Mike Dauber

At our recent LP Advisory Council meeting, LPs asked about headlines claiming AI is undermining SaaS. Our view is that the two are mutually reinforcing, not mutually exclusive. We are bullish on AI, and we believe certain SaaS leaders (with systems of record/action, first-party data and data rights, network effects, ambitious AI roadmaps, etc.) are well-positioned to capitalize on the agentic AI opportunity. There are multiple reasons for this. To start, consider what’s happening today with SaaS. The median company in the SEG SaaS Index grew 13% in Q2 while doubling its EBITDA margin year over year, with a top quartile growth rate above 20%. SaaS accounts for only 25% of overall software revenue in 2025, according to Gartner, so secular growth from on-premise to SaaS migrations should continue for years. Notably, this growth largely comes before many SaaS firms monetize a new wave of agents. Meanwhile, small AI startups with little revenue are burning cash and trying to sell. At the other end of the spectrum, Klarna’s much-hyped move to replace Salesforce with AI proved overstated; the CEO later said he was “tremendously embarrassed” by the fallout. SaaS pessimists might ask themselves: Has any large enterprise successfully replaced SaaS systems of record with an LLM? Rather than the AI-SaaS story being one of complete disruption, I believe it’s moving in waves, not unlike how businesses have historically incorporated new technologies:  ● Wave 1 (2023): “Get me some AI so we’re not left out” (a reprise of 1996’s “build a web page and we’ll figure it out later”). ● Wave 2 (2024-mid 2025): “Show me the budget and ROI. Also, why do we need an expensive AI model over a cheap one?” ● Wave 3 (late 2025): "I need enterprise-grade AI that integrates seamlessly, delivers measurable results and won’t disrupt core ops with experimental tools." We can’t say for sure what will happen next, but we do know how software brings value to the enterprise. SaaS is more than software code; it’s digital business intelligence using code to express that intelligence. That takes massive data sets and business experience brought to bear on enterprise functions, at scale and over time. It’s about executing tasks efficiently today, then innovating new tasks over time. For these reasons, we see a supercharged future of AI-enabled enterprise software that enhances productivity and innovation in dramatic ways. That future is less about ever-larger foundation models or narrow AI startups that complicate the stack. Instead, we see integrated software systems that orchestrate digital services to accelerate complex tasks, with agents as the 2026 step-function. AI is a massive force multiplier in that equation, but not a radical disruptor. At Thoma Bravo, we welcome the AI-SaaS conversation. We’re healthily paranoid as part of our mindset. But evidence, history, and business logic suggest that the AI revolution is set to accelerate SaaS value and growth, not undermine it.

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Thanks to Duncan Riley at SiliconANGLE & theCUBE for their thoughtful coverage of our recent raise, and to Young Sohn at Walden Catalyst Ventures for his acknowledgment of how Opaque is solving problems around verifiable guarantees and privacy. Gartner predicts that by 2025, over 50% of organizations will adopt privacy-enhancing computation to process sensitive data and conduct multi-party analytics. Here's the thing: AI won't scale on promises. It scales on proof. Proof that data stayed private during computation. Proof that model weights were never exposed. Proof that policies were enforced exactly as written. That's what this funding accelerates. https://lnkd.in/gGaTDnM5

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🚀 Big news in proptech: LightTable comes out of stealth with a $6M seed round led by Primary Venture Partners, with Innovation Endeavors, MetaProp, and angels participating. LightTable’s AI-powered peer review platform is transforming real estate development by cutting the design review process from typically weeks-long down to under an hour. By digitizing thousands of pages of specs in minutes, the platform surfaces critical issues early, reducing coordination mistakes on job sites by up to 70%. Developers like Mill Creek Residential are already seeing results, catching errors in seconds that outside experts would spend weeks uncovering. With this funding, LightTable will expand its engineering and construction expertise to further refine its AI, marrying field knowledge with cutting-edge tech. Great work LightTable team, excited to see where this goes. 👉 Read the full story here: https://lnkd.in/e3yzwzkc

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Early-stage execution breaks without structure. Ideas need cadence. Founder Institute Core Program runs 14+ weeks of weekly sprints, mentor feedback, and stage-based tracks from Validate to Growth. Fully virtual. More details in the XRaise breakdown below 👇 #PreSeed #StartupAccelerator #FounderInstitute #TechStartups #XRaise https://lnkd.in/eMZfBpuA

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Curvestone AI has raised $4M in seed funding, led by MTech Capital with participation from Boost Capital Partners, D2 Fund and Portfolio Ventures. 𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗗 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗗𝗘𝗧𝗔𝗜𝗟𝗦 👉 https://lnkd.in/dtDNHmEq Sebastian Kotur Sam Floy Mitch Lapworth Nasos Papadopoulos Alex Morgan Dawid Robert Kotur Breanna Yen Amy Woodcock Lea Montfajon Tim Miller #Startups #Founders #FundingNews #VentureCapital #PrivateEquity

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Double Upgrade to OW from UW on Brighter Growth Prospects and Attractive Valuation. Despite an aggressive strategy to evolve from a content-delivery company to a cloud infrastructure and security business, overall revenue growth since coming out of the pandemic has been stuck in the +4-5% range with EPS growing at a similar CAGR since 2021. While we believed there was merit to the long-term strategy, our prior Underweight rating was based on the view that significant investment in the business would be required for the next several years but that overall revenue growth would remain subdued given the ongoing headwinds in Akamai's legacy businesses. We now believe Akamai is approaching an important inflection point in its long-term business model evolution that should enable better top-line growth and faster EPS growth in the years ahead.

