Accelerate Partners was recently named No. 1,131 on the 2026 Inc. 5000 list, the annual ranking of America’s fastest-growing private companies.1 It is a meaningful milestone for our team, but the more interesting story is not the ranking itself. It is what the ranking reflects about the environment our clients are operating in right now, and why independent, supplier-agnostic technology advisory has become a strategic necessity rather than a discretionary expense.
When I founded Accelerate Partners in March 2020, the technology advisory landscape looked very different than it does today. Cloud migration was still treated as a multi-year initiative rather than a baseline expectation. Cybersecurity budgets were shaped primarily by compliance checklists. Private equity operating partners rarely had a dedicated seat for technology strategy at the deal table. Six years later, all three of those assumptions have been upended, and the pace of change is precisely why we have grown the way we have.
Being ranked #1,131 on the Inc. 5000 in our first appearance confirms that belief and reflects the hard work of an extraordinary team. Every one of our 11 employees has played a critical role in this success. While we’re honored by this recognition, we’re even more excited about what lies ahead as we continue helping clients accelerate their business outcomes through technology, cybersecurity, cloud, and AI solutions.
That milestone captures something worth unpacking. Growth of this kind rarely happens in a vacuum. It tends to track closely with the urgency organizations feel around the problems a firm is built to solve. In our case, that means three converging pressures: security spending that is accelerating faster than governance can keep pace with it, a private equity industry that has made technology a formal value creation lever, and a regulated-industry client base that can no longer treat compliance and cybersecurity as separate conversations.
Global information security spending is projected to reach $244.2 billion in 2026, a 13.3 percent increase over the prior year, according to Gartner’s most recent forecast.2 Cloud security is the fastest-growing subsegment within that figure, expanding at 28.8 percent as organizations continue shifting core infrastructure off legacy, on-premises systems.2 For CTOs and CISOs inside mid-market and enterprise organizations, that is not an abstract statistic. It is a budget conversation that is happening right now, often without a clear framework for prioritization.
The governance gap is the part that should concern every board and audit committee. Gartner predicts that 40 percent of enterprise applications will include task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026, up from less than 5 percent at the start of the year.3 Yet only about 6 percent of organizations report having an advanced AI security strategy in place.3 That is roughly an eight-to-one imbalance between adoption and oversight, and it is precisely the kind of gap that turns into a headline. The World Economic Forum’s Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026 reinforces this, noting that 94 percent of surveyed leaders expect AI to be the most significant driver of change in cybersecurity in the year ahead, cutting both ways as a tool for defenders and a new attack surface for adversaries.4
For companies in financial services, healthcare, legal, and other regulated sectors, this is not a future problem to plan for eventually. Regulators are increasingly holding boards and executives personally accountable for compliance failures tied to how AI and cloud systems are governed.2 That accountability is exactly why a growing number of our engagements start with a straightforward request: help us understand what we are actually exposed to, and help us build a roadmap that a board can approve with confidence.
The private equity side of our business tells a similar story from a different angle. Roughly 60 percent of private equity value creation plans now formally include technology initiatives, a shift from a decade ago when technology was treated as a back-office cost center rather than a driver of enterprise value.5 Add-on acquisitions accounted for roughly 40 percent of total PE deal value in the most recent full year of data, and each of those transactions carries real technology integration risk, from incompatible systems to inherited security gaps that were never fully assessed during diligence.6
This has changed who private equity firms bring to the table. The rise of the Technology Operating Partner, an executive who bridges financial oversight and operational technology leadership, reflects a broader recognition that technology decisions made during the first 100 days after a deal closes often determine whether a value creation plan succeeds or stalls.7 Firms that once relied on informal, ad hoc technology input are now building dedicated frameworks for it, whether through in-house operating partners or independent advisory relationships that plug into the deal team from diligence through exit.8
The stakes are not abstract. Technology readiness has become investor readiness. Portfolio companies with underdeveloped cybersecurity programs or fragmented systems following an acquisition do not just carry operational risk, they can see reduced valuations and slower exit timelines.9 On the other side of the ledger, disciplined technology cost optimization, including spend audits, vendor consolidation, and strategic sourcing, can drive cost reductions of 20 percent or more, directly improving the capital efficiency metrics that matter most to operating partners and deal teams.10 This is the exact intersection where our private equity technology advisory practice spends most of its time, translating technology risk and opportunity into language that fits inside an investment thesis.
