The value of the biggest deals announced in Arkansas in 2025 totaled $5.15 billion, a 72% decline over 2024’s $18.55 billion.
The number of big deals in the state — those believed to be worth $10 million or more — soared, however, reaching 125 last year compared with 80 in 2024, an increase of 56%.
And the 2024 total included a whopping transaction: Uniti Group’s $13.4 billion purchase of Windstream Holdings. In 2025, no deal in Arkansas for which Arkansas Business could determine a value reached $1 billion.
Arkansas bucked the global trend of surging values in mergers and acquisitions last year: M&A values worldwide reached $4.81 trillion, up 41% from 2024 and the second-highest total on record after 2021, according to Dealogic, a financial markets platform.
Megadeals — deals of $10 billion or more — drove the global increase, reaching a record total of 70. These included transactions like Netflix’s planned $72 billion purchase of Warner Bros. and HBO Max, and Union Pacific’s proposed $71.5 billion acquisition of Norfolk Southern.
M&A activity, however, started 2025 off slow, hampered by the tariff uncertainty created by the incoming Trump administration.
“The market certainly started slower than everybody had anticipated,” said Marshall McKissack, who leads the M&A practice at Stephens Inc. of Little Rock. “A lot of it had to do with the new administration and tariff uncertainty.
“It’s really kind of a tale of two halves,” he said. “The first half of the year, a little bit slower; back half of the year, the market started to hit its stride.”
In addition, McKissack pointed out, “It’s really kind of a tale of two markets though. The overall dollar volume was certainly driven by large transactions,” those of $5 billion or more. But the middle market, those deals of $100 million to $1 billion, “was definitely softer and slower,” he said, comparing it to the markets of 2023 and 2024.
Intriguing Deals
In Arkansas, the top deal on the list was the $900 million sale by Rausch Coleman Homes of Fayetteville of 24,000 homesites to Millrose Properties of Miami.
The No. 2 transaction was the $618.5 million sale by BSR Real Estate Investment Trust of Little Rock of nine multifamily properties in Texas to AvalonBay Communities of Arlington, Virginia.
As always, this list contains caveats. The $5.15 billion total is based on the 97 transactions for which Arkansas Business was able to find values. But the value of 28 other deals believed to total $10 million or more could not be determined as of press time, and any one of those transactions could easily skew the total value. And, of course, deals that weren’t announced didn’t make the list.
One example of a transaction certainly totaling hundreds of millions of dollars was the sale of Travel Nurse of America of North Little Rock, owned by Gridiron Capital of New Canaan, Connecticut, to TotalMed Holdings of Appleton, Wisconsin. Travel Nurse, which places nurses and other health care professionals in temporary assignments at hospitals and other facilities, reported $1.01 billion in revenue in 2022, before it was acquired by Gridiron.
Real estate deals were prominent. BSR, in addition to selling property, also bought, appearing on the list three times with purchases of apartment complexes in Texas.
The developing lithium industry in south Arkansas also features on the list of biggest deals. Energy Exploration Technologies of Austin, Texas, paid $26.1 million for Daytona Lithium, a subsidiary of Pantera Lithium, a sale that included 35,000 gross acres of Smackover lithium brine resources in south Arkansas. And Chevron U.S.A. paid an undisclosed sum for two leasehold acreage positions in the lithium brine fields of southwest Arkansas and northeast Texas comprising about 100,000 net acres.
As it did in 2024, Symbiosis Capital Management of Bentonville stayed active in 2025. Among its big investments were a $120 million ownership stake in a biotechnology company and a $112 million stake in a radiopharmaceutical company, both of them working on cancer treatments.
Enterprises linked to artificial intelligence appear among the biggest deals, including the $44 million purchase by NewRoad Capital Partners of Rogers, along with others, of a stake in a developer of AI-based workplace safety products.
And Foxden Capital of Little Rock continued to invest in well-established restaurant brands last year, paying $15.71 million for four U.S. Pizza Co. restaurants and a warehouse in Little Rock and one restaurant each in Maumelle and North Little Rock. It also paid an undisclosed sum for a majority stake in Yellow Rocket Concepts, the owner of Lost Forty Brewing Co. and restaurants including Zaza Fine Salad & Wood-Oven Pizza Co., Big Orange, Local Lime, Heights Taco & Tamale Co. and Camp Taco.
AI Enters the Chat
Worldwide, the industries that saw the greatest dealmaking activity were technology, health care and finance.
“If it’s AI, data center, that’s really taken the technology lion’s share” of dealmaking interest, McKissack said. “Traditional software companies, with the threat of AI, have seen valuations decline, interest decline.”
And while the middle market wasn’t great in 2025, he said, Stephens had a record year. “It was really across the board with the exception of software tech,” McKissack said, but deals involving data centers, energy, health care and banking were active.
McKissack is “cautiously optimistic” that the M&A momentum seen at the end of last year will continue into 2026.
And he noted that private equity firms didn’t participate in dealmaking during the last couple of years as much as they did coming out of the COVID pandemic. That means “there’s a tremendous amount of dry powder that continues to sit on the sidelines and will get deployed at some point.”
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