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Swalwell faces multiple allegations of sexual misconduct, including rape of a former staffer.

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Why we love this deal

A portable desk can be useful when you need a dedicated place to work without giving up much floor space. A smaller desk that has room for work materials, while also offering storage for other items, works well in a student apartment, in a child’s room for homework, or in your remote office. If you want the option to change your setup throughout the day, a portable desk can also come in handy, working as a remote desk during the day and a crafting desk in the evening. Portable rolling desks can also be moved out of the way when you’re finished working, providing more space to do other activities. 

The Winaz Portable Standing Desk with Storage features wheels, an adjustable standing option, and tons of storage. It’s useful for all sorts of work around the house, and provides a place to store notebooks, electronics, pens, books, and more, instead of having to purchase a separate shelf. This desk is on sale for $80, saving shoppers 20% at Amazon. 

Winaz Portable Standing Desk with Storage, $80 (was $100) at Amazon

Courtesy of Amazon

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Why do shoppers love it?

This rolling desk has an adjustable height range from 27.9 to 41.3 inches, offering sitting or standing positions for multiple heights. The five fixed settings are reinforced with a retainer that’s designed to keep the desk from slipping once the height is set, making it easier to adjust the workspace for different users. The 360-degree ball-bearing swivel casters allow it to roll in different directions, while the wheels can be secured with brakes to keep the desk in place. The option to roll the desk wherever you want it makes it flexible and convenient for any type of work.

Related: Walmart’s $195 makeup vanity with a built-in charging station is 49% off

For a smaller desk, it also provides several storage options. Two drawers provide space for smaller supplies, measuring 18 inches deep, 14 inches wide, and 4.5 inches tall, while a side pocket provides room for notebooks, magazines, or crafting accessories, and two smaller slip pockets offer even more storage for sticky notes, markers, or scissors. The desk features a larger lower shelf, measuring 7.1 inches deep and 31.5 inches wide, which is perfect for storage baskets, large school books, house slippers, and other large items.

Details to know

Storage: It includes two drawers, a large storage pocket, and two slip pockets, plus a large shelf underneath. 

Adjustable: The desk is adjustable with five different height options. 

Size: It measures 31.5 inches wide and 18.9 inches deep, providing space for laptops, desktops, books, notebooks, and more. 

“This rolling desk has held up well,” one shopper said. “The assembly went smoothly, all the parts fit correctly, and the instructions were clear. It has useful drawers and side storage, and the wheels make it easy to move around when needed. The height adjustment works as advertised.”Another buyer said, “I use this as a portable craft center. It’s nice to be able to pull it out to craft at night. The drawers are now jam-packed with tools and are still holding up.”

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Greenforest Folding Work Desk with Shelf, $51 (was $60) at Amazon

Bliesosfud Adjustable Standing Desk, $63 (was $80) at Amazon

Jsskeeim Adjustable Standing Desk, $54 (was $70) at Amazon

The Winaz Portable Standing Desk with Storage offers an easy alternative to a large, immovable office. With this desk, it’s easy to work off the sofa or in any other room. It can easily be moved out of the way when needed, and can hold a good amount of our office and work supplies, saving money and space. At just $80, this portable desk is a great deal that offers storage and adjustability. 

Real estate technology company Redfin is warning and informing Americans looking to buy a home about a key trend in the housing market.

Home prices continue to rise, mortgage rates are a factor, affordability is a constraint, and the reasons why people who want to buy homes are influenced by major factors.

“Despite the sluggishness of the overall housing market, home-price growth is proving to be surprisingly resilient,” Redfin’s head of economics research Chen Zhao said on August 18.

“That’s partly because today’s market is split in two: Many everyday buyers are constrained by affordability challenges,” Zhao continued. “Wealthy buyers have the means to keep competing for desirable homes. That upper-end strength is helping prop up prices even as the broader market cools, giving buyers some bargaining power.”

