$7.7B insurance firm acquisition backstory: meet the (AI) speed of the moment

In 2019, a Tampa insurance company bucked the trends in the market at the time and went public, raisng more than $220 million. 

There’s a picture from that day that shows about 100 employees of what was then known as Baldwin Risk Partners surrounding the famous Nasdaq podium at the exchange in Manhattan. Nine small children line the front and one person is holding a sign that reads #BRPIPO.

It was Oct. 24 and the company raised $229.6 million on its first day as a public company.

“This is us putting a stake in the ground and saying we are going to build a forever company in Tampa,” CEO Trevor Baldwin said at the time.

The company has undergone many changes since then. That includes a new name. And it includes skyrocketing revenue: up 1,777% since 2018, from $79.9 million to $1.5 billion last year.

But the biggest change is yet to come.

In September, nearly seven years after its IPO, The Baldwin Group announced it was selling a majority share of the company to the founder of Dell Technologies, along with AI-focused technology holding firm Sequence Holdings, for $7.7 billion. he Baldwin Group would return to being privately-held as part of the transaction. 

At $7.7 billion, the deal is one of the largest ever in the region that would take a public company private. It's more than $1.5 billion Apollo Global Management paid for Clearwater IT product distribution firm Tech Data in June 2020. 

This story is about why The Baldwin Group made the decision to sell, the market forces that may have led to it, who wins and what could be next. The Baldwin Group declined to make Trevor Baldwin or any other executives available for this story. In an email Friday, a company spokesperson wrote “our executives are booked and not able to do interviews.” Sequence and Dell declined to comment.

But, given that Baldwin is a public company, many of the details are contained in public filings, including annual and quarterly earnings calls and reports.

Trevor Baldwin also wrote a seven-page letter to employees and stakeholders at the time the sale was announced, Sept. 14. In it, he shares why the decision was made, what he sees in the future and why going private is a positive move.

“Our vision is unchanged. Our strategy is unchanged. Our leadership and our culture are unchanged,” Baldwin writes.

“The only thing changing is the capital structure around the firm, and we are changing it because the moment in front of us demands it.”

By the numbers

Founded in 2011, The Baldwin Group is an insurance, risk mitigation, employee benefits and wealth management company that works with businesses and individuals.

Heading into this past summer, Baldwin’s stock price had “been an up and down one for investors” for the past year according to an analysis posted on the website Seeking Alpha, a platform for investors. This was due to a slowdown in growth and fears about how AI would affect the industry.

But the stock price began in to rise in mid-June as rumors circulated the company may be considering a sale or merger. Seeking Alpha reported June 22 that shares “surged 20% as rumors percolated over a potential go-private transaction.”

A month later, Trevor Baldwin, on a July 30 call with investors, acknowledged there were “rumors in the marketplace around our potential exploration of capital structure alternatives” but, not surprisingly declined to address any questions on the topic.

Source: The Baldwin Group 2026 proxy statement

Note: Lowry Baldwin is the chairman and a founder partner of the firm, and Trevor Baldwin's father. 

The sale price was announced at $32.50 per share — an 87.5% premium over the $17.33 closing price on June 17, the day before reports of a transaction surfaced. (On Sept. 11, the Friday before the Monday sale announcement, Baldwin shares closed at $29.65 according to Nasdaq. Shares closed at $31.09 on Friday Sept. 12, 2025.)

As for the $7.7 billion price tag, the figure is based on an equity purchase price of approximately $4.6 billion and approximately $3.1 billion of debt that will be assumed or refinanced. 

Seeking Alpha, in its analysis of the deal, believes Dell and Sequence were willing to pay the multiple despite the concerns over AI disrupting the industry that had affected Baldwin shares early in the year; Baldwin announced a multiple of approximately 20 times the company’s “trailing-twelve-month Adjusted EBITDA of approximately $396 million."

While a high multiple like that may have kept others away, the Seeking Alpha analysis says Dell is familiar with AI and does not share the fears others may. Plus, Baldwin has embraced AI and cites the technology as part of the reason for the sale.

in his letter to stakeholders, Trevor Baldwin doesn’t disclose how the sale number was reached.

