1. Overview
The M&A Activity API gives you programmatic access to Wokelo’s curated database of merger and acquisition transactions for a given report. Each record surfaces the full deal context: who acquired whom, at what price, on what date, what the target company does, and the relevant news coverage — all structured and ready to query. This is a synchronous API — submitting a request returns the complete result set immediately. No polling is required. Each transaction in the result set includes:- Deal metadata — announced date, completion date, deal status, and disclosed transaction value
- Acquirer profile — name, website, and buyer type (Strategic or Institutional)
- Target firmographics — headquarters, founding year, employee count, and operating geography
- Target business profile — product category, core offering description, and product catalog
- News context — curated coverage excerpts with source URLs for deals with public reporting
- Deal sourcing and competitive intelligence — Track which strategic and institutional acquirers are most active in a sector. Identify consolidation patterns, serial acquirers, and emerging buyer profiles
- Market mapping — Understand how a sector is consolidating by pulling all transactions within a product category, geography, or date range
- Portfolio monitoring — Catch new deals involving companies in categories you track. Distinguish completed transactions from pending announcements using the
Deal Statusfield - Due diligence enrichment — Pull prior acquisitions by a specific acquirer or in a comparable category to assemble precedent transaction context rapidly
- Buyer screening — Identify which strategic and institutional buyers are most active in a space, segmented by acquirer type, deal size, and geography
This API is synchronous. A single POST request returns the complete transaction data immediately — no job polling required. See How Sync APIs work.
2. Quick Start
Step 1 — Submit the request3. Authentication
All requests must include a Bearer token in theAuthorization HTTP header. No other authentication method is supported.
4. Request Reference
Endpointreport_id is the only required parameter.
Full request example:
5. Response
Response structure
Transaction object fields
Each object in the transactions array contains the following fields: Deal identity
Acquirer
Target identity & firmographics
Target business profile
News
The
News field is unstructured text, not JSON. Parse it by splitting on newlines and identifying lines that start with http to extract source URLs separately from prose summaries.Deal Amount units
TheDeal Amount ($M) field is labelled in millions but stored values are in raw USD. A deal reported as “$1.1 billion” is stored as 1100000000.0. Always convert before displaying:
Notes on null values
Several fields are frequently null, and this is expected:Deal Amount ($M)— The majority of M&A transactions are not publicly disclosed. Null means undisclosed, not zero.Target Core OfferingandTarget Product Category— Null for targets where Wokelo’s enrichment pipeline did not find sufficient public information.Deal Completion Date— Null for pending deals and for completed deals where the close date was not reported.News— Null when no news coverage was indexed for the transaction.
6. Examples
Retrieving and filtering a full report
Retrieve all transactions in a report and filter to completed deals over $1 billion.Grouping transactions by acquirer
Build an acquirer activity profile to identify the most active buyers in a sector — useful for buyer targeting and market structure analysis.Filtering by product category with news
Filter transactions to a specific product category and surface deals with news coverage for deeper context.7. Error Handling
The API uses standard HTTP status codes. All error responses include a JSON body with adetail or message field.
Error response example:
8. Best Practices
Use thePermalink field as a stable identifier
If you’re storing transactions in your own database or CRM, use Permalink as the primary key. It is a stable, unique identifier for each transaction that persists across API versions and report refreshes:
Deal Amount ($M). Always guard before operating on field values:
News field as structured text
The News field is a multi-section string, not JSON. Each section contains a prose summary followed by a source URL. Parse it by splitting on newlines:
Deal Amount ($M) unit quirk
Despite the field name suggesting millions, the stored values are raw USD. Always convert before displaying or aggregating:
Acquirer Type and Acquirer Name to profile the buyer landscape
Acquirer Type ("Strategic" vs "Institutional") gives you the high-level split. Grouping by Acquirer Name lets you identify serial acquirers — companies appearing five or more times in a sector are a meaningful signal for buyer targeting or market structure analysis.
Use Deal Status to monitor live transactions
Filter to "Pending" deals to track active announcements that haven’t yet closed. Re-querying the same report over time surfaces status transitions as pending deals complete, giving you a lightweight deal-tracking workflow without building a separate monitoring layer.
Iterate your report scope, not just your client-side filters
If the returned transaction set doesn’t cover the geography, time range, or sub-sector you need, contact your Wokelo account manager to create or refine the underlying report. The richness of the API output is directly dependent on how the report scope was configured.
9. Related APIs
Target Screening
Identify and score potential acquisition targets for a defined acquirer — AI-ranked with deal feasibility, synergy, and precedent scores.
Buyer Screening
Identify and score potential acquirers for a target company — the inverse of Target Screening.
Market Map
Discover and map all companies competing in a specific market or product category.
Company Deep Intelligence
Generate deep AI intelligence on any acquirer or target — business model, financials, strategy, and M&A history.
Company Instant Enrichment
Synchronously enrich firmographic and financial data for any company in the transaction set.
Industry Deep Intelligence
Generate a deep intelligence report on the sector behind the deal activity for thesis development.