Accounting firm UHY is on a buying binge — and it’s just getting started.
After landing a major investment from Summit Partners, the middle-market accounting powerhouse is snapping up smaller firms at a rapid clip, betting that bigger really is better in an industry once dominated by mom-and-pop shops.
The strategy: pump fresh capital into cutting-edge artificial intelligence, roll up specialized firms across the country, and build a national brand that can go toe-to-toe with the industry’s giants — all while serving the millions of privately held businesses that keep America’s economy humming.
“We chose a sponsor at the end of 2024, so we took an investment from Summit Partners,” UHY CEO Steve McCarty told Thomson Reuters on August 6, 2026. “What that did is it supersized our investment into AI and really fueled this inorganic combination piece.”
Neither UHY nor Summit are revealing the size of the check or how much of the company Summit now owns — but the results speak for themselves.
A deal-making machine
UHY isn’t wasting any time. The firm has already notched roughly 15 acquisitions and combinations since launching its growth push in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, McCarty said — a pace that’s brought new offices, fresh expertise, and a growing pipeline of clients hungry for more tax, advisory and outsourced-accounting services.
It’s part of a bigger wave reshaping the accounting world. Private equity money is flooding into the profession, ranging from Citrin Cooperman, Cherry Bekaert, Baker Tilly, Carr Riggs & Ingram and Grant Thornton to smaller roll-up platforms — transforming an industry long defined by scrappy independent firms into one increasingly built on scale, sophistication and deep pockets, as the costs of technology, top talent and technical know-how keep climbing.
Why Wall Street loves accounting
For investors, the math is simple: accounting firms are cash-generating machines, pulling in steady, recurring revenue from tax prep, audits, financial statements and advisory work. Buy enough of them, bundle their services together, and suddenly you’ve got a business selling everything under one roof.
“Acquisitions, if done correctly, should provide immediate increases to overall EBITDA through top line increases and economies of scale on many G&A expenses,” said Joshua Chananie, a partner and board member at SAX Advisors LLC.
The upside for smaller firms getting scooped up? Instant access to big-league offerings. “Rolling up smaller firms creates more opportunities for cross sell, since many of them do not have all the services that the big firms do,” Chananie said — think business valuation, wealth planning, deal advisory and specialized tax work.
There’s also a leaner, meaner side to the deals. Combining back-office operations — marketing, HR, billing, tech systems — cuts out costly duplication and frees up partners to spend more time hunting new business instead of pushing paper. The payoff, according to Chananie: fatter profit margins and a juicier valuation if the firm decides to sell or raise more cash down the road.
Not just another “aggregator”
McCarty is quick to draw a line between UHY and the wave of private-equity-backed “aggregators” gobbling up firms across the country — outfits that buy dozens of practices but let them keep operating like independent fiefdoms under separate brand names.
UHY, he insists, plays a different game entirely.
The firm recently absorbed Anderson, Lower, Whitlow, P.C. — a Quad Cities–based Iowa accounting firm, bringing agricultural-sector muscle that dovetails with UHY’s work on research-and-development tax credits for farm businesses — plus a wave of younger talent and a budding accounting-services unit. It also picked up Hudson Valley firm RBT CPAs, LLP, expanding its footprint between New York City and upstate, along with a fractional-chief-financial-officer advisory shop.
“There are massive differences between integrators like us and firms that are simply aggregating,” McCarty said. “At UHY, there’s no curtain — we’re one firm.”
Rather than running a scattered portfolio of separately branded practices, UHY folds everything it buys into one unified operation — a model McCarty says gives staff more career runway while letting clients stick with the advisers they already trust.
The real test: Keeping people and clients
Of course, buying accounting firms isn’t like buying factories or real estate — the real assets walk out the door every night. If partners and staff bolt after a deal, they can take clients (and revenue) right along with them.
That’s why McCarty says UHY starts talking to employees before deals even close, selling them on the training, technical firepower and specialized colleagues that come with joining a bigger operation.
“We go berserk for great talent,” McCarty said. “When firms join UHY, they get that it’s an opportunity to take a breath and refocus on exactly why they got into public accounting.”
The payoff, he claims: a roughly 99% employee retention rate after deals close — though that figure hasn’t been independently verified.
Clients get the soft-sell treatment too. Instead of hitting them with new pricing, UHY leans on cross-selling. “We don’t come out and say, ‘Here’s your new rate card,'” McCarty said. “We say, ‘Here are all the additional services that you could provide your client.'”
Building a Big Four alternative
The bigger picture: as tax codes, audit rules and financial-reporting standards grow ever more tangled, private-equity cash could give mid-sized firms like UHY the firepower to invest in AI, cybersecurity and specialized talent that used to be reserved for the industry’s biggest players.
Not everyone’s cheering, though. Critics warn the consolidation wave could squeeze out competition, push fees higher, and erode the personal, small-town relationships that made local accounting firms special in the first place.
McCarty, for his part, sees UHY carving out a sweet spot — a national, middle-market alternative to the Big Four, built specifically for closely held and privately owned businesses that have outgrown their neighborhood accountant but aren’t ready for a mega-firm.
The billion-dollar question now: can UHY deliver bigger margins, broader services and investor-backed growth without losing the personal touch that made smaller firms worth buying in the first place?