On a seasonally adjusted basis, U.S. housing prices edged up 0.27% in July, matching the virtually flat pace of 0.28% seen in June, according to Redfin.

“Prices rose 3.4% from a year earlier, the fastest annual growth in a year,” Redfin wrote.

Mortgage rates clock in at 6.72%

On August 19, the daily 30-year fixed-rate mortgage (FRM) was 6.72%, Mortgage News Daily reported.

On a weekly basis, the FRM was 6.67%, according to Freddie Mac.

“Mortgage rates dropped on Wednesday due to a combination of lower oil prices and the announcement of changes to Treasury’s bond buyback program,” Mortgage News Daily’s Matthew Graham wrote.

“The oil price angle is easy to understand,” Graham added. “Throughout the war, higher fuel prices have caused volatility in inflation expectations and inflation is a critical consideration for bonds [and] rates.”

Mortgage News Daily explains Treasury buyback details

Graham clarifies his belief that the treasury buyback news is complicated, but he outlines the details he says are the ones that matter.

The original buyback program began in 2024 during President Joe Biden’s administration when Janet Yellen served as the Treasury secretary.

The initiative is not quantitative easing or the creation of new money. The U.S. Department of the Treasury sources funding by issuing bonds or collecting federal receipts, such as taxes and tariffs.

President Donald Trump’s administration and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent continued and expanded the program.

The department’s latest announcement increases the volume of long-term U.S. Treasury bonds that can be repurchased during scheduled buying operations.

The primary objective is to foster smooth, stable financial market operations, though it delivers indirect benefits to specific interest rates.

Because the recent expansion targets longer-term Treasury bonds, longer-term yields experienced the sharpest declines, whereas short-term rates ticked upward since funding additional long-term bond purchases inherently reduces short-term bond allocations, all else being equal.(Source: Mortgage News Daily)

Redfin reports mortgage rate, homebuyer struggles

Stagnant housing prices directly mirror the current supply and demand shifts in the market.

“Buyers are still contending with high housing costs — including mortgage rates that have sat in the mid-to-high 6% range all summer — which is keeping a lid on demand,” Redfin wrote. “At the same time, there are hundreds of thousands more sellers than buyers in the market, which caps price growth.”

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“Still, the slowdown is very modest: Home prices are still rising, and they’re rising at only a marginally slower pace than they were late in the spring.”

Redfin also identifies what it believes is a big reason for the current housing market dynamics.

Real estate technology company Redfin warns homebuyers about mortgage rates and home price changes.Image source: Shutterstock/TS

Luxury housing market drives real estate developments

Robust activity in the luxury sector helps sustain overall price growth even as broader buyer demand slumps.

“Luxury home prices are rising faster than non-luxury prices,” Redfin wrote. “Wealthy homebuyers are having an outsized impact on home-price growth, especially in affluent markets like the Bay Area and South Florida.”

“San Francisco and Oakland, Calif. lead the nation in price growth, and West Palm Beach, Fla. comes in fourth.”

There were some declines in home prices, particulary in Texas and Arizona.

“The biggest year-over-year declines were in Texas,” Redfin wrote. “San Antonio (-2.1%) is first, followed by Fort Worth (-1.3%), Dallas (-1%), Austin (-1%) and Phoenix (-0.9%).”

“Prices are falling in those places because in each of them, there are roughly twice as many sellers as buyers. That leads sellers to price lower to attract house hunters and, in some cases, buyers are able to negotiate prices down.”

Related: Zillow predicts major mortgage rate, housing market change

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s plan to calm markets is being short-circuited.

Here is ‘The Hunting Wives’ season 2 release date, which is closer than you might imagine and will be out well before the end of the year on Netflix.

“There is a lot of legal and financial power in my hands.”

You can now pay for college the same way you might split a meal with friends.
A handful of major universities now accept digital payments through PayPal and Venmo for tuition and fees, and more colleges are expected to make the change soon.

