John Zito, co-president of Apollo Global Management, told UBS clients on March 16 that private equity firms are effectively misstating the valuations of their software holdings. The core argument: private marks haven’t caught up with a public market that has been falling off a cliff.
The S&P North American Technology Software Index has dropped roughly 35% from its September 2025 peak. Private equity portfolios stuffed with software companies, meanwhile, have been suspiciously slow to adjust their numbers downward.
Apollo has been betting against software for over a year
This isn’t a sudden pivot for Apollo. The firm has maintained an underweight position in the software sector for approximately 18 months, well before the current selloff turned ugly. The reasoning has been consistent: the boom-era metrics that justified massive software buyouts, think sky-high growth rates and near-perfect retention figures, were unsustainable.
At a Toronto investor event in fall 2025, he posed a question that probably made a few portfolio managers choke on their coffee: “Is software dead?”
