AI agent security.
BNPL wars.
Crypto wins.

March 5, 2026

Watch and learn

Hi there,

Here is this week's Hot or Not.

Hot: AI agent observability & evaluation

AI agent observability & evaluation is an emerging market for M&A.

Category leaders are racing to acquire startups that monitor and evaluate agent behavior. For example:

Security company Snyk acquired Invariant Labs
Observability platform Coralogix bought Aporia
Model lab Anthropic acqui-hired HumanLoop
Database provider ClickHouse acquired Langfuse

Monitoring and observability giant Datadog represents a natural next mover in this consolidation wave. As highlighted on its CB Insights Strategy Map, the company has already invested in multiple agent observability players since 2024:

Check out our 2026 agent predictions report for a full list of targets.

Not: Paying now

Buy now, pay later (BNPL) is no longer a checkout feature.

BNPL leaders Klarna and Affirm are both building toward full-spectrum consumer banking and rank among the most active payments companies by partnership volume.

The two companies are integrating BNPL into everything from device-based checkout flows to merchant banking and payment processing, sharing 27 partners including Apple, Adyen, and Google

Explore the full trend in our 2026 fintech predictions report.

Hot: Secure AI agents

Agents execute code, call APIs, and move data autonomously, making every tool they access a potential attack surface.

Our hiring data reflects the growing urgency.

Red teaming is becoming a core function across top AI agent security startups, with startups building offensive security expertise around emerging agent vulnerabilities, including:

Prompt injection
Jailbreaking
Agent hijacking
Multimodal attacks

See which security vendors are leading in our recent report.

Not: Underestimating crypto

Crypto's biggest players are quietly becoming banking infrastructure.

Ripple, Coinbase, and Circle each forged 50+ partnerships in 2025, all targeting traditional financial institutions. For example:

Circle is embedding USDC into FIS and Fiserv
Coinbase is moving into institutional prime brokerage for JPMorgan and Standard Chartered
Ripple has partnered with 9 of the 100 largest banks since 2023

Ripple has been most aggressive, backing its partnership push with 4 acquisitions spanning treasury management, prime brokerage, stablecoin payments, and custody.

Get the full breakdown in our recent report on this year's fintech predictions.

The +1

Source: u/lemongarlicjuice via Reddit

Presidential wealth? So many things wrong with this.

I love you.

Anand

@asanwal

Co-Founder & Exec Chair

P.S. Did you miss our digital health predictions for 2026? Grab the data & insights here.

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