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“Tuition is one of the biggest payments a family will make, and it should come with the same flexibility and security that millions of people already count on PayPal and Venmo for every day,” Frank Keller, president of checkout solutions at PayPal, said in a news release.
PayPal, which owns Venmo, announced the feature Wednesday in a partnership with the education payment companies Illumia, Nelnet Campus Commerce and TouchNet, which collectively process direct tuition payments for thousands of colleges in the U.S.
For now, Bellarmine University, Butler University, Kansas State University, Michigan State University and Texas Tech University are among the first wave of schools to accept Venmo and PayPal “with others to go live in the coming weeks and months,” a PayPal spokesperson tells Money.
The new payment options at these colleges come at a time when tuition bills across the country are due for the fall semester. Students and families can use their Venmo or PayPal balances, linked credit cards, debit cards or bank accounts to pay.
The convenience of these added options may come at a cost, however. While Venmo and PayPal do not directly charge fees to make payments, colleges do collect processing fees for using those options.
For instance, Kansas State University charges 2.95% for domestic card payments from Venmo or PayPal, and 4.25% for international cards, with a minimum fee of $3 for transactions over $20. The fees are nearly identical for payments coming directly from credit and debit cards. (Payments by cash, check or direct ACH transfer from bank accounts do not incur fees.)
Given the cost of tuition, processing fees can add up quickly. Undergraduate tuition for one semester at K-State as a Kansas resident runs above $13,000. While over 80% of students receive some form of financial aid, fees on a standard tuition bill could potentially exceed $380 for residents — and much more for out-of-state and international students.

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For such large sums of money, families will also want to consider the risks of storing potentially thousands of dollars in a digital payment app. Venmo and PayPal are not banks, and balances kept on the apps are thus not insured by the FDIC.
“Deposit insurance only protects against the failure of the bank or credit union and does not protect the customer against the failure of the nonbank company itself,” according to an analysis from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under the Biden administration.
Wednesday’s announcement applies only to what’s called bursar payments, or charges directly on the school’s payment portal. Student loan bills, which are handled through third party loan servicers, are not affected by these changes.
“Millions of students and families already use PayPal and Venmo for everyday purchases,” a PayPal spokesperson says. “Bringing that same experience to tuition payments means one less login, one less account to manage and a checkout experience that feels familiar.”

Most people are taught to view their home purely as a place to sleep and a passive savings account. You pay down the principal month after month, watch the property value climb on real estate apps, and feel good about your net worth on paper. It feels safe, sensible, and conservative.
High performers and savvy entrepreneurs, however, look at that exact same balance sheet through a completely different lens.
Sitting on piles of idle equity while scrambling for cash flow to seize time-sensitive opportunities is often an expensive missed opportunity. Wealth is rarely built by locking up all your capital behind drywall. It is built by understanding leverage and knowing how to put assets to work without putting your personal foundation at risk.
If you already own property, understanding how to unlock that dormant value responsibly can change your financial momentum.
The Mental Shift From Dead Capital to Active Fuel
Traditional financial thinking treats all debt as bad and all home equity as sacred. This mindset keeps a lot of ambitious people from scaling their ideas because they think their only options are bootstrapping from scratch or burning through personal cash reserves.
Dead capital is money that simply sits still, earning zero active return and doing nothing to support your next big move.
When an unexpected business venture appears, a strategic acquisition presents itself, or high-interest legacy liabilities start dragging down your growth, cash availability is everything. Taking out a rigid personal loan or running up expensive commercial cards eats away at your margins before you even get rolling.
Smart wealth builders look for tools that give them access to liquidity on demand, allowing them to deploy funds when the timing is right and leave the rest untouched.
Why Lump-Sum Borrowing Fails Dynamic Projects
When you decide to fund a new initiative, whether that means expanding a venture, funding a major home workspace overhaul, or diversifying your holdings, capital needs are rarely flat.
Traditional term loans force you into an all-or-nothing position. You take a massive sum on day one, and the interest clock starts ticking immediately on the full balance, even if you only need a fraction of that money right now.

