AGC's Presentation at GuidePoint Security’s CISO Summit

This week, AGC’s Co-Head of Cybersecurity Investment Banking, Eric Davis, presented at GuidePoint Security’s CISO Summit in Newport, Rhode Island, sharing AGC’s latest perspective on the Cyber threat landscape and capital markets, and the impact of both on CISOs.

Two themes ran through the presentation. First, AI is now everywhere in Cyber, emboldening attackers, disrupting entire product segments, creating new budget categories, and informing virtually every investment and M&A discussion.  Second, the Cyber investment landscape is increasingly bifurcated, with capital chasing early-stage companies in AI-forward segments and a few later-stage companies that have successfully executed, while a large cohort in the middle struggle to raise their next round.

• AI is changing the economics of Cyber offense. Ransomware is increasingly targeting the under-protected mid-market, while autonomous offensive AI has crossed the human baseline in areas including phishing and penetration testing.

• Capital is moving toward the next security stack. Cyber funding continues to grow, but the mix is shifting earlier and toward AI-native companies, with Security of AI emerging as one of the market’s fastest-developing categories.

• Public-market value is increasingly concentrated. A small group of scaled leaders is driving much of the sector’s performance, while profitable growth and strong Rule of 40 metrics continue to command a significant valuation premium.

• Cyber M&A in 2026 is very much a tuck-in market.  Deal activity is tracking roughly in-line with last year at 400+ deals annualized, but most of these are sub-$250M in value, with few of the multi-billion-dollar mega-deals that characterized 2025.

• The exit backlog remains unresolved. Capital continues to create new Cyber unicorns and self-anointed “platforms” faster than the market is providing exits, leaving a large population of private companies competing for a limited number of IPO and strategic M&A outcomes.

For CISOs, this creates a difficult balance: they need to remain keenly aware of the human element in Cyber while also upgrading their security stacks to AI speed while ensuring appropriate guardrails over AI usage itself.  Platform consolidation is simplifying the vendor management process for CISOs, but best-of-breed features continue to play an important role in a holistic Cyber strategy.