But he does share why the company made the decision to sell: access to capital.

Become more nimble

“My conviction, and the urgency behind this decision,” Trevor Baldwin writes, “is that over the next several years a handful of winners, perhaps fewer, will emerge with advantages that compound recursively: better tools attract better talent, better talent wins more clients, more clients produce more data and more resources to invest, and the flywheel turns faster with every rotation.”

The Baldwin Group, he adds, obviously intends to be among those that prosper. 

Courtesy image

To be ambitious companies need to have freedom to make decisions based on opportunities and that is something public markets don’t usually tolerate. Companies like The Baldwin Group, he says, need to move at “the speed the moment demands rather than the speed the quarterly cycle allows.”

But being a public company had its benefits and helped Baldwin grow.

According to its 2020 annual report and end-of-year earnings statement, it employed 1,400 and its 2019 revenue was $137.84 million. Today, according to its 2026 proxy statement, it employs 4,200 and its 2025 revenue was $1.5 billion. That's an increase of 200% in payroll and 987.8% in revenue. 

As for Trevor Baldwin, his pay grew along with the firm's rapid growth. According to the company’s 2020 proxy statement, his total compensation was $1.12 million in 2020. His total compensation was $5.25 million in 2025, according to the 2026 proxy statement. That's up 368.74%. And according to the 2026 proxy statement, he owns 132,225 shares of class A common stock and 1.94 million shares of class B common stock.

“Going public," Trevor Baldwin writes, "worked."

“The public markets gave us privileged access to capital when we needed it most," he adds in the letter. "They gave us a currency that allowed us to pursue a growth strategy unique in our industry. They imposed a discipline of transparency and execution rigor that made us better operators, and they enabled thousands of (employees) to become owners of the firm they were building.”

He added that changing the capital structure “is not a write-off of public ownership” and said it was possible, maybe even likely, that Baldwin would become public again at some point.

Why now?

Much like the 2019 IPO, the timing was right for the company to make a big move.

As Trevor Baldwin writes in the letter, there are “two major forces at arriving at once” in the industry that require the nimbleness being private provides — talent mobility and AI.

“Together they present a once-in-a-generation opportunity,” he writes.

He says the “war for talent” has intensified over the past two years as consolidation has “shaken loose thousands of skilled professionals.” This has led to heavy recruiting by insurance companies and, in some cases, entire teams moving at once.

This has led to industry veterans sitting back to assess platforms and capabilities before making a decision about where to start.

By being private, and with the new backers, Baldwin intends to lean into recruiting, development and have the tools in place to attract what it calls ambitious and talented professionals.

The second, and some may argue bigger, force is AI.

According to a 2025 report from the consulting group McKinsey & Co., insurance is about an accurate understanding of underlying risks and assisting people in distress. AI, the report says, allows companies to better understand patterns in data and allows for hyper-personalization. It also adds automation to complex workflows.

McKinsey says insurance companies are already using AI in sales; to improve accuracy of underwriting; augment claims management; aid customer service operations with voice agents; and to transform back-office functions such as finance, actuarial and IT.

Trevor Baldwin, in the letter, writes that AI will change how work is done in the industry “more than any technology in history” and that change is for the better.

That doesn’t mean the technology will replace the judgement, relationships or the expertise that advisors and underwriters have. What it will do is remove obstacles and provide new tools and insights, freeing up time that can be spent on dealing with customers or strategy.

He insists in the letter that AI is not automating the work brokers and underwriters do but “redesigning it end to end.”

In a second quarter earnings call with investors in July, Trevor Baldwin was more specific about how the company is using AI. Answering an analyst’s question, he said the company had 27 processes that were “optimized and standardized” using AI across commercial and benefit lines in the quarter. And in the 17 weeks before the call, 47,000 tasks were converted to AI.

He told the analyst AI remains in its early days but there is growing confidence “around the broad-based profound impact that it’s going to have on our business.”