Cut Cost. Build AI.
Protect the Exit.
An executive dinner for PE investors and the software companies they own.
The AI Diligence Bar Quietly Went Technical
A board-level story about AI strategy used to close the conversation. In 2026, a diligence team can independently check whether it’s true:
The capability actually in production
Real user adoption
Model performance holding up over time
Data governance on sensitive data
Security under inspection
Most management teams have the story. Fewer have the evidence.
The market made the right bet, at the wrong time to still be paying for it
Large funds carry in-house value-creation teams and standing technology playbooks, amortized across a much bigger book. A $200M to $2B fund may not have built that bench or made a deliberate call against it given the economics at this scale.
The same logic runs one level down: most portfolio companies here sent their engineering capital toward product and growth. That was the correct call when they made it. It just means the technical debt bill and the AI diligence clock are arriving at the same time.
That’s the gap this evening is built around.
Three Moves Before The Next Process
Cut
Strip legacy cost out of the P&L.
Database migration, license consolidation, and infrastructure rationalization. Moves EBITDA directly — the number underwritten in the next process.
Build
Make the company AI-native where it counts.
Internal workflows like reporting and forecasting, and the product itself. Evidence in the data room outweighs intention on a roadmap slide.
Protect
Guard the exit multiple against an AI-diligence discount.
Governance, monitoring, and security built in from the start. Assembled the week before a process, it reads as exactly that.
One Company That Shipped: HireRoad
HireRoad, an HR analytics platform backed by Strattam Capital, had the problem most portfolio companies will recognize. HR leaders were working off static dashboards, waiting days for an analyst to answer a basic question. HireRoad set out to close that wait entirely, turning it into an instant, narrative answer.
Working with SourceFuse, HireRoad built the PeopleInsight AI Assistant — an embedded layer that turned static dashboards into conversational, predictive intelligence, running on AWS.
What compressed the timeline: AI moved into the toolchain itself
SourceFuse delivers through AI-DLC, a development lifecycle built with AWS. AI now sits inside migration, testing, and governance — the delivery process itself. That is what actually compressed the timeline. The same governance is what a 2026 technical AI diligence process checks, built in from day one.
What The Table Gives Each Side
Investor and operator get scored on this together at exit. So the evening is built as one conversation, not two.
If You Invest
- A diagnostic you can run across the whole book yourself: which companies are closest to a credible AI story, which still have a legacy cost to strip first.
- A read on where peers running similar portfolios are actually placing their bets right now — hard to get outside a room like this.
- A direct line into the SourceFuse and AWS delivery ecosystem, usable on any company you own.
If You Operate
- A first-hand account from a peer who already shipped this, and what it changed about how the company reads in a room.
- A clear-eyed read on which lever — cost or capability — is the bigger swing for your own platform, worked out here, ahead of your own next process.
- A delivery partner who can move inside the hold period you’re actually working with, and a fund in the room who already thinks this way.
Join Industry Leaders & Experts
Hari Challapalli
Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer, Beacon Signal — Ex-CPO, HireRoad
Strategic product leader driving high-performing teams, transformative innovation, and business growth through customer-centric product thinking.
Kelly Dyer
EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN & CO-FOUNDER, SOURCEFUSE
Technology entrepreneur and co-founder of SourceFuse, driving innovation across cloud, healthcare technology, and digital transformation.
Samarpan Bhattacharya
VP – Application Development and SaaS, SourceFuse
Veteran technologist leading global SaaS engineering, cloud-native innovation, ARC framework creation, and open-source contributions.
Investors and operators, one table, one evening.
