Apex Service Partners — the Alpine Investors-backed residential HVAC, plumbing, and electrical platform — is set to receive a minority investment from Apollo at a $10 billion valuation. Apex is reported to generate roughly $3 billion of revenue and ~$500 million of EBITDA, putting the deal at approximately 20× EV/EBITDA. Goldman Sachs is advising.
The transaction has not yet been formally announced. But if the numbers hold, this is one of the highest comps residential HVAC has ever produced — and the most consequential M&A data point the trades have seen in years.
How Apex got here.
Apex was founded in 2019 in Tampa by Alpine Investors out of Fund VII. CEO AJ Brown and President Will Matson both came through Alpine's CEO-in-Residence and CEO-in-Training talent programs — a model the firm has used repeatedly to install operators inside services platforms it builds from scratch.
By late 2023, Apex had scaled to more than 8,000 employees across the country, and Alpine ran one of the largest single-asset secondary deals the residential-services space had ever seen: a $3.4 billion continuation transaction in October 2023, advised by Evercore (lead), J.P. Morgan, and Cowen. The continuation fund pulled in commitments from Blackstone Strategic Partners, HarbourVest Partners, Lexington Partners, and Pantheon, alongside a $450 million primary investment from Alpine's newly closed $4.5 billion Fund IX. Limited partners from Fund VII were given the option to take liquidity, roll into the continuation, or blend the two.
From a $3.4 billion continuation mark in October 2023 to $10 billion roughly thirty months later — Apex's enterprise value has nearly tripled. That growth alone explains why Apollo wanted in. The structure of how they got in explains everything else.
Why a minority deal, and why now.
A minority equity check from a firm like Apollo accomplishes three things at once. It puts a sophisticated, large-cap institutional name on the cap table. It brings in growth capital without forcing Alpine out of the driver's seat. And — most importantly at this stage of Apex's life — it provides the dollars to clean up the capital structure and delever the business in anticipation of an eventual IPO.
That sequencing is the tell. Sponsors don't take strategic minority capital from a firm of Apollo's profile to fund another year of bolt-ons. They take it to fix the balance sheet, professionalize the disclosure, and stage the asset for the public markets. Once Apex eventually reaches the public markets, it becomes the first true publicly traded pure-play residential trades platform at scale — and a permanent reference price for everything below it.
A comp set that just got rewritten.
What makes the Apex number so consequential is that it doesn't land in isolation. Residential HVAC, plumbing, and electrical M&A in 2026 has been the most active stretch the category has ever produced. Stack the deals:
- Apex — ~20× (not yet announced)
- Champions Group — ~18.5× (Blackstone deal, earlier this year)
- Sierra Platform — ~14× (Redwood Services / SE Capital)
- ARS — currently pre-marketing a process at reported ~17.5×
- USA Hometown Experts — in market via MSouth
Five platforms. Five different sponsors. All within a single calendar year. The supply side of this market has rarely been louder — and yet the market is absorbing it, with institutional capital coming in at healthy multiples each time. That is exactly the signal sellers and sponsors look for. The Blackstone / Champions print earlier in the year validated the thesis at scale. Apex at ~20× now reprices the ceiling above it.
What 20× does to everything below it.
The number that matters to most operators isn't $10 billion. It's the math that 20× implies for everyone trading at a discount to the platform. The arithmetic of a roll-up is straightforward: if the platform itself trades at 16–18×+, paying 8–10×+ for sub-scale add-ons isn't aggressive — it's accretive on day one. Every turn of multiple between what the platform pays and what the platform trades for is value created the moment the deal closes, before a single dollar of synergy.
That's the mechanism by which a print at the top of the market cascades all the way down to a $750K-EBITDA shop in a secondary metro. The platform multiple is the ceiling, and the add-on multiple chases it. When the ceiling moves up, sub-platform multiples move up too — not at the same pace, but in the same direction.
Risk on.
The constructive case for residential trades M&A coming into 2026 was already in place. The 2026 deal tape has only reinforced it. Big-cap PE has now formally confirmed the category at a $10 billion enterprise value. The pipeline of platform-scale processes is the deepest it has been. And the multiples are holding through the supply.
For owners of independent contractors, this is the most important read in the market right now. The 800-pound gorilla just got priced — and at a number that puts an institutional floor under platform valuations for the foreseeable future. The message for the rest of the market is the same: it's risk-on for M&A in the trades in 2026.
The market just got rewritten. Where does your business sit in it?
Whether you're operating a trades business and thinking about a sale in the next 12–36 months, or a buyer trying to underwrite the new comp set, the strategic question is the same: how do you actually capture the value this market is creating? We work with both sides of that conversation — no pitch, just an honest read on where you are.
Get in Touch →