科技投资新时代开启

With growth slowing and AI looming, private equity’shottest sector is going to require a new playbook. By David Lipman, Christopher Perry, and Grant Kieffer The New E ra in Tech Investing Starts Now At a Glance Software dealmaking limped along in early 2026 as slowed revenue growth and the threat of AIdrove a wedge between buyers and sellers. `But amid the tumult, patterns are emerging that suggest how general partners and theirportfolio companies can navigate through the uncertainty. Managing both the risk and opportunity posed by AI boils down to rethinking due diligence andvalue-creation playbooks, while retooling metrics to validate success. If software investing has delivered anything to private equity investors so far in 2026, it is the disquietingcertainty that the world has changed—probably forever. Revenue growth that was running around 20% annually is now trending at half that. Net revenue retention(NRR) has dropped about 8 points since 2021(see Figure 1). Dealmaking is at a crawl. Aging portfoliosare suddenly a thing in tech investing. And looming over everything else is the specter of artificialintelligence, which, at best, threatens the once-unassailable SaaS value proposition and, at worst, raisesfears that some software use cases are veering toward obsolescence. Perhaps most ominous is the building evidence that software is losing the structural advantages thatfor a decade produced the buyout industry’s shiniest returns. The software assets that are transacting inthe private markets continue to attract high prices, largely because sponsors have focused their effortson selling their A-plus companies. Yet deals completed after the Covid-19 pandemic, including moreseasoned investments from 2020 to 2022, are, to date, generating returns below pre-Covid averages(see Figure 2). While many of these investments are not yet fully realized, and performance couldimprove over time, that will be a challenge given the high prices sponsors paid for assetsand the sector’s slowing growth. What comes next? While predictions aren’t worth a lot amid such uncertainty, it’s safe to say that we’re living through theWild West atmosphere that attends any period of technological disruption. What we know from previoustransformations (the dot-com revolution and the shift to cloud computing come to mind) is that winningbusiness models will eventually emerge from the chaos, and the winners will all have something incommon: a deep understanding of customers’ needs and a clear vision for how the emerging technologiescan solve those real-world problems with real-world economics. The New E ra in Tech Investing Starts Now The New E ra in Tech Investing Starts Now Figure 2:It will be challenging for postpandemic tech buyouts to achieve returnsin line with the prior decade, given high prices paid and less-certain growth At the moment, bold proclamations about AI’s future impact trade off almost daily with reports that fewcompanies are seeing measurable returns from their AI investments. Bid-ask spreads for some softwarecategories might narrow somewhat as AI use cases and business models begin to prove out. Butvaluations in most categories are essentially up for grabs right now. The biggest issue is that theAI disruption is moving faster than the dot-com or cloud transitions. Most companies are still indiscovery mode, searching for ways to meaningfully deploy AI to satisfy customer needs(or what they might need soon). Yet, against this backdrop, patterns are emerging that suggest a number of practical actions private equityinvestors can take right now to keep pressing forward. We already know enough about AI’s disruptivepower, in fact, to start making no-regrets shifts in every phase of the PE value proposition. Proactivegeneral partners (GPs) are taking steps to: •pragmatically reorient due diligence to more reliably underwrite AI risks and opportunities; •refocus value-creation playbooks to zero in on how AI technology can transform offerings througha deeper understanding of customer workflows; and•demonstrate bankable progress by marshaling data and metrics that can provide the next ownerwith compelling AI proof points, not just rosy narratives or random prototypes. The New E ra in Tech Investing Starts Now The new due diligence imperative In the decade or so since the subscription model took over software, boosting value has been all aboutmaximizing predictable, recurring revenue. Growth came steadily as vendors added seats, charged morefor new features, and cross-sold new products. With no physical product to deliver, each new dollar ofrevenue fell in large part to the bottom line. And once a SaaS company was established with a customer,the relationship deepened into a competitive moat as software became embedded, users developed habitsaround it, and data accumulated within the platform. AI is changing all that. These new technologies don’t just threaten to leapfrog some software solutions,allowing AI-n