The AI boom has set the stage for a wave of tech M&A this year.

After 2 consecutive years of decline, tech M&A deals were up in 2024, with some of the largest deals centering on AI. AI companies have also bucked the general downward trend in exit valuations, instead seeing nearly double the median acquisition price from 2023 to 2024.

Using CB Insights’ predictive signals, such as Mosaic and M&A Probability, we’ve identified 7 AI-related areas where we expect to see M&A activity this year, as well as high-potential acquisition targets for each.

See highlights below, and download the full report for the rationale behind each prediction, as well as M&A target shortlists.

Tech M&A prediction highlights

• Big tech players set their sights on humanoid robotic: As physical AI takes off thanks to the rise of LLMs, humanoid robotics is becoming big tech’s next battlefield. Among high-potential acquisition targets, 1x stands out for its dual focus on industrial and consumer humanoids (just in January, it acquired Kind Humanoid to accelerate household robot development). This makes it a prime target for Meta, which recently announced plans to enter the consumer humanoid market.
• Enterprise tech heavyweights compete for AI infrastructure dominance: We’re already seeing strong signals from cash-rich companies such as Cisco and IBM, which are future-proofing their business models with AI investments. Hardware-aware AI optimization players CentML and Nota AI — which help accelerate AI model deployment while reducing compute costs — appear in our AI infrastructure acquisition target list. These companies have already shown quantifiable efficiency improvements as well as validation from Nvidia as a partner or investor.

Source: CB Insights advanced search. Data is dynamic (as of 2/27/2025).

• Data center energy demands fuel interest in cooling tech: Companies offering immersion and liquid cooling solutions enjoyed a funding rebound last year, attracting a combined $120M in fresh funding. Hypertec and Submer are high-potential acquisition targets in this space.
• Professional services firms seek AI capabilities: GenAI is coming for knowledge jobs — and leading professional services firms are buying AI capabilities to get ahead of it. One area where we see high M&A potential for professional services firms is to cater to clients’ responsible AI needs, with potential acquisition targets such as Lasso Security and HydroX AI.
• Pharma companies target AI drug discovery startups: AI drug discovery M&A is surging, with 12 deals in the sector since 2023. That M&A deal volume reflects both a maturing technology and growing urgency among pharma players to bring AI tech in-house.
• SaaS giants fortify their offerings with AI agent acquisitions: While some believe AI agents signal the death of SaaS companies, we anticipate SaaS leaders will acquire AI agent companies to avoid disruption. We’re already starting to see this happen with ServiceNow acquiring Moveworks for close to $3B in March 2025.

Source: CB Insights — ServiceNow Acquisition Insights

• Coding AI agents drive next wave of AI agent consolidation: Explosive growth, soaring valuations, a fractured AI agent landscape, and rising doubts about revenue defensibility make the coding AI agents market ripe for consolidation. While some players like Cursor look too expensive for an acquisition, we’ve identified Warp, Vidoc, and Bito as likely targets with high Mosaic scores and higher-than-average M&A Probabilities.

What is Mosaic?

Mosaic is CB Insights’ proprietary metric that measures the overall health and growth potential of private companies using non-traditional signals. Mosaic is widely used as a target company and market screener to identify high-potential emerging tech companies, typically defined as those with a score of 510 or higher.

What is M&A Probability?

M&A Probability is CB Insights’ proprietary signal that measures a private company’s chance of an M&A exit within the next 2 years. It is used to quickly screen and triangulate companies based on exit likelihood.

Combining both Mosaic Score and M&A Probability makes it easy to shortlist acquisition targets.

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The 2024 Change Healthcare cyberattack demonstrates the far-reaching consequences of cybercrime in healthcare. This attack compromised the protected health information of at least 100M people and cost parent company UnitedHealth around $3B.

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These attacks can inflict damages costing billions of dollars. Since 2017, every critical infrastructure cyberattack causing an estimated $1B+ in damages has affected the healthcare sector in some capacity, highlighting its particular vulnerability to digital threats.

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By 2029, SDVs could account for as much as 90% of auto production, up from just 3% in 2021, per Morgan Stanley. However, the transition comes with steep challenges, such as the technical complexity involved and the need for strong cybersecurity measures to protect connected vehicles.

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This spending is creating opportunities for growth across the AI data center value chain.

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What you need to know:

Startups in the space have raised just over $350M across 21 deals YTD (as of 10/7/2024). This marks a big funding increase compared to prior years and has been driven almost entirely by early-stage activity. 

