All News (Page 377)

The software-as-a-service (SaaS) doomer headlines may have peaked in February—but if you check out the dealmaking data, SaaS has been looking alive. 

For the final quarter of 2025, enterprise SaaS M&A hit $83.7 billion in total value, recent PitchBook data found. This was across 245 deals, a slight drop in deal count quarter-over-quarter, but a nearly 24% leap in deal value. All in, this means that 2025 was the biggest year for enterprise SaaS M&A since the fever pitch of 2021. 

On its face, perhaps not what you were expecting. We’re a few weeks removed from February’s so-called SaaSpocalypse. In the 24 hours following the release of Anthropic’s Claude Cowork AI, software stocks in the public markets cratered: $285 billion in market value violently vanished overnight. (Since, some of the hardest-hit, including Salesforce, Adobe, and Workday, have evened out or rebounded—though all remain down year-to-date.) 

The SaaSpocalypse, ultimately, was a knee-jerk, existential reaction to where AI is (slowly, in many contexts) dragging the tech stack. And this round of PitchBook data is a reminder that the “death of SaaS” story, while a nightmare for public market multiples, is actually not a hindrance in the slightest to private market dealmaking.

“The SaaSpocalypse is accelerating M&A rather than slowing it down, and I expect enterprise SaaS M&A to remain highly active in 2026,” said Derek Hernandez, PitchBook senior research analyst, via email. “The sharp compression in public software multiples has made take-privates meaningfully cheaper for PE sponsors who were already deploying record capital. Additionally, M&A involving PE-backed enterprise SaaS surged over 100% YoY in 2025 to $89 billion. What we’re seeing is that flight to defensibility.”

Still, the SaaS spoils are very concentrated. These Q4 M&A numbers are bolstered by 17 multi-billion mega-deals, which comprised more than 75% of the total deal value for Q4. The largest deals included IBM’s $11 billion Confluent acquisition and Permira and Warburg Pincus’s $8.4 billion Clearwater Analytics deal. (Notably, strategics really showed up in Q4, as corporate M&A soared quarter-over-quarter by 168.5%, reaching $51.8 billion.)

It’s probably also not an exaggeration to say: We could very well be entering a golden moment for SaaS deals. The public markets’ agony may for the foreseeable future make assets less expensive, while AI urgency remains high. 

For the record, I do think the “death of SaaS” on some level is real. It doesn’t pertain specifically to the Salesforces or the Workdays of the world (they will certainly be around at the end of the decade). But the SaaS-era, ARR-reliable, seat-selling way of doing business? That’s certainly on its way out. And as it goes, the deals will flow.

See you tomorrow,

Allie Garfinkle
X: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com

Submit a deal for the Term Sheet newsletter here.

Joey Abrams curated the deals section of today’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Steve Klinsky has spent 25 years building New Mountain Capital into one of private equity’s most respected firms, with $60 billion in assets under management across hundreds of portfolio companies. His investment record speaks for itself: a supply chain software company he bought for $600 million sold for over $8 billion. A life sciences firm he backed went public at a $3 billion gain. The firm often says that it has never had a portfolio company go bankrupt.

But ask Klinsky what he’s most excited about right now, and he’ll tell you about a website.

ModernStates.org—the online home of his Modern States Education Alliance—has quietly reached 800,000 people and given away the equivalent of 25,000 free years of college credit, all without spending a dollar on advertising. And Klinsky says that’s just the start.

“It’s just getting started,” he said in a recent interview on Goldman Sachs’ Great Investors podcast, noting that it’s all happened without a single dollar spent on advertising.

“There’s $1.7 trillion dollars of student debt,” Klinsky said when speaking about what motivates him, a notable philanthropist. “It’s an unreal number.”

The Idea Is Elegantly Simple

Modern States didn’t invent anything new, Klinsky explained to Alison Mass, Goldman’s chair of Investment Banking, Global Banking and Markets. It built on a little-known but decades-old program called CLEP exams—College-Level Examination Program tests administered by the College Board, the same organization behind the SAT. The exams cover dozens of subjects, from college algebra to American literature, and have existed for 50 years. Pass one, and most U.S. colleges and universities will award you the credit—no tuition required.

The problem was that almost nobody knew about them, and even fewer could afford to prepare for them properly.

Klinsky’s solution: hire the best professor in each of the 32 subjects, build a free online course for every one, and post them at ModernStates.org. Students get free coursework, free readings, and free practice questions. If they pass, Modern States even picks up the $100 CLEP exam fee.

The math is striking.

“If you’re Abe Lincoln and you’re totally impoverished but you’re ambitious, you can get a year of college this way and save a year of time and $30 grand of money,” Klinsky said.

