London Stock Exchange Group has agreed to buy Octus, a New York company that sells intelligence, data and analysis on credit markets, for $3.535 billion in cash. LSEG announced the deal to the London market on October 22, 2026, nine days after confirming it was in talks.
The sellers are funds advised by private equity firm Permira and Octus management, including founder and chief executive Kent Collier. LSEG will pay with external debt. The deal needs regulatory approval and is expected to close in the first half of 2027.
After completion Octus will sit inside LSEG's Data & Analytics division. Collier will keep running the business and report to Gianluca Biagini and Ron Lefferts, the division's co-heads.
What Octus built
Collier founded the company in 2013 under the name Reorg. It is headquartered in New York and has offices in other countries. According to LSEG, Octus has more than 900 employees, about 750 customers and over 40,000 individual users at buy-side firms, investment banks, law firms and advisory firms.
Its focus is credit that is hard to see from public markets: private, illiquid and distressed debt. Octus collects loan documentation, covenants and deal terms that are not easy to find and turns them into structured, searchable data. It also offers news and expert analysis across the life of a credit, plus workflow and portfolio management tools. Customers reach the data through Octus' own platform, through an MCP connector for AI models, or through AI-based workflows.
LSEG said Octus expects revenue of more than $300 million in 2026, growing at a strong double-digit rate, with an adjusted EBITDA margin of about 40%. Revenue has grown at a double-digit compound rate since 2022. At the agreed price, LSEG is paying a little under 12 times that expected revenue.
“Combining Octus' leading proprietary data and intelligence with LSEG's data and analytics business creates a powerful offering for our customers, and further accelerates our growth.”
Why LSEG is buying
LSEG already sells liquid credit products, including IFR news, evaluated pricing, corporate actions data, the Yield Book analytics platform and LPC loan market coverage. Octus adds coverage of the illiquid and private end of the market, and LSEG said the goal is a single fixed income data, analytics and workflow platform across the whole credit spectrum.
Octus is also strong with hedge funds and alternative investment managers, a group of customers where LSEG said it has been less established. LSEG estimates that private credit has grown to about $3.5 trillion and that the market for private markets data and workflow tools is worth $7 billion to $9 billion a year and growing at a double-digit rate.
LSEG plans to sell Octus products across its global customer base and to build combined products with Workspace, LPC, Yield Book, PRS and Tradeweb. Tradeweb, the bond trading venue, agreed days earlier to buy credit trading platform Trumid for $1.97 billion.
"Combining Octus' leading proprietary data and intelligence with LSEG's data and analytics business creates a powerful offering for our customers, and further accelerates our growth," LSEG chief executive David Schwimmer said in the announcement. Collier said he was excited about Octus becoming part of the group.
The financial case
LSEG said the deal will add to organic revenue growth in its Data & Analytics division straight away and supports its guidance of around 7% organic subscription revenue growth for the group in 2027. It expects the deal to be neutral to adjusted earnings per share in the first full year after completion and to add to earnings after that.
Borrowing for the deal will push LSEG's leverage to around the top of its target range of 1.5 to 2.5 times at the end of 2027, including the Octus purchase and a £3 billion share buyback, before falling back to the middle of the range by the end of 2028. Morgan Stanley and Barclays advised LSEG. Evercore and Goldman Sachs advised the Octus shareholders.
LSEG first confirmed the talks on October 13, after Bloomberg News reported them, and said at the time that no final agreement had been reached. The signed deal followed nine days later.
From Warburg Pincus to Permira
Octus has changed hands before. Permira bought a controlling stake from Warburg Pincus in 2022 in a deal that valued the company at $1.3 billion, according to Private Equity Wire as cited by Pipeline Road. The LSEG price is more than two and a half times that valuation.
For Collier, the sale caps a 13-year run from a restructuring news service to a credit data business that LSEG now values at more than $3.5 billion, with the founder staying on to run it inside one of the largest market data groups.
