The AI era is a sorting mechanism for enterprise software — separating companies that will be amplified from those that will be disrupted. We introduce the Thriver Framework: two dimensions, ten criteria, and one target quadrant that defines the Covalent investment thesis.
Service as a Software (noun): A software system that performs the service itself, pricing on outcomes rather than seats. The next generation of defining companies will invert the acronym entirely.
The bear case says AI will unbundle and commoditize SaaS. The bull case — and the one we believe — says AI is the most powerful tailwind enterprise software has ever experienced. Being long AI means being long SaaS, not short it.
The AI compute boom is, at its foundation, a power story. America's data center buildout requires gigawatts of reliable, dispatchable electricity. Renewables cannot bridge the gap fast enough — natural gas and LNG are the only credible near-term answer.
Consensus-following produces median returns. Real alpha — the kind that defines careers and funds — comes from having differentiated conviction when the crowd looks the other way. The case for productive contrarianism in private markets.
Frontier AI labs have consumed a significant portion of high-quality internet text. The "data wall" thesis is now mainstream — but the story is more nuanced. Synthetic data, reasoning compute, and proprietary data moats are rewriting the calculus.
Misaligned incentives between a fund and its portfolio management teams remain one of private equity's most persistent value-destroyers. Getting the structure right isn't just good governance — it's the single largest driver of returns.
The Model Context Protocol is quietly doing to AI agents what REST APIs did to SaaS in 2007. A new infrastructure standard is forming underneath the AI stack — and the investment implications are enormous.
The 1914 Endurance expedition failed to cross Antarctica — yet it produced one of history's greatest leadership case studies. In a world of infinite pivots and 18-month product cycles, Shackleton's playbook is more relevant than ever.