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Another AI unicorn 🦄 Resolve AI, a startup developing an autonomous site reliability engineer (SRE), a tool that automatically maintains software systems, has raised a Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners at $1 billion valuation! https://lnkd.in/eTSMENiR

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Big moment for the future of aviation: Oureon Technologies is emerging from stealth with a $3.5M pre-seed round to build the communication layer for global airspace ✈️🚁 Each year, 100M+ aircraft flights and (soon) 800M+ drone flights operate with little to no real-time coordination. Oureon is fixing that, enabling manned and unmanned aircraft to communicate, deconflict, and move safely through shared airspace. We’re proud to lead this round, alongside other fantastic firms. Congratulations Tucker Dordevic and Isaac Duke. Excited and honored to be on the journey with you.

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Exciting & dynamic discussion with Anshul Pande (HealthEdge), Daniel Ramirez (Ten VC), Nisa Leung (Cypress Corp), and Sam Parker (Wing Venture Capital) on what it takes to responsibly scale healthcare AI from the VC perspective. Startups: read below! Moderated by our fellow at Fellows Fund Kristin Gleitsman In this sector, trust is the ultimate currency. Pilots must mirror real deployment and convert quickly to paid contracts; science and safety have to be unimpeachable from day one; and founders must navigate the “3,000-system jungle” with fluency in reimbursement, regulation, and workflow. Unlike other verticals, healthcare demands humility, rigor, and long-term alignment with patients and clinicians. Capital isn’t just fuel—it shapes culture. The best investors back teams that combine operational scale with trust-by-design, creating companies that last.

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FutureFirst launches $50 million fund targeting Vertical AI startups and faster exits. Founded by Hila Rom and Tammy Mahn, the fund has secured roughly half its capital and begun Seed investments. https://lnkd.in/dux64bTW

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My review of Pablos Holman's seriously probing (yet occasionally witty) book, Deep Future, about the core technologies that can transform key industries, in CTech by Calcalist. A must-read for any DeepTech investor or entrepreneur.

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A platform built to last. Ron Heinz of Origami Capital Partners' Oquirrh Ventures explains why 1Kosmos stood out as an investment opportunity, with its defensible architecture, real-world traction, and the ability to scale with demand. Read the full announcement: https://lnkd.in/dmme7nNX

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Manufact (formerly mcp-use), a San Francisco, CA-based infrastructure platform powering #AI agents built on Model Context Protocol (MCP), has raised $6.3M in Seed funding. The round was led by Peak XV Partners, with participation from Liquid 2 Ventures, Ritual Capital, Pioneer Fund, Y Combinator, and angel investors including the co-founder & COO of Supabase. Founded in 2025 by Pietro Zullo and Luigi Pederzani, and later joined by Enrico Toniato (CTO)—former IBM Research tech lead and AI reasoning veteran—Manufact makes it easy to build with MCP, the open standard launched by Anthropic to connect AI to external systems. Manufact is already used by thousands of developer teams, including 20% of US Fortune 500 companies, enterprises, and regulated organizations—enabling AI agents to connect to GitHub, databases, and internal systems, manage multiple MCP servers, deploy AI apps into real workflows, and scale securely into production. The new funding will be used to expand infrastructure and grow the team as demand for agentic AI continues to accelerate. 🤖 A strong signal for the future of open standards, agent infrastructure, and production AI. #SeedFunding #AIInfrastructure #AIAgents #MCP #DeveloperTools #OpenStandards #EnterpriseAI #StartupFunding #VentureCapital #SanFranciscoTech #AITechSupports #AITech #AITechnology #CEO #CTO 

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Fluidstack is advancing its fundraising efforts with talks of a $1 billion financing round at an $18 billion valuation. This follows shortly after it achieved a $7.5 billion valuation and secured a significant $50 billion deal to construct data centers for Anthropic, highlighting strong growth and investor confidence.

Scanner, a San Francisco-based developer of a security data platform, has raised $22 million in a Series A round led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Mantis VC and strategic angel investors, including the CEO of Vanta and the former GM of Splunk Security. Led by CEO Cliff Crosland, the company plans to use the funding to scale its engineering team, accelerate development of its AI-native search index, and expand its platform to support agentic threat hunting across massive log datasets. Scanner’s specialized security data lake enables sub-second queries across petabytes of historical logs, offering SIEM-level speed at a fraction of the cost, and is already used by high-growth enterprises like Notion, Ramp, BeyondTrust, and Lemonade to detect and investigate complex threats. FOUNDER: Cliff Crosland INVESTORS: Sequoia Capital & Mantis VC ROUND: Series A AMOUNT: $22,000,000 HQ: San Francisco, California #VentureCapital #Scanner #CliffCrosland #TradedVC

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