The Tech Middle-Market Turnaround Index 2026

What the Index measures

Four operational dimensions captured against an anonymized cohort of tech middle-market firms ($10M–$100M ARR, 50–300 employees) in the first 12 months post-acquisition or post-institutional-financing event:

1. Time-to-EBITDA-recovery — months from the operational disruption (acquisition, leadership transition, growth-stage funding) until trailing-twelve-month EBITDA returns to or exceeds the pre-event baseline.
2. Founder-bottleneck severity — the Founder Extraction Index score at the start of the engagement, scored across 12 weighted dimensions of operator dependency.
3. Tech-debt-to-EBITDA conversion ratio — the dollar EBITDA drag estimate from the EBITDA-DevOps Bridge divided by trailing-twelve-month EBITDA, expressed as a percentage and as multiple-turn impact at exit.
4. 100-Day Integration Velocity Score — the Integration Velocity Score at day 60 post-close, measured across consolidated billing, single SSO, merged engineering on-call, combined CRM, unified incident response, and shared compensation framework.

Why an operator-led dataset

Tier-A advisory firms publish wide surveys spanning industries and geographies. The Bain Global Private Equity Report covers 11 countries; the AlixPartners Disruption Index spans 10 industries. Their per-segment depth is shallow because the panel is split. The Turnaround Index is the opposite: 100% tech middle market, U.S. + Canada, 50–300 employees, n=150 PE Operating Partners and founder-CEOs. The relevance density per respondent is materially higher.

We also report against actual outcomes. Where Tier-A surveys publish opinions ("how confident are you about Q3?"), the Turnaround Index publishes realized metrics — anonymized aggregations of engagement-level data Human Renaissance captures inside operator-led diagnostic and turnaround engagements.

Methodology

Full methodology — survey instrument, panel composition, weighting, response-quality controls, anonymization protocol — publishes at /research/methodology at the close of the Q2 2026 wave. Aggregated benchmarks ship with a downloadable CSV under a CC-BY-4.0 license.

Citation

Press, analysts, and academic researchers are encouraged to cite findings from the Index. Suggested format:

"Tech Middle-Market Turnaround Index 2026, Human Renaissance, retrieved YYYY-MM-DD." humanr.ai/research/turnaround-index-2026