Foundation Capital

Foundation Capital's investors Jaya Gupta and Ashu Garg published a thesis on 22 December 2025 arguing that the trillion-dollar enterprise software layer built on systems of record (Salesforce for customers, Workday for employees, SAP for operations) is missing a component that AI agents now require: decision traces.

Their starting point is «analyse Jamin Ball sur les systèmes de record», which they reference explicitly. Ball argued that agents do not replace systems of record but raise the bar for them. Gupta and Garg accept that and extend it. Rules describe what should generally happen; decision traces record what happened in one specific case, under which policy, with which exception, on which precedent. Those traces currently live in Slack, deal desk conversations, escalation calls, and employee memory. Salesforce stores current state rather than state at the moment of decision, and warehouses like Snowflake receive data through ETL after the decision is made. Neither can reconstruct the missing layer.

Gupta returned to the same idea from the cost side on 28 May 2026 in "Token Budget Wars", where measurement becomes memory: agents produce decision rationale, which she calls one of the most perishable assets, and the accumulation forms a context graph. The unresolved part is ownership. Whoever holds the allocation layer makes the allocation calls, and Foundation Capital's bet is that incumbents structurally cannot build it.