Brown & Brown, Inc.

Brown & Brown, Inc. is an American insurance brokerage that markets and sells insurance products and services — primarily in property, casualty and employee-benefits lines — and earns its keep as an intermediary rather than a risk-taker, generating $5,902 million in total revenues in fiscal 2025. Headquartered in Daytona Beach, Florida, and tracing its roots to an agency founded there in 1939, it ranks among the largest publicly traded insurance brokers in the world and reports through two segments, Retail and Specialty Distribution.

For most of its modern history this has been one of the steadiest compounding stories in American finance: a decentralized, founder-led roll-up that bought small and mid-sized agencies, folded them into a meritocratic culture in which teammates own nearly a fifth of the company, and produced an almost monotonic climb in revenue, margins and free cash flow. Brown & Brown has increased revenue every year since 1993 with the single exception of 2009, growing from $95.6 million that year to $5.9 billion in 2025, a 14.2% compound rate. The discipline was the product.

Then, on 1 August 2025, the company closed the largest acquisition in its history by an order of magnitude — the $9.6 billion purchase of RSC Topco, the holding company for Accession Risk Management Group, parent of the Risk Strategies retail brokerage and the One80 Intermediaries wholesale-and-program platform — funded by a $4.3 billion equity raise and roughly $4.2 billion of new senior notes. The file turns on a single tension: the same year Brown & Brown levered up to swallow a transformational deal, the quiet engine underneath — organic revenue growth — fell off a cliff, from 10.4% in 2024 to 2.8% in 2025 and then to flat in the first quarter of 2026. The market noticed. The shares fell from a peak around $124 in early 2025 to roughly $57 by mid-2026, compressing the valuation to levels not seen in years. The question this report turns on is whether this is a great franchise temporarily indigestion-bound and mispriced, or a maturing one whose best growth is behind it just as the debt arrived.