Quick Facts
- Median EV/Revenue multiples for public SaaS companies have fallen to 5.1x as of December 2025, down from a pandemic peak of 18 to 19x.
- The AI agents market is projected to grow from $7.84 billion in 2025 to $52.62 billion by 2030, a CAGR of 46.3%.
- Gartner predicts at least 40% of enterprise SaaS spend will shift to usage-, agent-, or outcome-based models by 2030.
The SaaS model that made Salesforce and Workday worth hundreds of billions of dollars is breaking. Venture investor Richard de Silva, founder and managing partner of Lateral Investment Management, argues the transition is not a cycle. It is a structural replacement.
De Silva’s thesis is direct: the next wave of software will be AI-native, industry-specific platforms built around proprietary data and deep domain knowledge. Generic horizontal SaaS tools cannot compete with that model.
The Per-Seat Model Is Collapsing
SaaS was built on a simple premise. Sell subscriptions, charge per seat, grow by adding users. That model worked because humans were the end users. AI agents are not.
Publicis Sapient reports cutting traditional SaaS licenses by roughly 50%, including Adobe, replacing them with generative AI tools. Multiple SaaS companies reported slowing growth in Q4 2025 earnings not because AI failed to boost productivity, but because it succeeded. Customers are reducing software seats as AI-enhanced workers accomplish more with fewer licenses.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff put the split plainly: “We have per-user products which are for humans. And we have consumption products, they are for agents and robots.”
Bloomberg estimates that subscription-based pricing could fall from 60% of software pricing models to 30% over the next decade, while outcome-based pricing is projected to climb from 10% to 60%.
New Pricing Models Are Already Live
The replacement models are concrete. A legal AI platform charges per contract drafted. A spend management tool takes a percentage of overages it finds. A chargeback platform collects a fee on successful recoveries. The software charges for the work done, not the seat filled.
Analysts have begun flagging “AI seat risk” explicitly in earnings coverage. SaaS companies with heavy enterprise per-seat exposure saw revenue multiples compress in late 2024 and into 2025 relative to peers that had already shifted toward consumption or outcome-based pricing.
Agentic AI Investment Is Accelerating
Capital is moving fast. More than $9.7 billion has been poured into agentic AI startups since 2023. In April 2025, OpenAI closed a $40 billion funding round at a $300 billion valuation, with agent revenues projected at $29 billion annually by 2029.
Enterprise adoption is tracking with the investment. As of 2025, 79% of organizations report some level of agentic AI adoption, and 96% plan to expand usage. Gartner and Deloitte project that 35% of point-product SaaS tools will be replaced or absorbed into agent ecosystems by 2030. AI agents are on track to sit inside 40% of enterprise applications by 2026, up from under 5% in 2025.
Deloitte’s 2025 Tech Value survey found that 57% of respondents were allocating between 21% and 50% of their annual digital transformation budgets to AI automation.
What This Means for Software Founders
De Silva’s argument is not that software demand is shrinking. It is that the economics underpinning the sector are being repriced. Seat-based expansion, durable product differentiation through UI and integrations, and predictable net revenue retention are no longer reliable signals of a defensible business.
The companies best positioned to survive the shift are those with proprietary vertical data, deep customer relationships, and pricing models tied to measurable outcomes. The January 2025 single-session wipeout of $300 billion in SaaS market value was, in de Silva’s framing, a leading indicator that public markets have already started to reprice that risk.
For founders still building on a per-seat model, the window to adapt is narrowing.
Read more: SaaS Isn’t Coming Back. Something Much Bigger Is Replacing It