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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
Common use cases:
  • 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 Status field
  • 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 request
Step 2 — Access the transactions
Step 3 — Work with the data

3. Authentication

All requests must include a Bearer token in the Authorization HTTP header. No other authentication method is supported.
API tokens are issued from your Wokelo account. Navigate to Account Details → API Credentials in the Wokelo dashboard to get your client id and client secret. Contact support@wokelo.ai if you do not yet have API access.
Never expose your token in client-side code, browser requests, or public repositories. A missing or invalid token returns 401 Unauthorized. A valid token without sufficient plan permissions returns 403 Forbidden.

4. Request Reference

Endpoint
The request body is JSON. The report_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

The Deal 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 Offering and Target 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.
Sample response (excerpt):

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.
Sample output:

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 a detail or message field. Error response example:
Retry logic with exponential back-off:

8. Best Practices

Use the Permalink 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:
Handle null values defensively Many fields are null for legitimate reasons — especially Deal Amount ($M). Always guard before operating on field values:
Parse the News field as structured text The News field is a multi-section string, not JSON. Each section contains a prose summary followed by a source URL. Parse it by splitting on newlines:
Account for the Deal Amount ($M) unit quirk Despite the field name suggesting millions, the stored values are raw USD. Always convert before displaying or aggregating:
Cache responses for analytics workloads M&A reports are relatively static — a report generated today won’t change minute-to-minute. For dashboards or batch pipelines, cache the full response locally and refresh on a schedule (e.g. daily) rather than calling the API on every page load or query. Use both 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.

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.