Insights from Smith Point Capital’s 2025 Annual General Meeting
Last month, we had the privilege of sitting down with our limited partners, portfolio founders, and an extraordinary group of industry leaders for Smith Point Capital’s 2025 Annual General Meeting. What emerged was clear validation of a fundamental truth: the future of enterprise software investing belongs to operators, not observers.
Our discussions underscored that we are at the center of a historic shift. The democratization of innovation is accelerating at a breathtaking pace. Artificial intelligence is not merely transforming how software is built—it is enabling an entirely new generation of founders, business models, and ideas.
We are entering the era of the Citizen Innovator. For the first time in history, the tools required to transform enterprises are accessible far beyond traditional institutions and credentialed experts. Today, anyone with curiosity, grit, and imagination can build, test, and launch ideas at extraordinary speed.
This shift represents a profound democratization of innovation—one in which ability outweighs background, ideas matter more than titles, and execution consistently outperforms hierarchy. Talent can come from anywhere, and now it can scale from anywhere.
The rise of the Citizen Innovator is reshaping markets, expanding opportunity, and unleashing a wave of entrepreneurial energy unlike anything we have seen before. And we are just getting started.
The Execution Gap: The Defining Challenge of the AI Era
The opportunity ahead extends far beyond technological advancement and the understanding that innovation can come from anyone, anywhere. It is rooted in the ability to convert technological capability into consistent, scalable execution. As in past cycles of innovation, capital is pouring into the market, and history suggests that these periods produce a wide dispersion of outcomes—significant success for some and substantial underperformance for many.
The differentiating factor is not access to capital; it is operational excellence. The ability to identify the right companies—and support them through the complexities of growth and scale—will define performance in this cycle. This is the foundation of Smith Point Capital’s operating model and the focus of our daily work.
Today’s enterprise software market is expanding at an unprecedented pace while undergoing structural change. Despite $155 billion invested in the category last year, an estimated 90% of AI pilots never reach production.1 This underscores a familiar pattern: the limiting factor is not funding, but execution.
Smith Point Capital was purpose-built to solve this execution gap. The results presented at our Annual General Meeting reinforced this. We have already deployed more than half of the $360 million committed to Fund I across eight transformational enterprise software companies. More importantly, our portfolio companies delivered nearly 100% year-over-year ARR growth on average, supported by experienced operating partners.
In this environment, value creation is being fundamentally redefined. Founders require applied expertise—not theoretical guidance. Network introductions are no longer differentiators; meaningful value creation comes from operators who can engender relationships, have navigated similar challenges and can provide actionable insights at pivotal moments.
Our approach is not conceptual. It is repeatable, institutionalized, and producing measurable impact.
2025 AGM Portfolio Highlights
Bestow: Building the Infrastructure for Modern Life Insurance
Founders Jonathan Abelmann and Melbourne O’Banion continue to demonstrate the power of aligning product vision with disciplined operational execution. Their growth trajectory remains strong, supported by a platform architecture built to scale with carrier demand.
The performance of their customers speaks even louder. One carrier partner moved from outside the top 20 to the top 5 in industry sales within twelve months of launching on Bestow’s platform. This is not incremental improvement—it is category-level transformation enabled by modern infrastructure, operational rigor, and a customer success model designed to drive rapid agent adoption.
This is the kind of outcome that emerges when operators help build the systems that enable scalable distribution and enterprise-grade reliability.
Anomalo: Enabling AI Through Autonomous Data Quality
Elliott Shmukler and the Anomalo team are addressing one of the most critical constraints to enterprise AI adoption: data quality. With more than $13 million in ARR and strategic investments from both Snowflake and Databricks, Anomalo is the only data quality platform endorsed by both leaders of the modern data ecosystem.
Their AI-first approach delivers approximately 80% data quality coverage out-of-the-box through unsupervised machine learning, with the remainder requiring minimal configuration. Their newly launched AIDA platform—an Intelligent Data Analyst—represents a meaningful advancement in how enterprises understand, validate, and trust the data powering their AI initiatives.
When Anomalo encountered a critical issue with a Google Cloud partnership, our response was not a generic introduction. We engaged senior relationships directly to resolve the matter. This is the operator-led advantage: experienced support at the moments that materially influence a company’s trajectory.
AI Reality: Moving Beyond the Hype
Our panel, AI Reality: A View from the AI Ecosystem, brought together leaders applying AI at enterprise scale:
- Paul Smith, Chief Commercial Officer, Anthropic
- Parth Patwari, Head of AI & Data, Deloitte
- Sara Varni, Chief Marketing Officer, Datadog
These are operators, not observers. They work closely with Fortune 500 organizations to move from experimentation to production-scale AI. Their insights reinforced a critical truth: the organizations winning with AI are those treating it as an operational transformation—not a technical experiment.
Their perspective mirrors what we see across our portfolio: AI rewards organizational maturity and execution, not aspiration alone.
Redefining Mission Critical: Virtualitics and the Future of Defense Technology
Perhaps the most powerful moment of our AGM came during our session on defense technology, featuring Virtualitics Founder CEO Michael Amori; Chief Revenue Officer Rob Bocek, and Vice Admiral Collin Green (Ret).
Virtualitics has achieved what most defense tech companies only aspire to by holding contracts with all branches of the U.S. military. Their 4x ARR growth over the past two years is the result of focused product roadmap development, strategic positioning, and the kind of operational support that can only come from investors who've actually built and scaled enterprise software businesses.
2025 To Date and The Road Ahead
2025 has been a defining year for Smith Point Capital. It marked a significant expansion of our value-creation capabilities as we grew both our Precision Advisory Network and our internal operating team. But the most meaningful validation came from our founders. When facing critical decisions—scaling sales, building platform ecosystems, navigating strategic partnerships—we are their first call. Not because we provided capital, but because we have operated through the very challenges they are confronting.
As we look ahead, the opportunity set is strong. Exceptional companies are emerging at the intersection of data, AI, edge computing, and precision applications. The $2.3 trillion intelligent enterprise market is being built now, and the companies that will define it are those pairing visionary product leadership with disciplined execution.
The broader industry is beginning to recognize what has anchored our strategy from the start: modern enterprise software demands genuine operating expertise. Traditional venture models are giving way to operator-led approaches because the evidence is clear—concentrated portfolios supported by hands-on operators consistently outperform.
To our limited partners: thank you for your trust and your support of a differentiated model. The results we are delivering reflect your conviction that operators can build firms capable of accelerating company growth in meaningful, measurable ways.
To our portfolio founders: your ambition and execution inspire us daily. We are honored to support you and remain committed to providing the operational expertise, strategic networks, and hands-on partnership required to build category-defining companies.
To our advisors and broader Smith Point community: Thank you for your unwavering partnership in advancing Smith Point’s mission to be the most impactful member of every cap table we join—and for helping turn founders’ and CEOs’ bold visions into enduring companies.
The future of enterprise software investing is not defined in spreadsheets or boardrooms; it is defined through the operational work that separates good companies from great ones.