Why a Billionaire PE Founder Is Doing This

Klinsky, whose net worth Forbes estimates at $4.9 billion, didn’t arrive at education philanthropy through guilt or optics. His path there is personal.

Growing up in Detroit, his older brother Gary—seven years his senior—tutored him relentlessly after school. “It was incredibly meaningful in my life,” Klinsky said. Gary died of a genetic illness while Klinsky was just in graduate school at Harvard. And in 1987, when Klinsky made partner at his first major PE firm, Forstmann Little, in New York City, one of his first acts was to create afterschool centers in the most crime-ridden neighborhoods nearby, named in Gary’s memory. They’re still running today.

That hands-on experience in East New York—a neighborhood that at the time had more murders than the entire state of Nebraska—convinced him the problem with America’s most underserved students wasn’t the kids. It was the system. “When I would go visit the school,” he said, “the kids were fantastic. The teachers were fantastic.”

Charter schools came next. Then a deeper focus on higher education. Then Modern States.

Redemption of an Industry

Klinsky’s philanthropy is harder to dismiss when you consider where he came from. He is, by his own acknowledgment, a character in Barbarians at the Gate—the classic business book that became the defining indictment of 1980s private equity excess, chronicling the savage $25 billion RJR Nabisco buyout (then the largest in history) and the era of debt-fueled, fee-gorged dealmaking that made Wall Street a cultural villain for a generation.

He was there. He saw it up close. And he spent the next 40 years building something deliberately different.

New Mountain Capital was founded on a explicit rejection of the old model—less debt, no financial engineering, only non-cyclical industries, and a relentless focus on actually improving the businesses it buys. Klinsky has made the case publicly for years, including as chairman of the American Investment Council, the trade group representing all 5,000 U.S. private equity firms, and in a Harvard Business Review piece laying out how his firm grew a sleepy supply chain software company from $600 million to over $8 billion in value.

“Private equity has gone from a form of finance into a form of business,” he told Mass on the Goldman Sachs podcast. His free-college initiative, in that light, isn’t a detour from Klinsky’s Wall Street identity but another expression of what he’s always done: find something broken, rolled up his sleeves, and built something better.

Just Getting Started

Despite its scale, Modern States remains one of philanthropy’s best-kept secrets. Klinsky attributes its growth entirely to word of mouth—800,000 users found it organically, proof of concept for a model he believes can grow far larger.

At a moment when student debt has become one of the defining anxieties of a generation, the program’s timing couldn’t be more relevant. Even in-state tuition at universities trying to hold costs down—like Purdue in Indiana—runs roughly $33,000 a year, Klinsky noted.

Modern States won’t solve the student debt crisis alone. But for 800,000 people who’ve already used it, it may be the most practical solution anyone has actually delivered.

For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

“World class.” “Consistent.” “Focused relentlessly on performance.” Blackstone President and COO Jon Gray is speaking from his New York office, and you could be forgiven for thinking he’s referring to the strategy that has helped turn his firm into the world’s largest alternative investment manager, now boasting $1.3 trillion in AUM (assets under management).

But actually, he’s talking about golf. Or rather, a golfer—the one Blackstone just hired to be its first ever brand ambassador. And in choosing Tommy Fleetwood, the 4th highest-ranked golfer on the PGA Tour, Blackstone did set out to find someone that embodied the firm’s ethos. “He’s such a compelling figure, he’s a self effacing, good high-integrity human being who also happens to be outstanding at what he does,” effuses Gray, who calls Fleetwood “world class, both as a professional and as a human being.” 

The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but they will involve Fleetwood wearing Blackstone’s logo in the coveted “front of hat” position when he plays in tournaments around the world, and perhaps a little mixing and mingling with Blackstone clients at events designed to reach clients in a more relaxed setting than a conference room. 

Fleetwood is the British golfer who is known as one of the most likable players on tour. He previously held the uncomfortable record of having the most top five finishes on the PGA Tour without a win—an excruciating 30. But last year when he finally broke the streak and won the Tour Championship in August, it was a moment that showcased grit and glory, transcending sports. The New York Times dubbed 2025 “the year of Tommy.”  

Gray says the pairing came about via Blackstone partner Joe Baratta, who runs the firm’s private equity business, and had a preexisting relationship with Fleetwood. “He came to us and said, ‘Hey, look, [Tommy’s] got a contract that’s coming up with Nike and he’s thinking about potentially making some changes. Would we have an interest?’”

