transaction valued by Reuters at $3.92 billion, close to $4 billion; expected to close in the second half of 2026. 2	A software layer that lets AI models run across different chips without processor-specific code.
Schneider Electric to acquire Cognite	Industrial SaaS / AI	100% of Cognite in an all-cash transaction valued at $3.1 billion; completion expected in the coming quarters. 3	Industrial data contextualization and agentic AI inside AVEVA's industrial software stack.
Persistent Systems to pursue Nagarro	Enterprise software services	Voluntary public takeover offer at €81 per share; The Hindu reported the offer values Nagarro at €1.1 billion. 4 5	European digital-engineering scale, AI implementation talent, ERP/CX delivery and access to industrial, consumer, TMT and BFSI clients.
Deluxe to acquire Celero Commerce	Fintech / payments	All-cash transaction of about $625 million, plus seller transaction expenses and other adjustments; expected close in Q3 2026. 6	Merchant acquiring scale, ISV and partner distribution, and a larger payments/data revenue mix.
Bloom Energy and Brookfield expand AI power partnership	Infrastructure commitment	Brookfield and Bloom expanded their AI-infrastructure power financing framework fivefold to $25 billion. 7	Dedicated fuel-cell power capacity for data centers as AI load growth strains grid access.

The deals that matter

Merck KGaA / Bio-Techne: tools move back toward platform scale

Merck KGaA's $11.3 billion Bio-Techne agreement is the week's cleanest large-cap life-science tools deal. Bio-Techne brings more than 500,000 products, over $1.2 billion of fiscal 2025 net sales, 34 global locations and a portfolio that spans recombinant proteins, antibodies, immunoassays, ProteinSimple instruments and RNAscope spatial-biology technologies. 1

For Merck, this is less about a single product line than about controlling more of the scientific workflow. The company explicitly tied the acquisition to research, bioprocessing and advanced therapeutics, with annual cost synergies of about €140 million expected by year three after closing. 1 That makes the deal a read-through for the broader tools sector: platform breadth, not just reagent catalogs, is getting paid for.

Qualcomm / Modular: the software moat around chips gets a price tag

Qualcomm's nearly $4 billion all-stock Modular deal is an AI-infrastructure acquisition, but the asset is software. Modular builds a layer for running AI models across different processors, reducing the need to write separate code for every chip environment. Reuters framed the transaction as a direct challenge to Nvidia's CUDA advantage, the developer software layer that keeps much of the AI ecosystem tied to Nvidia hardware. 2

The transaction fits Qualcomm's attempt to move deeper into data centers. The hardware road map matters, but this deal says the company does not want to compete on silicon alone. If customers care about cost, portability and inference performance, owning the developer layer may matter as much as shipping the chip.

Schneider Electric / Cognite: industrial AI moves inside AVEVA

Schneider Electric agreed to buy Cognite for $3.1 billion in cash and plans to fold it into AVEVA. Cognite says it had more than $170 million of 2025 revenue, more than 800 employees and 36% growth in ARR bookings, with products that contextualize industrial data and support agentic AI workflows. 3

The strategic intent is straightforward: Schneider wants AVEVA to own more of the data foundation used by industrial customers. Industrial AI requires plant data, asset context and engineering records to be usable by software agents. Cognite gives Schneider a platform to make that data usable inside design, operations and maintenance workflows, rather than leaving the integration layer to third parties.

Persistent / Nagarro: digital engineering consolidates for AI programs

Persistent's bid for Nagarro is a services-scale deal with product-market logic. The official announcement says Persistent, through Galaxy Germany Holding SE, plans an all-cash voluntary takeover at €81 per share, has already secured roughly 21% of Nagarro through the largest shareholder, and is seeking a minimum acceptance threshold of 50% plus one share. 4

Nagarro brings about 18,500 employees across more than 40 countries and roughly €1 billion of 2025 revenue; The Hindu reported the deal value at €1.1 billion. 5 For Persistent, the acquisition would add European reach, ERP and customer-experience delivery, and more enterprise AI implementation capacity. The combined group says it would have a roughly $2.9 billion revenue run rate and more than 46,000 employees. 4

Deluxe / Celero: payments scale keeps moving into software channels

Deluxe agreed to acquire Celero Commerce for about $625 million in cash, plus certain seller expenses and adjustments. The target is a payment-processing company focused on small and midsize businesses and strategic partners; Deluxe said the combination would broaden distribution through banks, software vendors, independent sales organizations and direct channels. 6

The financial detail explains the rationale. Deluxe said the combined company and Celero processed about $70 billion of gross transaction volume in 2025, while Celero generated more than $200 million of 2025 revenue with a 28% adjusted EBITDA margin. 6 That is not just a merchant-book acquisition. It is a bid to shift Deluxe's mix toward payments and data, with Celero's partner network as the route to more embedded distribution.

Bloom / Brookfield: AI infrastructure commitments belong on the same watchlist

This is not an acquisition, so it sits slightly outside the M&A column. It is still material enough to include. Bloom Energy and Brookfield expanded their AI-infrastructure power financing framework from up to $5 billion to $25 billion, aimed at deploying Bloom fuel cells for data centers. 7

The reason to track it beside software deals is that AI infrastructure is turning energy access into a competitive constraint. Reuters noted that data-center operators are increasingly turning to nuclear, renewables and fuel cells to meet AI and cloud-computing power demand. 7 In practical M&A terms, power commitments may shape who can scale AI workloads before the next software asset even comes to market.

Cross-deal themes

1. Buyers paid for control points, not just revenue

The week's strongest common thread is ownership of bottlenecks. Qualcomm bought a developer software layer. Schneider bought an industrial data foundation. Deluxe bought payments distribution and processing scale. Merck bought life-science workflow breadth. Each asset sits at a point where customers either standardize their workflows or bear switching costs.

That is why headline revenue multiples are only part of the story. Cognite's 2025 revenue was above $170 million against a $3.1 billion transaction value, while Bio-Techne's fiscal 2025 net sales were above $1.2 billion against an $11.3 billion enterprise value. 3 1 Buyers are paying for where the asset sits in the operating stack.

2. AI is driving both software and non-software deal logic

AI showed up in more than the obvious compute deals. Modular gives Qualcomm a path around chip-specific programming. Cognite gives Schneider industrial AI data plumbing. Persistent/Nagarro is about delivering enterprise AI programs at global scale. Bloom/Brookfield is about the power constraint beneath all of that.

The clean takeaway for corporate development teams: AI exposure is no longer confined to model companies or chipmakers. The targets getting bought are often the implementation layer, the data layer, the energy layer or the workflow layer around AI deployment.

3. Fintech consolidation is still about distribution

Deluxe/Celero is a useful reminder that fintech M&A often comes down to channels. Deluxe highlighted financial institutions, ISVs, independent sales organizations and direct sales as the combined go-to-market routes. 6 The payment-processing economics matter, but the reason to pay $625 million is the right to sell more services through more embedded routes.

What to watch next week

Two open questions carry over. First, whether more AI infrastructure transactions look like Bloom/Brookfield, where capital commitments substitute for classic acquisitions. Second, whether software buyers keep paying high prices for control layers with modest standalone revenue, as Schneider did with Cognite and Qualcomm did with Modular.

If those two patterns continue, July's M&A tape may look less like a list of product acquisitions and more like a race to own the operating stack around AI, industrial data and payments.

Industry M&A Weekly: Merck's $11.3B Bio-Techne Deal, Qualcomm's Modular Bet, and Four More