March 5, 2026

Watch and learn

Hi there,

Here is this week's Hot or Not.

Hot: AI agent observability & evaluation

AI agent observability & evaluation is an emerging market for M&A. 

Category leaders are racing to acquire startups that monitor and evaluate agent behavior. For example:

• Security company Snyk acquired Invariant Labs
• Observability platform Coralogix bought Aporia
• Model lab Anthropic acqui-hired HumanLoop
• Database provider ClickHouse acquired Langfuse

Monitoring and observability giant Datadog represents a natural next mover in this consolidation wave. As highlighted on its CB Insights Strategy Map, the company has already invested in multiple agent observability players since 2024:

Check out our 2026 agent predictions report for a full list of targets. 

Not: Paying now

Buy now, pay later (BNPL) is no longer a checkout feature. 

BNPL leaders Klarna and Affirm are both building toward full-spectrum consumer banking and rank among the most active payments companies by partnership volume. 

The two companies are integrating BNPL into everything from device-based checkout flows to merchant banking and payment processing, sharing 27 partners including Apple, Adyen, and Google

Explore the full trend in our 2026 fintech predictions report.

Hot: Secure AI agents

Agents execute code, call APIs, and move data autonomously, making every tool they access a potential attack surface. 

Our hiring data reflects the growing urgency. 

Red teaming is becoming a core function across top AI agent security startups, with startups building offensive security expertise around emerging agent vulnerabilities, including: 

• Prompt injection
• Jailbreaking
• Agent hijacking
• Multimodal attacks

See which security vendors are leading in our recent report.

Not: Underestimating crypto

Crypto's biggest players are quietly becoming banking infrastructure.

Ripple, Coinbase, and Circle each forged 50+ partnerships in 2025, all targeting traditional financial institutions. For example: 

• Circle is embedding USDC into FIS and Fiserv
• Coinbase is moving into institutional prime brokerage for JPMorgan and Standard Chartered
• Ripple has partnered with 9 of the 100 largest banks since 2023

Ripple has been most aggressive, backing its partnership push with 4 acquisitions spanning treasury management, prime brokerage, stablecoin payments, and custody.

Get the full breakdown in our recent report on this year’s fintech predictions.

The +1

Source: u/lemongarlicjuice via Reddit

Presidential wealth? So many things wrong with this.  

I love you.

Anand

@asanwal 

Co-Founder & Exec Chair

P.S. Did you miss our digital health predictions for 2026? Grab the data & insights here.

Get started with CB Insights

CB Insights' emerging technology insights platform provides all the analysis and data from this newsletter. Our data is the easiest way to discover and respond to emerging tech. 

Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here