Underpinning the deal, of course, is Blackstone’s quest to raise its profile in the highly lucrative—and increasingly competitive—private wealth business. Gray says the business is about $300 billion, or roughly one-fourth of the firm’s total AUM. Blackstone primarily provides retail investors with access to alternative investments such as real estate or private credit, in which they give up instant liquidity in exchange for higher returns. That makes Blackstone’s client base mostly financial advisors who recommend those asset classes to their clients, as well as family offices and high-net-worth individuals. 

Gray points out that Blackstone’s institutional investors like pension funds tend to have about one-third of their assets in private vehicles. But if you look at individuals—even very affluent individuals—they’re only about 1%-2% allocated to private assets, “and yet their time horizons look very similar,” he notes.

Is Gray worried about the current souring mood towards private credit, which has weighed on Blackstone’s stock this year? He acknowledges the noise, and admits that the for the economy overall, “the picture in the near term looks cloudy.” But he says his investors want returns over years and decades, not days. “It’s not what’s going to happen next week, it’s what’s going to happen in five, 10, 20 or 30 years,” that matters he says.

The ability to absorb stress and transcend losses are also themes that are all too familiar to golfers. So is Gray considering picking up a set of clubs now that Fleetwood will be repping the firm? The answer: Not yet. “I’m a Type-A person, so if I do something, I want to be really, really good at it,” he says. With a punishing travel schedule, taking it up anytime soon isn’t the cards. “For right now, I’m focused on work and family, and I love that Tommy is focused on golf.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Treeline wants to rebuild corporate IT from the ground up, starting with the everyday headaches most workers barely notice until something breaks.

The San Francisco–based startup has raised a $25 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz to build what it calls a “modern IT operating system,” an AI and software-first alternative to the decades-old managed services firms still powering most corporate IT. The round comes as global IT spend is expected to climb above $6 trillion in 2026.

“Basically every business in the world needs some form of IT management,” Peter Doyle, CEO and cofounder of Treeline, told Fortune. Most companies, he notes, can’t afford a full in-house department, so they outsource to a managed service provider—one of roughly 40,000 firms in the U.S. alone that handle everything from onboarding employees to fixing the Wi-Fi. The product those providers sell, as he sees it, is fundamentally “people and tools.” Teams of technicians stitch together dozens of point solutions to monitor environments, provision laptops, and respond to tickets, he says.

Treeline’s bet is to flip that model. Instead of starting with people and layering in software, it starts with a unified software and AI layer, then brings technicians for judgment and oversight. The company says its AI agents now augment or directly resolve 98% of customer requests, and speed up employee onboarding from 20 minutes to 2 minutes.

“What it takes is not being afraid to keep technicians and people in the loop,” Doyle says. “I’m not saying that we should replace technicians. We should empower them.” 

Treeline uses its technicians‑in‑the‑loop model to automate lower level work like password resets so specialists can focus on “the really important tasks,” Doyle says.Doyle comes to the problem as an investor turned founder and operator. He previously spent about a decade in venture capital at Accel, backing IT infrastructure and security companies like Pagerduty, Heptio, and ServiceChannel. When we started Treeline, he thought building a better tool and selling it into that channel would be enough. “Within the first 10 days, we realized that wouldn’t work. We actually needed to fundamentally change how this industry operates,” he told Fortune.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Good morning. When Barbara Larson stepped into the role of EVP and CFO at Workiva in January, she wasn’t entering unfamiliar territory. She had used the company’s financial reporting platform at Workday and VMware and had advocated for it. So, when the opportunity came to join Workiva, she says the decision was uncomplicated.

“I love this stage of the company,” Larson told me. It’s the high-stakes push to scale. “We’ve guided to $1 billion in revenue this year.”

Workiva (NYSE: WK), which offers an AI-powered platform for governance, risk, compliance, and sustainability, reported $885 million in total revenue for fiscal 2025, a 20% year-over-year increase, with subscription and support revenue growing 22%. For the full year 2026, total revenue is expected to be in the range of $1.036 billion to $1.040 billion. Among the company’s more than 6,600 customers are Hershey, Slack, and KeyBank, according to its website.

Courtesy of Workiva

Larson brings more than two decades of financial leadership experience. She most recently served as CFO at SentinelOne and previously spent nearly a decade at Workday, ultimately becoming CFO. She also held senior roles at VMware, TIBCO Software, and Symantec.

Many companies are still drowning in data across disparate systems, a pain point Workiva is designed to address, Larson said. “I’ve spent my entire career in finance,” Larson said. You’ve got your data working either for you or against you—there isn’t a middle ground, she said. If you’re running AI across fragmented systems or unreliable data, you aren’t accelerating insight; you’re just accelerating the wrong answers, she added.