The broader technology and IT procurement consulting market is expanding quickly. The global procurement consulting market is projected to grow from approximately $12.49 billion in 2025 to $22.97 billion by 2030, a compound annual growth rate of nearly 13 percent.11 Separately, top-quartile procurement teams are now allocating roughly 24 percent of their total budget to technology, a figure that would have seemed unusually high just a few years ago.12
Growth of that magnitude naturally attracts more vendors, more resellers, and more consultants who are compensated, directly or indirectly, by the very suppliers they are recommending. That is the exact dynamic our supplier-agnostic technology procurement model is built to avoid. When a firm’s revenue is not tied to which cloud provider, security platform, or managed services vendor a client ultimately selects, the recommendation can be built entirely around fit, risk tolerance, and total cost of ownership rather than commission structure.
This independence becomes more valuable, not less, as the underlying technology decisions get more complex. Private equity dry powder available for deployment remains substantial, but sponsors are becoming more selective and more focused on operational discipline rather than multiple expansion as the primary driver of returns.13 In that environment, technology decisions need to hold up under real scrutiny, not just look reasonable in a pitch deck.
Everything above applies with extra weight to organizations in financial services, healthcare, legal, manufacturing, and real estate, the core industries we serve. These sectors cannot treat cybersecurity, cloud migration, or AI adoption as purely technical decisions, because every one of those decisions now carries a compliance dimension that a general-purpose IT vendor is rarely equipped to evaluate.
Consider a regional bank or lender migrating core systems to the cloud. The technology decision, including which provider, which architecture, and which security controls, is inseparable from the regulatory question of data sovereignty, examiner expectations, and third-party risk management. The same is true for a healthcare organization evaluating an AI-assisted documentation tool, where HIPAA exposure has to be assessed before a vendor demo is ever scheduled, not after. Manufacturing companies pursuing federal contracts face their own version of this through CMMC certification requirements, where a misstep in scoping or implementation can cost a company its eligibility for an entire category of revenue.
This is precisely why regulated organizations tend to get the most value from an advisor with no stake in the outcome of the vendor selection. A reseller or managed service provider is generally incentivized to sell what they already offer. An independent advisor is incentivized to get the client to the right answer, even when that answer is “stay with your current vendor” or “delay this initiative until governance catches up.” That distinction matters enormously in board-level conversations, where the ability to say a recommendation was arrived at independently carries real weight with auditors, examiners, and outside counsel.
For organizations trying to translate all of this into an actual plan, I consistently see four questions separate the companies that convert technology spending into real value from those that simply spend more without a clear return.
First, where is the gap between what you have deployed and what you can actually govern? If AI agents, cloud workloads, or new platforms have been adopted faster than policy and oversight can keep pace, that gap needs to be measured and closed before it becomes a headline. This is the same 40 percent adoption versus 6 percent governance imbalance referenced earlier, and it exists inside most organizations in some form.3
Second, does your technology roadmap map directly to your business or investment thesis? For a private equity backed portfolio company, that means the technology plan should trace clearly to the value creation plan the deal team underwrote. For an independent regulated business, it means the roadmap should trace to specific business outcomes, not simply to a list of tools worth adopting.
Third, who is evaluating vendor recommendations, and what is their incentive structure? This is the independence question again, and it is worth asking explicitly rather than assuming the answer. A five-minute conversation about how an advisor is compensated will tell you almost everything you need to know about whether their recommendations can be trusted at face value.
Fourth, is your technology spend actually being measured against cost and risk reduction, not just capability? Disciplined vendor consolidation, spend audits, and strategic sourcing can meaningfully reduce total technology cost while simultaneously reducing risk, a combination that is rare in most other categories of corporate spending.10
Organizations that can answer all four of these questions with confidence are generally the ones translating technology investment into measurable value. Organizations that cannot are usually the ones calling an advisory firm after something has already gone wrong, which is a far more expensive way to get the same answer.