Borrowing too little forces you to stop midway through execution to secure emergency funds at terrible rates.
Borrowing too much means paying unnecessary monthly interest on cash that sits idle in a checking account.
High-interest credit cards offer convenience at checkout but carry aggressive rates that punish you if a project takes an extra quarter to pay off.

A modern capital strategy needs to mirror the fluid nature of real life and real investments.
Unlocking Liquidity Without Sacrificing Ownership
Property owners who have built up steady equity over years of ownership have an advantage that many emerging founders lack. Instead of selling off an appreciating asset or taking on predatory merchant advances, they treat their real estate as a personal credit facility.
When mapping out modern avenues to fund ambitious growth, many forward-thinking professionals turn to digital HELOC loans to keep their financing flexible. An equity line gives you a revolving credit limit backed by your real estate with zero annual fees, allowing you to draw funds in exact increments only when a specific capital requirement comes up.
Because you only pay interest on the money you actively draw, this setup keeps your carrying costs low. You can bridge inventory runs, hire specialist contractors, or jump on time-sensitive investment entries without committing to massive, fixed monthly obligations.
Guarding Your Liquid Cash Reserves
A critical rule of calculated risk is never emptying your primary emergency cushion to chase growth. Wiping out your liquid cash reserves to fund an expansion leaves you completely exposed if market conditions shift or an invoice takes sixty days to clear.
Having an active line of credit running quietly in the background changes your tactical positioning:

Your liquid reserves stay parked in high-yield vehicles, generating steady returns and keeping daily stress low.
The credit line acts as a strategic valve, ready to jump on sudden opportunities without forcing fire-sales of existing assets.
Secured credit lines consistently carry far lower rates than unsecured personal loans or corporate credit cards.

The Rules of Strategic Leverage
Unlocking home equity gives you serious financial agility, but leveraging property demands absolute discipline. Top performers do not use equity to fund lifestyle upgrades; they treat it strictly as an investment tool.
Before tapping into built-in value, apply a few basic filters:

Fund value-generating assets: Direct capital toward projects with a clear path to generating revenue, improving personal productivity, or eliminating expensive debt.
Know your carrying capacity: Confirm that your baseline cash flow easily handles interest obligations even if a venture takes longer to produce returns than planned.
Set a firm exit plan: Define the exact timeline and revenue milestones that will retire the drawn balance as soon as projects materialize.

Distinguishing between calculated investment and emotional spending is what keeps your home a source of permanent strength rather than unnecessary exposure.
Conclusion
Achieving real financial freedom is not about playing defense your entire life. It is about understanding how to mobilize the assets you already possess so they work for you around the clock. By turning idle property equity into a flexible, low-cost capital line, you give yourself the breathing room to act decisively, back your biggest ideas, and build wealth on your own terms.
The post How Strategic Thinkers Use Home Equity as Smart Leverage appeared first on Addicted 2 Success.

