With IPOs Off Limits, Software Investors Pin Hopes on PE Buyouts

Hi, it’s Akash. I’ve been in Toronto at the Collision Conference, Canada’s annual technology convention. It drew more than 37,800 attendees, along with big names like Vinod Khosla and the country’s own artificial intelligence royalty, Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez, as well as the “godfather of AI,” Geoffrey Hinton.

Last year at this event, AI was still new and novel, and speakers joked at dinners about how many times it would be said on panels. This year, the discussion was more concrete, with most people wrestling with the technology’s real-world uses—to advance self-driving cars, medicine and manufacturing, to name a few areas of potential.

Beyond AI, venture capitalists have also been grappling with what is to come of all the enterprise software businesses that raised money during the pandemic funding boom, reaping the benefits of businesses’ lavish software spending budgets, but that now are seeing growth slow. First-quarter results from larger, public software companies like Salesforce, Workday, and MongoDB all showed enterprise customers are continuing to tighten their wallets.