AI product management · Industry brief

Morgan Stanley completed its acquisition of EquityZen in January 2026, consolidating the secondary market for privately held company shares. According to EquityZen co-founder Phil Haslett, this deal reflects broader market growth and increasing adoption of secondary liquidity, with major financial institutions now paying closer attention to the space. The secondary market shows a stark bifurcation: AI-first companies built from 2023 onward are trading at premiums to their last funding rounds, while older software companies from the 2021 cohort raised at inflated valuations and many now trade at significant discounts, with Airtable exemplifying this trend by selling substantially below its $10 billion valuation. Within AI specifically, Haslett notes investor opportunity spans the entire production curve from data center energy to compute orchestration to training efficiency, with companies like Figure AI, Scale AI, and Redwood Materials entering top valuations, signaling a thematic shift toward AI infrastructure and hard tech.

Clio, a legal technology platform, raised $850 million in Series G funding at a $5 billion valuation and simultaneously used those proceeds to acquire legal research platform vLex in a deal valued at roughly $1 billion, combining practice management, client intake, and AI-powered legal research capabilities. This transaction exemplifies a broader shift where strategic acquirers now account for 62% of lower-middle-market SaaS transactions in 2025 (up from 55% in 2023), with companies like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Microsoft using acquisitions to fill capability gaps—a pattern increasingly replicated at mid-market scale where software companies are acquiring niche AI and analytics startups to build integrated platforms. The legal tech consolidation also reveals sharp variations in M&A multiples by vertical, with healthcare IT companies commanding close to twice the revenue multiple of education technology companies, underscoring how vertical market positioning significantly impacts acquisition valuations beyond growth rate alone.

Oakley Capital has acquired a majority stake in Graphwise, an enterprise AI data platform created through the October 2024 merger of Bulgaria's Ontotext and Austria's Semantic Web Company. The deal marks one of Bulgaria's largest software exits and represents a successful exit for Portfolion Capital Partners, which had invested in Ontotext in 2022 as part of a consortium. Graphwise provides AI data infrastructure using semantic layer and knowledge graph technologies for over 200 international clients in financial services, pharmaceuticals, and the public sector, with Oakley Capital and management planning to accelerate international expansion and pursue further acquisitions.

# Summary Pallet, an AI supply chain automation startup that has raised $50M from General Catalyst, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Bain Capital Ventures, is actively expanding its enterprise deployment capabilities. The company is hiring a Deployment Strategist to manage end-to-end customer deployments for its CoPallet AI agent platform as it scales into larger enterprise and mid-market customers. This role reflects Pallet's focus on enterprise AI governance and deployment at scale, particularly around translating complex business processes into executable AI workflows and managing the operational and organizational considerations required for mission-critical AI system adoption.