The Dutch buyout firm is reportedly working with Houlihan Lokey on early-stage discussions around a possible transaction. Deliberations remain preliminary, and Waterland could decide to retain the asset for a longer holding period. Xebia was founded in the Netherlands in 2001 and provides consultancy and software engineering services focused on artificial intelligence, cloud infrastructure, and data. The company employs more than 5,500 staff and operates from 28 offices worldwide. The business counts several global technology groups among its strategic partners, including Google Cloud, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Salesforce, reflecting its positioning within the enterprise AI ecosystem. Waterland acquired Xebia in 2020 as part of its mid-market buyout strategy. A sale at the mooted valuation would mark a significant exit for the firm and underline growing private equity appetite for professional services groups exposed to long-term AI adoption trends. Subscribe to our Newsletter to increase your edge. Don't worry about the news anymore, through our newsletter you'll receive weekly access to what is happening. Join 120,000 other PE professionals today....

Cambio, a startup that has built AI-powered commercial real estate software for institutional investors, has raised $18 million in a Series A round at a $100 million valuation, it tells Crunchbase News exclusively. Maverick Ventures led the financing, which included participation from Y Combinator, Adverb and angel investors from OpenAI, Anthropic and Notion, among others. Founded in 2022 by former institutional commercial real estate operators Leia de Guzman and Stephanie Grayson, Cambio has now raised a total of $22 million. It participated in Y Combinator's summer 2022 cohort and then went into 'R&D mode.' The San Francisco-based company launched its offering at the end of 2023, and de Guzman claims it has since seen 'rapid adoption' across enterprise customers and geographies ' scaling to 35 countries and to more than 2 billion square feet in assets. It recently opened a London office to support EU and APAC growth. Put simply, Cambio uses large language models and agentic artificial intelligence workflows to turn 'messy building data into investor-grade decisions and reporting.' And it claims to do so within minutes....

If you've spent any time looking at the raw attention maps of a Transformer or debugging a failed prompt chain at 2 AM, you start to realize something fundamental about the current state of Artificial Intelligence: we are trying to interface with a probabilistic alien intelligence using tools designed for deterministic machines and biological evolution. And frankly, it's a bit of a mess. We are currently stuck in a strange localized minimum. On one side, we have Natural Language'the interface of biology. It is expressive, high-bandwidth, but incredibly lossy and ambiguous. It's 'vibe-based.' On the other side, we have Programming Languages (Python, C++)'the interface of classical silicon. They are precise, constrained, and brittle. They are 'logic-based.' The thesis I want to explore today is that neither of these is the correct abstraction for the future of AI application development. We are missing the middle layer. We have excellent Models (the raw weights), but we are terrible at building Systems (the cognitive architectures) that effectively direct those models....

Speaking on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Rishi Kapoor, co-chief executive and chief investment officer of Investcorp, said the firm is instead targeting domestic services businesses that offer better risk-return profiles and greater insulation from geopolitical volatility. 'Ironically, we are not really going big and deep into data centres mainly because too much capital has gone into it,' Kapoor told Reuters. 'Returns have gotten compressed to levels where arguably, you can get a better risk-return trade-off in other areas.' Investcorp is focusing on professional, commercial, healthcare, IT, and transportation services, with geographic priorities including the US, the Gulf region, and India. The firm manages around $60bn in assets. Kapoor said concerns about inflated valuations and a potential AI bubble are emerging, even as investment into artificial intelligence infrastructure continues to surge. He added that Investcorp sees a strong IPO pipeline across its core markets and has several portfolio companies that could list this year....