Sector deep dives and maps, deal breakdowns and practical guides from our M&A team.
Sam Altman said back in 2024 that his tech CEO group chat ran a betting pool on the year the first one-person billion-dollar company appears. But lately the claims have moved from group chats into my corner of the market, with real money attached. Is any of it actually true?
We put 318 AI agents to work on finding every serial acquirer of vertical software, pulling each acquisition announced in the last 6 months and reading what the buyer said about the company it bought and why.
For most of the last 100 years those places belonged to a handful of channels, each with a fixed amount of airtime or column inches. The money went to whoever owned these channels and a company's message was compressed into something a committee would approve. But AI is changing that.
Three of the four labs shipped two versions of the same model recently. One you can buy. One you have to be approved for.
Why does AI transform one services business and stall in another? Look at how each one gets paid. Letting agencies take a percentage of rent collected. Insurers are priced on premium. Neither sells time, so every hour the software removes is pure profit...
An AI-native service company delivers a traditional service, still through human professionals, but rebuilt so that AI does most of the work and the humans do the part that actually needs judgement.
Sequoia says the next trillion-dollar company will be "a software company masquerading as a services firm." Emergence wrote a playbook on it. YC built a startup school module around it. a16z and Bessemer are committing billions to the thesis.
In five years, every traditional boutique investment bank will be dead. Or at least unrecognisable from what it is today.
Ask McKinsey's chief executive how many people the firm employs and he gives an odd answer. Bob Sternfels told Harvard Business Review that the firm's workforce is 40,000 humans and 20,000 agents.
Legal is a $1.1 trillion market and you cannot simply buy your way into it. In most of the United States, non-lawyers are not allowed to own a law firm, and that includes the venture funds behind every company in this story.
Google Cloud launched Gemini Enterprise for Legal, with Cleary Gottlieb, Freshfields, Weil and Williams & Connolly as its first firms. Google shipped a financial services version the same afternoon and says healthcare is next, so treat this as a template rather than a legal story.
An AI roll-up buys existing service firms... accounting practices, letting agencies, IT providers, call centres and rebuilds their production around AI built in-house.