Four months ago, AI looked like it might gut the software industry. This week, one of its biggest investors declared the threat over. The truth sits somewhere in between.
Speaking at the SuperReturn International conference in Berlin, Orlando Bravo, founder of Thoma Bravo, one of the world’s largest software-focused private equity firms with almost $200bn under management, told CNBC that the panic had passed.
“The SaaSpocalypse is over. It’s finished, no more,” he said, calling AI “an enormous tailwind for software companies.” Around half of the new revenue across his portfolio, he added, is now “AI revenue, agentic revenue,” and he expects software and AI to fuse into “a new agentic solution” for corporate customers.
The term he was burying was coined in February, when Anthropic’s Claude Cowork agent tools triggered a brutal selloff.
The 💜 of EU techThe latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!Investors took fright at the idea that AI agents could collapse the number of human “seats” that subscription software is priced on, wiping roughly $285bn off software, financial, and asset-management stocks in a 48-hour window and repricing per-seat software as AI-native spending surged.
