US Software: Insights from 2026 DB Software Bus Tour

We spent two and a half days on an investor bus tour in the San Francisco Bay Area meeting a dozen public and private software companies, along with VCs, CISOs and consultants. Our key takeaway is that AI is changing demand patterns, and vendors closest to the token stream are seeing the greatest incremental benefit today, most evident in Infrastructure, while Security should also benefit as greater token usage expands data flows, identities and attack surfaces; Snowflake, CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks are among the more apparent beneficiaries. In security, infrastructure modernization and legacy displacement are driving demand for endpoint, hardware firewall and data resilience, and customers are carving out dedicated 2027 AI budgets, of which security represents roughly 3-5% and is incremental to core cyber budgets;