Momentum Cyber CEO: 2026 is the ‘year of the land grab’

After a blockbuster 2025 for cybersecurity M&A deals, the industry may be getting an unexpected sequel.

For those who need a quick refresher, there were a total of 261 US cybersecurity M&A deals last year, an 12% uptick from the year prior, according to PitchBook data provided to IT Brew.

It was also a year of colossal transactions. Google’s $32 billion purchase of cloud cybersecurity platform Wiz and Palo Alto Networks’s $25 billion acquisition of CyberArk were just a couple of deals that shook the industry to its core due to their size. J. Eric McAlpine, founder and CEO of cybersecurity investment bank Momentum Cyber, refers to 2025 as the “year of the mega deal” (the bank tracked a total of 400 M&A deals last year).

“We really saw eight substantial deals really drive the market last year in terms of total deal volume by dollar count,” McAlpine said.

But the fun hasn’t stopped yet. If 2025 was the year of the mega deal, McAlpine said 2026 would be the “year of the land grab,” with AI deals stepping into the limelight.

“Last year, AI was the new kid on the block,” McAlpine said. “This year, it’s very much center stage for deal making.”

IT Brew caught up with McAlpine to discuss what’s ahead for buyers and sellers in the market.

The conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.

What do you mean when you say 2026 will be a “land grab” year?

That means that a lot of strategic buyers (buyers who acquire technology to expand their product or portfolio) are acquiring a lot of vendors in the space at an alarming pace, more than we’ve ever seen in the past. In a typical year, you’ll see strategics account for 50%–60% of deal activity. Last year, it was 92%. So far, year-to-date has been 87%. So, they are very much looking at modernizing and future-proofing their platforms.

Is it a buyer’s or seller’s market right now?

It’s actually both, and it sort of depends. It’s nuanced. I would say that it’s a buyer’s market for native-SaaS companies that are trying to position themselves to be AI companies now, and they’re making that pivot, but they’re not getting valuation credit necessarily today for that pivot…so, it certainly is a buyer’s market for those companies.

It is a seller’s market today if you’re doing anything that is very highly innovative around AI security. And so, there’s the haves and the have-nots in today’s dealmaking environment.

What are you seeing buyers look for in deals this year?

Everything AI-related, certainly. If you look at AI governance, that is a topic that seems to continue to come into all of our strategic conversations. How do we handle these agents? What are these agents doing? Who’s in charge of the agents?

That notion of identity and AI governance have [also] come together. You have identity players like Okta and SailPoint, who are very much focused on moving into identifying AI agents in the workloads. And then you have the pure play AI companies that are starting to move into identity and you start to see those worlds kind of come together.

Any tips for sellers on how to make themselves more appealing in this market?

Make sure that you fit into a broader narrative. Make sure that you’re not very narrowly defining one very particular pain point and you become cast as a best-of-breed point solution that can do one thing and solve one pain, because the moral is going to move away from you at some point. The problem is going to move to another attack surface area. And so, make sure that you position your product in the marketplace in a broader sort of platform narrative.

Any predictions for H2 2026?

My forward call would be [to] pay close attention to what the hyperscalers and frontier labs are doing. I believe the hyperscalers and frontier labs are going to play a very meaningful role in our industry through acquisition.