The 2026 Inc. 5000 list as a whole tells a story of resilience. This year’s honorees collectively generated more than $385 billion in 2025 revenue and added over 627,000 jobs to the U.S. economy over the past three years, with a median three-year growth rate of 130 percent across the full list. Artificial Intelligence and Data companies posted the highest median revenue growth of any industry represented, at 279 percent, underscoring just how central that category has become to the broader growth story this year.14
Being part of that list in our very first year of eligibility is meaningful to me and to our whole team, but it is not the point of this article. The point is that the conditions driving our growth, including accelerating security spend without matching governance, private equity’s structural embrace of technology as a value creation lever, and a procurement landscape growing complex enough to reward independence, are not temporary. They are the operating environment our clients will be navigating for the foreseeable future.
Our cybersecurity advisory team continues to help clients close the gap between adoption and governance described above. Our cloud strategy practice is spending more time than ever helping regulated organizations modernize infrastructure without introducing new compliance exposure. And our AI advisory work has shifted from exploratory conversations to governance frameworks that boards can actually approve.
If this year’s recognition reflects anything beyond our team’s effort, it is validation that regulated industries and private equity backed organizations need a technology partner whose only obligation is to the client’s outcome. That was true when I founded Accelerate Partners in 2020, and if anything, it is truer now.
For organizations evaluating their own technology roadmap, our Executive Guides library offers frameworks for approaching these decisions systematically, and my team is always available to talk through where your organization stands today.
1. Yahoo Finance / Inc. “Inc. Unveils the 2026 Inc. 5000 List, Recognizing America’s Fastest-Growing Private Companies.” https://finance.yahoo.com/small-business/articles/inc-unveils-2026-inc-5000-110000462.html
2. Software Strategies Blog. “Top 6 Cybersecurity Trends from Gartner’s 2026 Security Forecast.” https://softwarestrategiesblog.com/2026/02/10/gartner-cybersecurity-trends-2026/
3. Software Strategies Blog. “Information Security Spending 2026 Hits $244.2B As Agentic AI Outpaces Defenses 8 to 1.” https://softwarestrategiesblog.com/2026/03/24/information-security-spending-2026/
4. World Economic Forum. “Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026: The Trends Reshaping Cybersecurity.” https://www.weforum.org/publications/global-cybersecurity-outlook-2026/in-full/3-the-trends-reshaping-cybersecurity/
5. LCA Strategies. “Private Equity Technology Services.” https://www.lcastrategies.com/industries/private-equity
6. E78 Partners. “Technology as a Value Creator for Private Equity Portfolio Companies.” https://e78partners.com/blog/technology-as-a-value-creator-for-private-equity-portfolio-companies/
7. Korn Ferry. “Tech Titans in Private Equity.” https://www.kornferry.com/institute/tech-titans-in-private-equity
8. Fortium Partners. “How Technology Leadership Can Unleash Private Equity Portfolio Value.” https://www.fortiumpartners.com/insights/how-technology-leadership-can-unleash-private-equity-portfolio-value
9. Renew Technology Advisors. “Private Equity and their Portfolio Companies Technology and Security Challenges.” https://renewtechadvisors.com/portfolio-companies-and-private-equity
10. E78 Partners. “Technology as a Value Creator for Private Equity Portfolio Companies.” https://e78partners.com/blog/technology-as-a-value-creator-for-private-equity-portfolio-companies/
11. Mordor Intelligence. “Procurement Consulting Market Size & Growth to 2030.” https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/procurement-consulting-market
12. Procurement Tactics. “Procurement Statistics: 60 Key Figures of 2026.” https://procurementtactics.com/procurement-statistics/
13. Private Equity List. “Private Equity & Venture Capital: Emerging Trends Guide 2026.” https://blog.privateequitylist.com/private-equity-venture-capital-emerging-trends/
14. citybiz. “Inc. 5000 Companies Generate $385 Billion as 2026 Ranking Debuts.” https://www.citybiz.co/article/887225/inc-5000-companies-generate-385-billion-as-2026-ranking-debuts/