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As new, hard-to-predict threats emerge from the nascent genAI space, so too do startups working on a broad range of novel cybersecurity solutions — some of which protect against genAI risks, while others use genAI to build new defenses. 

But among these young companies, which are building the tech solutions that could eventually grow into their own cybersecurity markets? 

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For the networking leader, AI forms the crux of a multi-pronged strategy to steer away from pure hardware toward services and software, which offer expanded revenue streams. Cisco is investing in pure-play AI infrastructure startups, forming AI partnerships, and embedding AI in its products.

Yet Cisco is going one step further by embracing an approach to AI computing centered on Ethernet and networking fabrics. These technologies could help handle the scale the speed demanded by data- and compute-intensive AI workloads. To this end, Cisco has partnered with chip leaders like Nvidia to help businesses manage AI clusters and deployments more easily. 

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Wiz also considered a $23B acquisition by Google, before walking away from the offer in July with plans to pursue an IPO. The news comes alongside rising cyber consolidation as cyber leaders look to keep up with an evolving attack surface, with M&A activity up 14% quarter-over-quarter (QoQ).

We break down the cybersecurity landscape in H1’24 across funding trends, mega-rounds, exits, and more using CB Insights data

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Humans will still play a crucial role — but instead of assembling parts or operating machinery, they will maintain robots and keep them running.

In these future factories, robots coordinate in unison, completing work automatically — without breaks, every hour of the day — to get products out the door. 

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Prefer to listen in? Check out our discussion of the report here: 

An empowered digital workforce would reshape industries as we know them. The implications would be enormous, changing how companies hire and scale, as well as what they can achieve with a small headcount. 

That future isn’t too far off. 

The idea of autonomous AI agents — LLM-powered bots that can independently reason and execute tasks — caught on like wildfire in 2023, marking an important evolution beyond chatbots and copilots. 

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has described agents as “AI’s killer function” as recently as May 2024.  

While much of the tech remains limited in its ability to execute tasks reliably, use cases are gaining traction in horizontal enterprise applications like customer support, sales, and engineering.

We mined CB Insights startup, financing, business model, and buyer interview data to map the evolving landscape and analyze its future. 

In the 28-page report, we cover: 

• The state of AI agents: Investment is surging to companies in the space, but limitations — most notably, agent reliability — remain. 
• Leading horizontal applications and impacts: The landscape of VC-backed agent startups is dominated by a focus on horizontal applications — across sales, customer support, and other enterprise and general productivity workflows.
• Emerging industry applications and opportunities: While few agentic companies focus on single industries, companies are emerging to target workflows across financial services, industrials, and more. 

Download the full report to get all of the data and analysis.

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Beyond relevance to government agencies, IQT’s investment activity has historically pointed to next-gen technologies that have the potential to be developed for use beyond the public sector.

IQT has participated in over 50 disclosed deals since the beginning of 2022, with many of its investments falling into areas categorized as “deep tech” — cutting-edge technologies rooted in scientific or engineering advances, such as biotech and quantum computing.

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These threats include data poisoning (corrupting or modifying training data to compromise the model), jailbreaking (tricking the LLM into producing malicious outputs that bypass safety protocols), and prompt injection (manipulating the input prompt to override the LLM’s original instructions).

Companies offering generative AI-powered solutions face high stakes, as security incidents could lead to compromised AI models, sensitive data loss, or reputational damage. A notable example occurred when Samsung banned use of generative AI tools after employees disclosed meeting notes and proprietary code to OpenAI’s ChatGPT last year.

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Driving the upswing: Humanoid robot funding has reached a record annual level just 4 months into the year, while investment in the operational technology (OT) security tools that can help protect them has already outpaced the previous 2 years combined.

Despite the gains, sector-wide deal count fell to its lowest quarterly level since 2016. This mirrors the broader pullback in venture dealmaking globally. 

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The company has faced multiple high-profile incidents over the past 6 years — including crashes involving its planes and a fuselage blowout. This series of events has resulted in a decline in consumer trust, aggravated airlines, and lost sales to rival Airbus.

Amid these challenges, Boeing has shaken up its corporate leadership and moved to improve its manufacturing quality. For instance, the company is exploring a reintegration with Spirit AeroSystems to help address production flaws.

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Threats to grid stability are escalating due to more extreme weather events and sophisticated cyber attacks. Increasing electricity demand due to data centers and electric vehicles exacerbates these challenges, while the global push toward sustainable — yet intermittent — power sources like solar and wind adds further complexities.

There is an urgent need for more power generation diversity and delivery system reliability, as exemplified by incidents like the 2021 Texas freeze and the 2022 California heatwave.