Serval is making Catalyst, its AI agent for building enterprise automations, generally available Thursday and enabling it by default for customers — allowing teams of AI agents to decide what should be automated and then build the automation itself.Catalyst sits above Serval’s AI-native service management platform as an admin-facing “super agent.” It can inspect ticket history, standard operating procedures or natural-language instructions, identify recurring work, and draft the workflows, skills, forms, access policies, journeys and dashboards needed to automate it. Serval is also using Catalyst to create background agents that continuously inspect connected systems for emerging problems and propose fixes before an employee files a ticket.That distinction matters because enterprise service management vendors are rapidly converging on AI-assisted workflow creation. ServiceNow’s Build Agent can already translate natural-language instructions into full-stack applications, flows, scripts and other platform metadata, while its AI Agent Advisor can analyze instance records to identify automation opportunities. Atlassian’s Rovo can generate Jira automation flows from plain-English requirements, and Freshworks offers Freddy AI Agent Studio for creating service agents that act across Freshservice workflows. So Serval’s claim to differentiation is narrower — and potentially more consequential — than simply “we use AI to build workflows.” Catalyst is designed as a single administrative layer that can move from discovering an opportunity, to assembling multiple kinds of governed automation, to creating proactive agents that keep looking for new work to automate.”You just started with a single prompt, and now you’ve got enterprise-grade workflows ready to deploy that are going to solve all password resets for the entire company,” Serval co-founder and CEO Jake Stauch told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview. From ticket history to working automationServal says Catalyst analyzes existing help desk data before an organization has decided what to automate. If it finds a repetitive category of requests, it can draft the automation required to resolve those requests and stage the result for administrator review. Users can also upload an SOP or spreadsheet and ask Catalyst to turn the documented process into an executable system.Serval’s documentation says Catalyst can build workflows, author help desk skills, create onboarding and offboarding journeys, configure access-management policies, construct dashboards, investigate operational issues and debug failed workflow runs. Unlike Serval’s earlier workflow builder, Catalyst is intended to become the primary interface for configuring the platform; the company says its long-term goal is that anything an administrator can do through the UI should also be possible through Catalyst.The actual workflows are code-backed. In a demonstration, Stauch showed Catalyst taking a request to build password-reset workflows, detecting connected systems including Okta, Google Workspace and Microsoft Entra, and generating the underlying TypeScript needed to perform those actions. Administrators could then add approvals or restrict who was allowed to run the workflow.The models underneath Catalyst are deliberately swappableServal is not building its own foundation model. Stauch said in the interview that the company uses models from “frontier labs,” runs evaluations to determine which models work best for particular jobs, and is deliberately model-agnostic. “You can swap different models in,” he said, adding that Serval also works with enterprises that build their own models.Stauch provided more detail in a May 2026 interview with Sequoia Capital, saying Serval was using both OpenAI and Anthropic models. He said OpenAI’s GPT models had performed best for end-user interactions and tool calling, while Anthropic’s Sonnet and Opus models were producing the strongest results for the code-generation side of Serval’s automation system — the workload most directly relevant to Catalyst. Serval continuously runs evals rather than automatically moving every workload to the newest model release, Stauch said. That architecture makes the underlying LLM less central to Serval’s differentiation. The company’s own documentation now lets organization administrators supply their own OpenAI or Anthropic API keys, including a compatible custom endpoint, while Stauch said the broader architecture can accommodate different models.The materials do not, however, establish that every Catalyst user gets a self-service menu for arbitrarily choosing an individual model. Serval’s pitch is instead that its proprietary value sits in the harness around those models: enterprise context and memory, integrations, generated code, permissions, approvals and the controls governing what an agent can actually do.That code-generation model is central to Serval’s pitch against ServiceNow. Stauch argues that legacy ITSM deployments often accumulate custom tables, business rules, workflows and platform-specific expertise that make seemingly simple automation changes expensive to implement. Serval, by contrast, wants administrators and business teams to describe the outcome they need and let the model generate the implementation.But ServiceNow is no longer standing still on that front. Its current Build Agent similarly creates applications and code from natural-language prompts, supports flow design and testing, and operates inside ServiceNow’s governance framework. ServiceNow’s AI Agent Studio lets customers create agents and agentic workflows, while AI Agent Advisor is explicitly