About The Squeeze
Private equity firms have spent decades buying the brands you grew up with, and almost nobody was keeping score. We are. The Squeeze tracks which familiar brands are owned by private equity and what happened to them after the deal. Every claim comes with its receipt, so you can check our work instead of taking our word for it.
What we track
We track a couple hundred brands so far: restaurants, retailers, gyms, vet clinics, and more. It's a curated list, not a census. We pick the names you'd recognize from the nearest strip mall, then follow the ownership trail.
Each entry gets a status: owned, watching (PE-owned, no clear consumer harm yet), formerly (PE has exited), corporate (owned or controlled by a non-PE company), or not PE. A company counts as PE-owned when a PE firm controls it, or is its largest shareholder with seats on the board. “Year acquired” means the year the current owner took control.
This is a scoreboard of who owns what. It isn't financial or legal advice.
How we verify ownership
Every entry needs at least two sources, and Wikipedia isn't one of them. Before anything goes live, an automated check blocks entries that make a legal claim without saying who made it, or that disagree with themselves on the numbers. Each company page shows its receipts.
An ownership change counts only when it comes from the firm's own website, an SEC or court filing, or a reporter with a byline. Data aggregators and AI search summaries don't count on their own. They copy each other, mistakes included, and a few of those mistakes are deals that never happened.
Corrections
Every company page has a “See something wrong?” link, and you can send anything else through the tip form. When we fix a page, its update date changes, so you can see when it was last touched.
In September 2026 we went back through our most-visited pages, checked them sentence by sentence against their sources, and fixed what didn't hold up. We'll keep doing that.
AI in our process
We use AI tools for research, drafting, and fact-checking. They don't get the last word: every claim has to match a cited source before it publishes, and a second, independent check reviews our corrections.
How this stays free
No ads, no paywall, and no private equity. If you find the site useful, you can chip in on Ko-fi. The database stays free either way.
We’ll keep you posted
New companies, new receipts. No spam.
Using our data
The full database is available under a CC BY 4.0 license, including a downloadable CSV. Use it however you like. Credit us when you do. The numbers page shows how the data breaks down.