Regulatory pressures are intensifying, Larson noted, with shifting requirements and a changing geopolitical backdrop making compliance a moving target. Workiva’s approach is to ground AI within the customer’s own data, standards, and context, so output isn’t merely “plausible” but actionable and defensible, she said.

That applies to internal users managing SEC reporting, Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, enterprise risk management, and sustainability disclosures, as well as external auditors using the same platform. Larson points to SEC risk factor drafting: when new standards or risks emerge, AI itself being a prime example, teams can draft disclosures and benchmark them against peers within a controlled environment.

Larson’s role also reflects a broader shift in what it means to be a CFO in 2026. The job, she says, looks nothing like it did five years ago.

That includes a dual mandate on AI: CFOs must drive adoption across the enterprise while transforming their own finance organizations. At Workiva, Larson is partnering with the CIO and executive team to identify where AI can drive faster outcomes and create leverage for shareholders, she said. In fiscal 2025, Workiva delivered more than 600 basis points of non-GAAP operating leverage alongside 20% revenue growth, a trajectory she aims to continue.

As a mentor, Larson’s advice is grounded in her own biography. Growing up moving frequently, she learned to embrace change, be adaptable, and stay curious—principles that apply to the age of AI.

“If you are going to be a really strong finance leader, you have to understand the broader business,” she said.

Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com

Quick note: CFO Daily marked five years on March 28! Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to speak with hundreds of finance chiefs across industries. It has been fascinating to report on the evolution of the CFO role and the future of the finance organization. A special thanks to Fortune’s executive editor Lee Clifford, who has worked with me from the beginning. And thank you for your readership.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

AI models are affirming people’s worst behaviors even when other humans say they’re in the wrong, and users can’t get enough. 

A new study out of the Stanford computer science department and published in the journal Science revealed that AI affirms users 49% more than a human does on average when it comes to social questions—a worrying trend especially as people increasingly turn to AI for personal advice and even therapy.

Of the 2,400 who participated in the study, mostly preferred being flattered. The number of test subjects more likely to use the sycophantic AI again was 13% higher compared to those who said they would return to the non-sycophantic chatbot, suggesting AI developers may have little incentive to change things up, according to the study.

While sycophantic chatbots have been previously shown to contribute to negative outcomes such as self-harm or violence in vulnerable populations, the Stanford study shows it may also be extending some effects to everyone else.

The study found subjects exposed to just one affirming response to their bad behavior were less willing to take responsibility for their actions and repair their interpersonal conflicts while also making them more likely to believe they were right.

To obtain this result, researchers conducted a three-part study in which they measured AI’s sycophancy based on a dataset of nearly 12,000 social prompts which they ran through 11 leading AI models including Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Even when researchers asked the AI models to judge posts from the subreddit AITA (Am I The Asshole) in which Reddit users had said the poster was wrong, the large language models still said the poster was right 51% of the time.

The study’s lead author and Stanford Computer Science Ph.D. candidate Myra Cheng said the results are worrying especially for young people who she said are turning to AI to try to solve their relationship problems.

“I worry that people will lose the skills to deal with difficult social situations,” Cheng told Stanford Report.

The AI study comes as government officials decide how involved regulators should be with overseeing AI. Several states, including Tennessee and Oregon, have passed their own laws on AI in the absence of federal regulations. Still, the White House last week put out a framework that, if taken up by Congress, would create a national AI policy and would preempt states’ “patchwork” of rules. 

To test human reactions to sycophantic AI, researchers studied the reactions of just overn2,400 human participants interacting with AI. First, 1,605 participants were asked to imagine they were the author of a post based on the AITA subreddit which was deemed wrong by other humans on the subreddit but deemed right by AI. The participants then either read the sycophantic AI response or a non-sycophantic response that was based on the human feedback. Another 800 participants talked with either a sycophantic or non-sycophantic AI model about a real conflict in their own lives before being asked to write a letter to the other person involved in their conflict.

Participants who received validating AI responses were measurably less likely to apologize, admit fault, or seek to repair their relationships. Even when users recognize models as sycophantic, the AI’s responses still affect them, said the study’s co-lead author, Stanford computer science and linguistics professor Dan Jurafsky.

“What they are not aware of, and what surprised us, is that sycophancy is making them more self-centered, more morally dogmatic,” Jurafsky told Stanford Report.

Surprisingly, in the Stanford study, when the researchers asked the study’s human subjects to rate the objectiveness of both sycophantic and non-sycophantic AI responses, they rated them about the same, meaning it’s possible users could not tell the sycophantic model was being overly agreeable.

“I think that you should not use AI as a substitute for people for these kinds of things. That’s the best thing to do for now,” said Cheng.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com