During a recent discussion, Exiger CEO Brandon Daniels asserted that the much-discussed SaaS apocalypse is entirely genuine. This perspective is somewhat unexpected given that Exiger operates as an enterprise software firm specializing in complex supply chain solutions, a sector many believe would be disrupted by custom, large-language-model-generated applications.

According to Daniels, the rapid integration of artificial intelligence has significantly scaled their business operations, transformed product development, and redefined how clients interact with their systems. He noted that AI has fundamentally shifted their long-term corporate strategy. Highlighting the urgency among buyers, he shared that some clients face strict performance bonuses tied directly to deploying one or two agentic programs within their corporate environments by the end of the year.

Previously recognized primarily as a dominant provider of real-time risk intelligence for financial institutions and the federal government, Exiger expanded its reach significantly following a monumental $1.2 billion investment in December 2023 from global investment firm Carlyle (NASDAQ: CG) and Insight Partners. Since that capital injection, Daniels reported executing seven strategic software acquisitions, expanding their suite to cover third-party risk, multi-tier risk, tariff compliance, and purchasing orchestration.

Advanced supply chain resilience tools have leveraged diverse forms of artificial intelligence for years. Utilizing natural language processing, these platforms parse online news and data feeds, transforming raw facts into contextual intelligence to report supply chain disruptions stemming from weather patterns, geopolitical tensions, and other hazards in near real time.

Daniels emphasized the breadth of their infrastructure, stating they have cultivated what they believe is the most expansive supply chain knowledge dataset available, encompassing extensive company profiles, trade interactions, and detailed material science metrics.

Using AI to Rebuild the Platform

To unify these diverse capabilities, Exiger utilized AI in its software development lifecycle to rebuild its entire solution from the ground up. Leveraging Google Antigravity, an advanced AI tool designed to assist engineers in creating production-ready software for an agent-first era, the company achieved remarkable speed.

Initial internal projections estimated that constructing this modernized platform would require at least three years and consume roughly $180 million—figures that could easily have doubled in both time and cost. However, after adopting Antigravity in early 2025, a lean startup-style development team successfully overhauled the platform in just four months, outperforming their product roadmap by three to nine months.

Although leadership initially anticipated shrinking their engineering headcount by half, rapid year-on-year financial growth—measured by comparing equivalent quarters—made retaining engineering talent paramount. Daniels recognized that keeping the team intact would unlock new market expansions, facilitating their entry into the trade compliance software market this year and setting the stage for supply chain planning next year.

Deploying AI-savvy engineers demands a premium, with compensation often doubling traditional developer salaries. Furthermore, token consumption pricing for large language models adds substantial operational costs. Nevertheless, the productivity dividends justified the expense: average development sprint cycles plummeted from 30 days down to a mere six hours.

Addressing the SaaS apocalypse, Daniels affirmed that traditional software moats have dissolved, making businesses reluctant to sink $100 million into legacy deployments like SAP. Demonstrating their agility, he recounted a meeting where a client requested a specialized distributor portal with intricate inventory management logic—a feature set Exiger built live in front of them within a single day.

Succeeding in this new landscape still demands rigorous industry domain knowledge. For Exiger, another vital moat is their proprietary repository of billions of historical purchase records. This data enables federal agencies to track the origin of imported goods, verify tariff compliance, and evaluate the true manufacturing capabilities of suppliers based on facility locations and procured machinery.

Creating an AI-Native Platform

By engineering their platform as a native AI solution, Exiger ensured that core architectures, data flows, decision-making logic, and workflows rely fundamentally on artificial intelligence rather than superficial add-ons. Within this framework, supply chain constraints and corporate policies act as the vital guardrails that help autonomous agents navigate disruptions.

Once operational, these agentic workflows can independently mitigate rush orders, inventory shortages, and raw material delivery delays. Human oversight provides validation for decisions, creating a continuous learning loop where agents refine their performance over time and share insights with one another.

True power in the current software transition extends beyond merely mirroring legacy enterprise apps with AI tools. By pioneering genuinely native AI solutions, such as their upcoming supply chain planning platform, Exiger aims to simplify complex constraint logic, streamline implementations, accelerate problem-solving engines, and drastically reduce the manpower required to manage complex global supply chains.