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| The Daily Pitch |
| PE, VC and M&A |
| Your edge on global private capital markets |
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| Good morning. In today's Daily Pitch, we look at a key reset in the enterprise SaaS market and the latest celeb-backed beverage to draw private capital. Also, in case you missed it, check out our analysts' recap of JP Morgan's 2026 Healthcare Conference. |
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| Our new weekly newsletter, Public Meets Private, covers the intersection of alternatives and the wealth channel. Sign up here |
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| The counterintuitive business of curbing phone addiction |
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| (Josie Doan/PitchBook News) |
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By Rosie Bradbury, Sr. Venture Capital Reporter
It's the season of New Year's resolutions, and cutting down on smartphone habits is a popular ambition.
This has given rise to a small but growing cohort of startups offering increasingly radical options for a digital detox.
There's Brick, which prompts users to "go back to living" if they try to access a list of blocked apps. Mobile app Forest plants a virtual tree for every 25 minutes spent off social media. And some consumers are forgoing the modern smartphone entirely, returning to a flip phone or a BlackBerry.
In a recent Pew Research survey, just over half of US adults said they go on Facebook and YouTube daily, and 24% said they go on TikTok every day.
"I've been doing this for 10 years, and I think that's the Number One task of ours," said Kaiwei Tang, founder of Light, which sells a modernized and slimmed-down version of a smartphone.
Still, fundraising for these startups is no small task. "I do not have a big VC like Sequoia putting in $10 million," Tang said. (Although Michael Mignano, partner at $25 billion firm Lightspeed, personally invested.)
An obvious use case for anti-scrolling technology—and the most appealing to VCs—is helping parents and schools worried about young people's screen time.
A new upstart, Tin Can, which recently raised a $12 million round led by Greylock Partners, sells a landline-style phone that lets parents control who their child can call. The Tin Can, whose marketing taps into '90s nostalgia, works best when "pods" of households adopt the phones all together.
Opal, which makes an app that encourages scrolling breaks, is selling into an older age group: teens who already have a smartphone. "Seventy percent of our users are students, and [that's] about equally split between high school students and college students," said Kenneth Schlenker, founder and CEO of Opal.
But the question of market-sizing, of how many people will realistically part with their device and pay to do so, is a tough one.
Even for the VCs, like Resolute Partners managing partner Judd Morgenstern, the gravitational pull of attention-monopolizing technology remains strong. "We're investors in xAI, and we were inspired by the mission of the search for truth and uncovering the secrets of the universe." |
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| A message from Oracle NetSuite |
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| AI-driven KPI transformation |
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New technology brings new opportunities—as well as hype, “fear of missing out,” and disappointment. AI is proving to be no exception to this rule.
Bernie Smith's latest field guide helps to untangle the useful from the mythical and the practical from the distracting. Download it now for proven strategies on leveraging AI to improve your KPIs. |
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• VC funding for AI-powered climate-tech startups surged to a record $6.6 billion in 2025, driven by mega-deals. It marked a 59% increase year-over-year, according to our latest analyst note on the sector.
• Tom Holland's Bero is the latest celebrity-backed beverage brand to attract private funding, receiving a strategic investment from Paine Schwartz Partners for its nonalcoholic beer offerings. Drink up
• Eight VC-backed companies are now valued above $100 billion on secondaries markets, underscoring the bounty awaiting select investors should companies like SpaceX, Stripe and Databricks choose to go public in 2026. Explore the PitchBook 100
• The University of Utah might have a conflict of interest. Its endowment has a new outsourced CIO provider, Cynosure Capital Management, which is founded by members of one of the state's richest families. Go deeper |
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| SaaS incumbents vs. challengers in the agentic AI era |
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By Derek Hernandez, Sr. Enterprise SaaS and Infrastructure SaaS Research Analyst
A veritable clash of the titans is emerging in enterprise SaaS, pitting legacy incumbents and AI-native startups against each other, as they take on a specialized market opportunity expected to swell to $190 billion in a few years, according to our new analyst note.
This is a once-in-a-generation reset as the arrival of AI agents forces a clean strategic split: Incumbents are embedding copilots and task agents into legacy suites, while challengers are rebuilding workflows end-to-end with autonomous agents at the core. This divide in product architecture is also quickly determining where durable value accrues.
Enterprise AI adoption is already mainstream, but outcomes are not. Seventy-eight percent of organizations are using AI, yet 95% of software trials are failing to accelerate customers' revenue, creating an opportunity for vendors that release tools, instead of demos, whose impact on business is measurable and governable. |
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On the incumbent side, platforms like Salesforce (Agentforce), Microsoft (Copilot), ServiceNow (Now Assist) and SAP (Joule) are pushing AI deeper into systems of record—an advantage for distribution, security posture and enterprise trust. But they're often also constrained by legacy data silos and workflow rigidity.
On the challenger side, AI-native vendors design the agent as the product core, where it acts like a smart employee autonomously managing tasks and following company guidelines. This enables shifting pricing from human seats to delivered outcomes—such as tickets resolved, invoices processed or transactions reconciled.
Capital is following the thesis. AI-related venture investments represented 64.3% of total global VC deal value in 2025 through Q3, with growth deals concentrating around emerging leaders such as Adept, Runway, Glean, Ramp and Cresta.
As models become commodities, defensibility for software makers is migrating to centralized management tools, strict ownership rules, workflow coordination with safety nets, industry specialization, and performance tracking because enterprises will only scale agents they can audit and govern. |
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Smart reads that caught our eye.
• AI, Big Tech and President Donald Trump are vying for the spotlight as the World Economic Forum kicks off in Davos. [The New York Times]
• The NYSE is developing a platform for trading tokenized securities, putting the heft of the exchange behind the technology. [The Wall Street Journal]
• Europe's struggle to produce globally dominant companies is not a mystery—it is the result of a weak and fragmented VC ecosystem. [ | | | | | | | |
