For most of 2026, software investors worried that artificial intelligence would let companies build their own tools and stop paying for the software they had relied on for years.
That fear pushed many well-known names down 40% or more from their highs.
Then one report changed the mood in a single afternoon.
News broke on Aug. 13, 2026, that private equity firm Silver Lake was in talks to buy human resources and finance software maker Workday (WDAY).
Workday stock jumped about 18% that day.
If a sophisticated buyer was willing to pay a large sum for enterprise software, the market may have been too harsh on the group as a whole.
Wall Street moved quickly to answer the obvious follow-up question. If Workday can draw a bid, who else could?
Analysts started dropping names. Four of them particularly stood out for investors trying to figure out where this leaves their money.
Why a Workday deal reset the mood for software stocks
The Silver Lake talks did something no earnings report had managed all year. They gave software investors a reason to think the selling had gone too far.
Workday was valued at about $43 billion before the news, according to Reuters.
Shares then rose about 18% and lifted its market value to roughly $51 billion, Bloomberg reported.
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Private equity buyers look for steady, recurring revenue and customers who rarely leave. Enterprise software fits that description well.
A deal signals that these buyers see durable cash flow where public investors saw a business under threat from AI.
That sets a price floor. Once a buyer offers a premium for one company, investors use that number as a baseline for similar stocks. Prices tend to stop falling below it.
What KeyBanc analysts told investors to watch next
Right after the Workday report, KeyBanc analysts drew up a shortlist of software companies that could attract a similar bid.
Their high-conviction names included HubSpot (HUBS), Five9 (FIVN), GitLab (GTLB), and Asana (ASAN), according to Seeking Alpha.
The logic was practical. Each company owns data and workflows that customers depend on daily, which is exactly what an acquirer wants.
KeyBanc analyst Jason Celino put a number on the idea. He said investors should value software companies at about 15 times their projected free cash flow when thinking about a buyout.
For Workday, that math works out to a price of about $224 per share, which is a rough floor for what a buyer might pay, Investing.com reported.
That framing gave the whole group a reference point that had been missing for months.
HubSpot: the sales and marketing platform buyers already know
HubSpot sells marketing, sales, and customer service software mainly to small and mid-sized businesses.
Once a company runs its customer records through HubSpot, switching becomes costly and slow. That is the appeal.
A buyer would gain control of front-office customer data that is valuable for training sales and service tools.
HubSpot also showed the business is holding up. In the second quarter, revenue rose 20% to $911.7 million and beat expectations, while adjusted earnings reached $3.26 per share, according to AOL.
The stock had still fallen hard this year, which is what makes it interesting to an acquirer.
If a private equity firm or a bigger cloud company buys HubSpot, they would likely have to pay more than today’s stock price to get the deal done.
Five9: the call-center software the market wrote off
Five9 runs cloud software for contact centers, the systems companies use to handle customer calls and messages.
Many investors assumed AI voice agents would replace human call centers quickly, so the stock went down sharply.
Five9 recently traded well below its 2025 high.
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That heavy discount is the opportunity. Five9 owns the routing, telecom links, and live customer data that AI agents need to work.
The company is also growing. Second-quarter revenue rose 10% to $312.4 million and beat expectations, while its AI-related revenue climbed 78%, AOL noted.
For a buyer, taking Five9 private would remove the pressure of reporting messy quarterly numbers during that shift.
GitLab: the developer platform sitting in a two-company race
GitLab offers a platform where teams write, secure, and ship software.
As companies rush to build their own AI tools, that kind of infrastructure becomes more important.
That makes GitLab a structural AI play rather than a victim of AI.
Analysts note that infrastructure software often draws private equity first, given its direct role in building enterprise AI.
There is a second angle that helps shareholders. GitLab competes mainly with Microsoft’s GitHub in a near two-company market.
A financial buyer could grow GitLab on its own, or a large infrastructure provider could buy it to compete harder with Microsoft.
Either path could spark a bidding contest, which tends to lift the price a seller can command.
Asana: a lagging stock that a deal could reset
Asana makes work-management software that helps teams plan and track projects.
Its stock has struggled under heavy competition and tighter corporate software budgets, and it recently traded near the low end of its range.
The company spent years building what it calls its Work Graph, a map of how tasks and projects connect across a company.
A buyer would value that map as a base for AI agents that assign and track work automatically.
An acquisition would also change the story for long-term holders.
Instead of grinding through more weak quarters in public view, Asana could restructure privately and give shareholders a clear exit at a premium.
That is why a takeover framework matters most for the names the market had already given up on.
How the 4 infrastructure software targets stack up
Here is a simple way to compare what each company brings to a buyer and what public investors have feared.
Quick comparison of the 4 names
- HubSpot: Owns front-office customer data for small and mid-sized businesses. Public fear was cheap AI-built alternatives.
- Five9: Controls contact-center routing and live customer data. Public fear was AI replacing call centers.
- GitLab: Runs core developer and security workflows. Public fear was AI coding tools making it obsolete.
- Asana: Holds cross-team project data through its Work Graph. Public fear was larger platforms absorbing its market.
The pattern is consistent. In each case, a buyer sees a data asset where the market saw a business AI would erode.
This is not the first private-equity move on software this year
The Workday talks did not come out of nowhere. Private buyers have been circling software companies all year.
Thoma Bravo bought HR software company Dayforce for about $12.3 billion. The deal was completed in February.
Shareholders got $70 per share, which is a 32% premium over the pre-deal price, according to Thoma Bravo.
That deal already showed buyers were willing to pay up for recurring software revenue in HR and finance.
The reported Workday move extends that pattern to a much larger target. It suggests the appetite is not limited to smaller names.
When two separate buyers pay premiums for the same kind of business within months, the “AI will kill software” argument starts to look overstated.
What investors should actually do here
A takeover rumor is a reason to pay attention, not a reason to buy right away. Being called a target does not guarantee a deal.
Here are the risks worth considering before acting.
Risks to weigh first
- No deal is promised. Talks can break down. If the Silver Lake and Workday discussions stall, the recent gains in these stocks could fade.
- Big buyouts need heavy financing. Multi-billion-dollar deals often require several investors, which can slow or sink a transaction.
- Weaker names may still struggle. If companies keep cutting software vendors, second-tier names without strong data could keep falling even with M&A talk around them.
A sensible next step is to decide in advance how much a sudden 20% drop would cost you, then wait for the next round of earnings before adding money.
The bottom line for software investors
The reported Silver Lake move on Workday did more than lift one stock. It gave the whole software group a reference point after a harsh year.
By putting real money behind an enterprise software business, a major buyer signaled that public markets may have priced in too much AI damage.
KeyBanc’s shortlist of HubSpot, Five9, GitLab, and Asana gives investors four specific names to study, each with recurring revenue and data that a buyer would want.
None of them is a sure thing. Deals fall apart, and a rumor can reverse as fast as it arrived.
But the setup has changed. For the first time in months, the question around these stocks is not only how much AI might take away. It now includes how much a buyer might be willing to pay.
That shift is worth watching closely as earnings and any deal news arrive in the coming weeks.
