Qualitate

Finally launching Qualitate out of stealth: expert intelligence for every investment and strategy decision

2,200+ discussions with senior data & AI decision-makers breaking down these trends in 2026 now live on the Qualitate platform qualitate.io/book-a-demo

Non-human identities (NHIs) went from 3% of IAM buyer discussions to 38% in 12 months Agentic AI, expanding SaaS footprints, and API-driven architectures are creating machine identities faster than existing tools can manage

One prompt to custom project:

Collaborative work management spending is stalling, based on our 2H '25 enterprise apps study. Seat penetration is plateauing and buyers are limiting rollouts to cut costs. We’re seeing more of the same in our ongoing 1H '26 study. $TEAM is impacted (28th percentile current account spend growth in enterprise apps), but theyʼre not alone - most competitors showed even sharper deceleration and weaker forward spend. Long term, Atlassian shows the greatest ability to survive consolidation vs. competitors. Atlassian’s strength: developer preference. As organizations consolidate tool spend, they need one platform that appeals to all departments. Atlassian fits the bill for the most technical employees. “Weʼre looking for tools with cross-departmental adoption, and $ASAN hasnʼt fit that. Our product and engineering teams prefer Confluence for their projects.” “Consolidation activity is happening, so we are trying to get rid of tools like $MNDY that do not support key security enterprise features. There's better options for us for that usage to be cannibalized by other tools like Jira.”

$CRWD management vs. buyer commentary on AI @CrowdStrike management on their F4Q26 earnings call: "AI is driving elevated demand for the Falcon platform and is a key accelerant for our business." Across our 1H '26 cybersecurity study, AI/automation was cited by 43% of organizations planning/maintaining spend or evaluating CrowdStrike, up from 38% last study. CrowdStrike shows 89% positive AI/automation alignment, outperforming most key competitors. Verdict: Aligned. Buyers confirm AI is a growing part of the demand story.

1/ $CVLT reported today. EPS beat, SaaS revenue +43% YoY. Our 1H '26 cybersecurity buyer data adds context the earnings don't show.

The third era of primary research:

In November 2025, @qualitateio sourced next 12-month spending plans from 400+ IT technology buyers globally $INTC signals showed strong improvement versus the prior study @intel customer spend growth within servers hit 8.4%, accelerating 3.5pp study-over-study, driven by increased exposure to AI use cases

The response has been overwhelming to @qualitateio's launch. A massive thank you to this incredible team. We’re hiring fast to build the future of research:

Primary research is painfully slow and expensive. Here's 2 years of building the fix. Today, the world's largest investment firms & enterprises run their workflows on Qualitate in days instead of weeks

These tools will be interesting to watch With AI, fundamental can get a quant back office and, with some of these tools, quant can get a fundamental front end. If you walk the halls of a large hedge fund today, you will see very large data engineering teams, teams of many data scientists, forensic accounting teams, survey teams, etc. This headcount intensity has been a barrier to alpha. A key question is whether other funds can replicate these 200 bodies with 5 people and a stack of great AI tools, which increases the competitive intensity of alpha. In my view, the distinction between longer duration, fundamental quant strategies (long term is 3m+ in quant world) and high/intermediate velocity fundamental strategies should see convergence - the question is how much. The promise of quantamental, which has so hard to implement due to cultural, talent & "run of cards" LP dynamics (non-core strategies first to go when they go off the rails), now becomes more promising, and the investors of the future in my opinion are bionic and highly "quanty". But what side wins? Fundamental investors becoming more quanty or quant firms encroaching on fundamental alpha? Even arcane concepts like thematic betas that fundamental investors mostly ignore today become highly relevant to the fundamental investor when you can overlay automatic research on thematic cycles. I believe demand for factor models will grow nicely and be a key piece in the New Investor Dashboard. If I were a large quant firm, I would work to build a coalition of other quant firms to systematize corporate access via recorded management calls (with mgmt discretion), conducted by a team of in-house journalists, eventually AI voice agents. The same way some of the large long only complexes have taken corporate access in house. May not happen, but will we see CFO's taking their 2x monthly call with the "quant coalition"? That would not be great for fundamental investors... (not sponsored by Qualitate)

I’m really excited to share today that I’m joining @qualitateio ! Two years ago, I led the first financing into Qualitate on behalf of Crew Capital. Today, Qualitate comes out of stealth, announcing its $7M seed financing led by Crew Capital and IA Ventures. When I first met @S_Kadakia , Qualitate was just an idea in a pitch deck. But when he explained his vision for Qualitate, it immediately clicked. I’ve spent the last decade as an investor and analyst across both private and public markets. The throughline in my career has been primary research - how to get an informational edge that can drive conviction in an investment thesis. Over the last 30 years, expert networks have grown as a dominant way enterprises and investment firms have tried to get that edge. But like so many industries, AI has made expert networks obsolete. Qualitate is creating a new category of primary research for the AI era: continuous intelligence. Our AI moderator interviews experts across the economy and aggregates their insights into the world's largest structured database of primary intelligence, and it compounds with every new conversation. That's the foundation. On top of it, customers can embed Qualitate's data into their own tools and systems, combining our data with their data to power end-to-end research workflows, like interviewing experts, interviewing employees, generating executive briefings, and analyzing potential investments. Qualitate helps companies understand not just the world around them, but what’s happening in their own company as well. All powered by the world’s largest structured database of primary research. I’ll stay on as an advisor to Crew, and nothing changes with the portfolio companies whose financings I led or the boards I'm a part of. After a decade of evaluating companies from the outside, as we stand on the precipice of the biggest tech cycle of our lifetimes, I wanted to help build an AI company. And after two years of working with Sagar, it’s clear Qualitate was the one. The team he has assembled is incredible, and I’m excited to be joining them as VP of Operations.

Read our full press release: businesswire.com/news/home/2026…

Finally launching Qualitate out of stealth: expert intelligence for every investment and strategy decision

Why is @OpenAI losing deals to @AnthropicAI? Hear it directly from senior decision-makers. We filtered our library on spend intentions and pulled 60+ in-depth discussions from the last 6 months where buyers are decreasing or replacing OpenAI. Here’s what they said:

AI security spend is the fastest-growing in cybersecurity across 70+ markets we track. Spend drivers are shifting from “we're scared of AI threats” to “we need to secure production AI workloads”

Sales tools are a top-growing category in enterprise apps. Growth is being driven by top-of-funnel markets Vendors most exposed to these markets in 2H '25 (by buyer usage & eval intentions): @clay (77%) @ZoomInfo $GTM (75%) @useapolloio (72%) @gong (63%) @ConstantContact (33%) @HubSpot $HUBS (26%) @anaplan (26%) @klaviyo $KVYO (24%) @salesforce $CRM (22%)

Private cybersecurity vendors are getting more at-bats than ever. Converting them is the problem Let's break it down, with data from our latest cyber study with 556 senior tech buyers

We track which AI vendors enterprises are evaluating and converting on @AnthropicAI's evaluation share more than doubled between 1H and early 2H '25 in our data, with large enterprise conversion hitting 100%...

Cybersecurity budgets are stagnating 3 slides on the shift from our fresh 1h '26 cyber trends report Context: Qualitate's AI moderator conducted 35K minutes of discussions with buyers about their 2026 strategies, compared against 100K minutes from prior studies. outputs below