designed to analyze operational records for automation candidates. The competitive question is therefore shifting from “who has generative AI?” to how many separate tools, configuration concepts and specialists are required to get from an observed operational problem to a production automation.Serval is effectively arguing that Catalyst compresses those steps into one conversational surface and a smaller platform model. ServiceNow, by comparison, now has a powerful but broader set of AI and development surfaces spanning Build Agent, AI Agent Studio, AI Agent Advisor, Workflow Studio and AI Control Tower. That breadth is an advantage for customers already deeply invested in ServiceNow, but it also illustrates the complexity Serval is attacking. ServiceNow itself notes that Build Agent is aimed at admins and developers who understand and can support what it generates.Atlassian is moving in the same direction from a different starting point. Rovo can generate “if this happens, then that happens” automation flows from natural-language descriptions, while Jira Service Management increasingly supports agents that triage, investigate and execute service work. Freshworks’ Freddy AI Agent Studio likewise emphasizes agents that resolve requests end-to-end, with prebuilt IT and HR agents and more than 30 workflow templates.Catalyst’s differentiator, then, is not that rivals cannot generate an automation from a sentence. It is Serval’s attempt to make the entire automation lifecycle itself agentic.Building agents that look for trouble before a ticket existsThat approach becomes clearest with Serval’s background agents.Rather than waiting for a help desk request, a background agent can run on a schedule across connected systems, correlate signals and draft a remediation. In one customer example provided by Serval, an agent correlated network incidents across two offices using switch telemetry, DHCP data and historical tickets, ruled out hardware and wireless interference, traced the issue to configuration drift, and generated a remediation workflow for an administrator to approve.“Most AI agents today wait for an employee to ask a question or submit a ticket,” Stauch said. “We believe the future is AI that acts before an employee ever submits a request.”That framing also highlights a philosophical difference in Serval’s pitch. The startup does not want service management to revolve around creating, routing and tracking better tickets. It wants the system to eliminate as many requests as possible by turning repeated support work into executable automation.”A lot of the code written in enterprises has nothing to do with software engineering,” Stauch explained. “It’s actually internal automations and other scripts for the company, and so we use that technology to build a better service management platform.”Serval’s pitch to enterprises is that it can largely automate those scripts. And the governance model is critical because Catalyst can generate code and potentially initiate changes across production systems. Serval says Catalyst inherits the permissions of the user operating it and remains scoped to that user’s team workspace. Everything it builds starts as a draft, and organizations can restrict publishing privileges or require formal review and approval before an automation becomes active.Customer data remains customer-owned, with several deployment optionsThose controls also extend to the enterprise data Catalyst examines. Stauch said Serval is intended to operate as the customer’s system of record and told VentureBeat that “they own all the data.” Serval’s current Master Services Agreement is more precise: customers retain rights, title and interest in both their “Customer Materials” — a category that includes records, documents, workflows, prompts, inputs and configurations — and the output Serval generates from them. Serval receives the rights necessary to process that information to provide, maintain, support and secure the service. Serval also says it does not retain or use customer materials, inputs or outputs to train, fine-tune or improve its own or third-party AI models. Its Data Processing Addendum identifies Serval as the processor of customer personal data and allows processing for operating the service, responding to support requests, diagnosing issues and protecting the platform, while authorized subprocessors can also be involved. Serval’s acceptable-use terms say it maintains a current list of AI subprocessors and model providers for customers.Where that data resides can vary by deployment. Stauch said customers can use Serval as a cloud SaaS service, run it on-premises or place it in their own VPC. Serval’s self-hosting documentation now describes two fuller options: a Serval-managed single-tenant deployment inside an AWS account owned by the customer, or a self-managed deployment on the customer’s Kubernetes cluster in any cloud or on-premises environment.In the AWS option, Serval says it operates the installation without persistent IAM access to the customer’s AWS account.There are therefore two distinct access boundaries for enterprise buyers to consider. At the Catalyst level, the agent can only reach data, integrations and automations available to the user and team workspace under which it is operating. At the platform level, Serval and authorized subprocessors necessarily process customer information to deliver and support the service, subject to the company’s contractual confidentiality and data-processing terms. That makes Stauch’s informal statement that Serval “doesn’t touch” customer data better understood as an ownership and deployment claim, rather