The Agentic Endgame: Shifting an Investment Thesis for the AI Platform Era

The tectonic plates of enterprise software are officially shifting. We are moving decisively out of the SaaS/Cloud Infrastructure era and into the Agentic AI Platform era.

For mid-market incumbents, the opportunity is huge, but it’s a true Innovator’s Dilemma. They must actively cannibalize their high-margin, sticky-tool revenue streams to build the actual solution layer. Most won’t. This creates the ‘white space’ for disruptive startups we look to fund.

Here are the biggest opportunities:

1- Shifting from Tools to Solutions
The core mandate has changed: Customers are no longer buying tools; they are investing in guaranteed outcomes.

For the last decade, SaaS has been a tax on the enterprise—paying per seat for unused features, siloed dashboards, and data summaries that still required expensive human analysis to act upon. That model is now structurally defunct.

We are actively seeking startups that completely abstract the interface layer and focus solely on solution delivery. No more “data visualization for decision support.”

The biggest initial challenge will be organizational change management. The first enterprises that can embrace the loss of the human-in-the-loop intermediary role will achieve exponential, asymmetric gains.

2- Defensible Business Models of the Agentic Era
A) Business in a Box or Service as a Software

Thesis: Deep vertical automation that achieve quantifiable results.

The Play: Building a closed-loop system that doesn’t just manage a process (like ERP) but executes the complete workflow from ingestion to resolution. The moat here is not the code, but the proprietary execution graph—the deeply engineered understanding of the business infrastructure necessary to guarantee a quantifiable result. This is about delivering a linked chain of automated solutions, not just a set of discrete features.

B) The Agentic Network Layer

Thesis: Creating a standardized, low-latency protocol for inter-agent communication and task decomposition.

The Play: We’re betting on the emergence of foundational network infrastructure. These platforms will enable individual, sovereign agents (owned by users) to securely expose the minimal necessary data to coordinate with other agents to solve complex, multi-step problems in real-time. This is the dynamic B2B marketplace of the future.

C) Data Co-operatives & Federated Learning

Thesis: Solving the data silo problem with aligned economic incentives.

The Play: Aggregating “dark data” that is individually non-material but collectively powerful. Think of specialized small data creators (SMBs, niche researchers) whose aggregated, high-fidelity data pool can train a model that no single entity could afford to replicate. The key is the shared value creation mechanism: A protocol that compensates data contributors via fractionalized ownership or micropayments, while charging solution providers for access. This creates a powerful data-moat flywheel that increases in defensibility with every new participant.

3- Outcome-Based Pricing (OBP)
The true signal of a mature agentic business model is the shift to Outcome-Based Pricing.

If you’re still charging a flat monthly fee per seat, you’re building a tool, not a solution. We invest in companies so confident in their execution engine that they can virtually guarantee the result.

Model: Fee = Value Created. If the defined outcome is not met, the customer pays nothing.

Initial Traction: This will immediately disrupt the incumbent SaaS market.

Future: This model will fully converge with the Agentic Network, where real-time micro-transactions—multiple per second—will be executed for solving fractionalized problems, replacing the entire concept of a “subscription” with dynamic, utility-based value exchange.

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This isn’t just an upgrade or a shift. It’s a fundamental architectural replacement that dictates a completely new investment thesis.

If you or someone you know are in San Diego and are interested in any of the above topics please reach out. We are focused on supporting the growth of this future in San Diego.

– This is the changing point for my writing. I had AI help writing the post. I started with a detailed transcript and then used the support for formatting and clarification of the concepts. It’s still all original ideas in one place, just cleaned up a bit from previous works.