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Funding to the space set a new record in 2023 — bucking the broader decrease in venture funding for the second year in a row.  

While still a nascent technology, startups are pursuing a broad range of potential use cases for quantum computing (which process information in a fundamentally different way to typical computers) across numerous industries — from training AI models more efficiently to simulating otherwise hard-to-model chemical reactions to quickly solving complex logistics problems, among many others.

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Threats to company hardware — e.g., servers, chips, and hard drives — abound.

For example, some attackers are creating counterfeit hardware that companies are incorporating into their IT infrastructures. These devices often contain backdoors that can be exploited to access company systems. Attackers are also finding ways to modify existing devices to gain unauthorized access. Meanwhile, elements like outdated password practices and firmware-level exploits are introducing additional vulnerabilities.

These hardware attacks can be incredibly damaging.

Compromised hardware can undermine all other cybersecurity defenses in place, granting cybercriminals direct access to sensitive information. Hardware attacks can also allow attackers to gain direct control of a device and even those connected to it in some cases, putting entire systems at risk of infiltration and disruption.

Meanwhile, the risks facing company hardware are intensifying with the development of new technologies. For example, quantum computers could eventually become capable of cracking some types of encryption in a fraction of the time it would take a conventional computer — complicating everyday challenges like user verification, access control, handling data, and more.

As a result, companies are turning to hardware security solutions to protect their physical devices and prevent unauthorized access to enterprise systems.

In the market map below, we identify 144 hardware security vendors operating across 15 categories.

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Note: This map includes public companies, private startups, and exited companies that continue to operate independently. It is not intended to be exhaustive of the space and categories are not mutually exclusive.

Key takeaways

1. Hardware security markets are in varying stages of development. For example, post-quantum cryptography saw an influx of early-stage investment activity last year, while the hardware security modules market is dominated by more legacy firms.
2. More industries — from manufacturing to automotive — are embracing connected products, bringing internet of things (IoT) security front and center. Among highlighted markets, IoT security has seen the most equity deals over the past year (15 deals).
3. Access control is becoming more central to hardware security. Companies are increasingly moving IP assets and computing operations to the cloud, which is creating a new set of security challenges. Consequently, several different markets are now focused on managing user credentials and permissions for cloud applications to uphold hardware security — e.g., enterprise key management, passwordless authentication tools, and biometric identity.

Market descriptions

Enterprise key management

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As AI increases the frequency and sophistication of cyber threats, investors are looking to emerging cybersecurity solutions to help enterprises prevent costly breaches. Advancements in generative AI are also carving out new cybersecurity needs, requiring companies to protect their data, models, and how employees use third-party tools.

Regulation from oversight bodies — like the SEC’s new rules governing cyber risk management and incident disclosure — is also a key driver for investors backing cybersecurity startups.

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Despite the increase, cybersecurity startups secured just $5.7B in the first 3 quarters of 2023, down 58% from the same period in 2022.

While cybersecurity M&A exits declined in Q3’23, the sector saw one of its largest M&A deals to date: Cisco acquired Splunk for $28B to beef up its AI capabilities.

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To prevent and defend themselves against these security vulnerabilities, enterprises are increasingly adopting identity & access management (IAM) solutions, which ensure that the right individuals have access to the right resources at the right time.

IAM solutions are foundational to a zero-trust cybersecurity framework, where each entity is authenticated before being granted permission to corporate resources. More organizations are moving toward this standard as a proactive security measure. Last year, for instance, the US federal government advised all agencies to adopt a zero-trust model by fiscal year 2024. 

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Beyond employee devices, the growing number of connected products across industries like manufacturing and healthcare is driving the need for stronger endpoint security solutions.

But tackling endpoint security is a bigger task than just securing devices — users themselves also pose a risk. According to Verizon, nearly 75% of cyberattacks involve an element of human error. To help counter this, vendors are springing up in tech markets like enterprise password managers and security awareness training that aim to reduce employees’ vulnerability.

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For the first time in over a year, quarterly deal activity showed positive gains quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) in Q2’23. This is even more significant in the context of the broader venture market, which saw deal volume decline over the same time period. 

Another bright spot in the quarter was M&A exits, which jumped as enterprise tech behemoths snapped up cybersecurity startups to expand their capabilities.

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The price is substantial and growing. Data breaches now cost nearly $4.5M on average, up 15% over the last 3 years, according to a recent IBM report.

At the same time, regulations such as HIPAA in healthcare, Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards, and the EU’s GDPR impose hefty fines for companies that do not secure their data properly.

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