May 28, 2026

Getting SaaSy

Hi there,

Here is this week’s Hot or Not.

Hot: Professional services AI

KPMG and Anthropic this week announced KPMG Digital Gateway Powered by Claude, embedding frontier AI directly into KPMG's client delivery platform, with an initial focus on tax and private equity clients.

Leading strategy and tech consulting firms have collectively pursued more than 100 AI agent-related partnerships, investments, and acquisitions since 2023, per CB Insights data.

Two-thirds of organizations say deploying agents is a priority, yet nearly half remain stuck in the evaluation phase.

That gap is professional services firms' strategic opening. Get the' full roadmap for how firms will capture value in the AI agent era in our Future of Professional Services report.

Not: GLP-1 tunnel vision

GLP-1 leader Eli Lilly just spent up to $3.8B to re-enter a market it had largely abandoned, acquiring three vaccine developers in a deal worth up to $3.8B:

• Curevo
• Vaccine Company
• LimmaTech

The move signals a deliberate push to diversify beyond its blockbuster weight-loss franchise, following the pattern of pharma leaders using M&A to rapidly expand into high-growth therapeutic areas rather than build from scratch.

See the rest of the pharma giant’s deal activity in CB Insights' Eli Lilly strategy map.

Hot: Agentic commerce

Last week, Google unveiled Universal Cart, a cross-retailer, cross-service checkout layer spanning Search, Gemini, YouTube, and Gmail. It joins Amazon's Alexa+ shopping integration and Meta's AI chatbot shopping tests in a race to own the full consumer journey.

McKinsey projects agentic commerce could account for roughly one-third of all US online sales by decade's end. For example, Shopify and Walmart have already plugged their catalogs into ChatGPT to get ahead of the shift.

CB Insights identified 90+ private companies building across this stack in the agentic commerce market map.

Not: Dying early

Longevity tech has already raised over $400M this year, and Retro Biosciences just added to the tally with its new Series A-II last week.

The Sam Altman-backed startup raised a $1.8B pre-money valuation to fund new discovery programs across cell therapy, tissue reprogramming, and AI-enabled protein engineering.

It's one of dozens of startups racing to commercialize lifespan extension, from at-home diagnostics to senolytic therapies.

See all 200+ companies working to extend the human lifespan in our longevity tech market map.

The +1

Source: u/broseph_swagamuffin via Reddit

A slice of reality. What happens when your pie chart is an actual pie and doesn’t add up to 100?

I love you.

Anand

@asanwal 

Co-Founder & Exec Chair

P.S. Did you miss our briefing on the future of SaaS with AI agents? Get the recording here.

P.P.S. Our researchers are on stage at Money20/20 Europe in Amsterdam this week. Two sessions worth watching:

The Future of Payments: Scaling Secure Agentic Commerce: Tuesday, June 2, 3:55 PM at the Orbital Stage:

Mastercard and Google are building payments infrastructure for AI agent buyers. CB Insights Lead Fintech Analyst Aisha Chandraker explores what that actually takes with Pablo Fourez (Mastercard CDO) and Bogdan Brinzarea Iamandi (Google).

The Agentic Commerce Race: Preparing Payments for Autonomous Buyers Wednesday, June 3, 11:45 AM at the MoneyPot Stage

A small group of companies re-architected their payments stack for agentic buyers — and the data on conversion, risk, and routing already looks different. CB Insights VP of Research Rachel Binder moderates the debrief with Visa, Checkout.com, and Microsoft.

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