than a literal assertion that the service never processes it.Ramp and other customers provide an early testCustomer deployments provide some evidence that the faster-build thesis can translate into operational changes, although the metrics come from Serval’s own case studies.Corporate expense and financial technology firm Ramp says in a Serval case study that Catalyst has made workflow building 50% faster and helped extend Serval across roughly 10 teams, including IT, finance, facilities, people and talent, legal and business operations. In one hardware replacement program, Serval says Ramp automated 600 laptop replacements and saved 150 hours, leaving approval as the principal human step.The more telling Catalyst example may be what happened afterward. Ramp had already automated laptop replacement when Catalyst suggested splitting its shipping logic into separate office and home workflows to reduce errors. The company also says employees outside IT now use Catalyst for analytics, bulk ticket operations, workflow troubleshooting and HR process automation.Other Serval deployments show the broader operating environment Catalyst is meant to configure. Mercor says it has onboarded more than 4,000 external experts through Serval automations and expanded the platform across seven teams. Together AI says Serval automates 95% of its just-in-time infrastructure access requests, with approval and auditing controls around sensitive access. Perplexity says Serval automatically handles more than half of its incoming IT requests and all employee onboarding.Those deployments extend beyond Catalyst itself, but they demonstrate the type of cross-system automation substrate Catalyst is now being asked to build and maintain.Serval says more than 90% of customers adopted Catalyst as their starting point for automation during beta. Catalyst is generally available Aug. 20 and will be enabled by default for all Serval organizations.Pricing and the battle with ServiceNowPricing is customized depending on the size of the deployment and is not publicly listed on Serval’s website or documentation. Serval describes a single platform fee and typically runs a pilot to determine expected deployment and usage. Stauch said the software license can be similar to ServiceNow’s, but argues total cost of ownership can be substantially lower because customers require fewer implementation and maintenance services.”The total cost of ownership is going to be dramatically less — usually half as much, sometimes 10 to 20% of the total cost of ownership of ServiceNow,” Stauch said. “But the actual software license fee is not necessarily going to be all that different.”Serval’s origin story and historyServal was founded in 2024 by Stauch and CTO Alex McLeod, former Verkada product and engineering leaders, after they repeatedly heard IT customers complain about overburdened help desks and the limitations of established IT service-management software.Serval has positioned itself as an AI-native alternative to platforms such as ServiceNow and Jira Service Management, combining help-desk ticketing, access management, asset management and workflow automation within a single system. Serval and Sequoia Capital describe the company’s goal as moving IT software beyond merely recording and routing requests toward resolving them automatically.The company can operate as an organization’s primary IT service-management system or add automation to an existing one. Its publicly identified customers include Perplexity, Mercor, Clay, Verkada and Together AI. Serval says customers can automatically resolve more than half of their incoming IT requests; its Together AI case study reports automation of 95% of that customer’s just-in-time access requests.Investor interest accelerated rapidly in late 2025. Serval announced a $47 million Series A led by Redpoint Ventures in October, bringing its funding at that point to $52 million. In December, it raised another $75 million in a Sequoia-led Series B at a $1 billion valuation, lifting total capital raised to approximately $127 million; Redpoint, Meritech Capital and General Catalyst also participated. Serval told Reuters that revenue had grown 500% since August 2025 and that it was expanding beyond IT into operational work performed by human resources, finance and legal departments.The big test for enterprise customersFor enterprise buyers, Catalyst’s biggest test will be whether its compression of the automation lifecycle survives contact with large, messy, highly customized environments.ServiceNow can now generate applications and discover automation opportunities with AI. Atlassian and Freshworks are adding increasingly capable agentic automation to their own service platforms. Serval therefore cannot rely on natural-language creation alone as its moat.Its stronger wager is that an AI-native platform can make the administrative layer itself agentic: continuously finding repetitive work, building the necessary resources across the service stack, exposing generated code for review, and proposing the next automation before an administrator has opened a workflow designer.If Catalyst works at that scope, the competitive unit is no longer the ticket — or even the workflow. It is the system that keeps turning an enterprise’s operational history into new automation.

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.

Software stocks stabilized after a reported private-equity bid for Workday, and analysts quickly named the next possible targets.Bloomberg / Getty Images

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.

Related: Analyst warns software stock has an $18B problem