At 9:30 a.m. ET, Trump praised Citigroup on Truth Social, writing: “Wow! CITI was ranked Number 1 in topping M&A Advisory Market by Value in Q1. Congratulations to Jane F and ALL of her great people. They’ve worked really hard! BIG comeback for CITI!!! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

The president’s post went up just as the stock market was opening, and at one point Citigroup shares touched a high of $137.12, up almost 1.8%. By the end of the day, however, Citi fell 1%, still less than JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs and the S&P 500.

It wasn’t immediately clear which investment banking league rankings President Trump was referring to. So far in 2026, for example, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley and BofA Securities all rank ahead of Citigroup in the latest Global M&A Advisor Ranking on Dealogic, a leading financial analytical platform.

While Goldman Sachs was the lead advisor on 196 deals worth a combined $992.3 billion this year, Citi was the lead on 97 deals worth $285.3 billion.

In fact, according to Dealogic, Citigroup has fallen to number 5 among leading mergers and acquisitions advisors in 2026, down from number 4 in 2025.

Leon Kalvaria, Citigroup’s global chair for banking, appeared on Fox Business News early Wednesday, where he was asked about Citi’s position as the leading advisor on power sector deals. Citi advised on four deals worth a combined $41.4 billion in the energy industry so far in 2026, according to Global Data Financial Deals Database.

What is clear is that Citigroup stock has outperformed the S&P 500 this year, climbing 14.3% against an S&P 500 gain of 6.2%, according to FactSet data. By contrast, Wells Fargo is down 12.1%, JPMorgan is lower by 4.1% and Bank of America is off 1% in 2026. Goldman is 13.9% higher, also trailing Citi.

Citigroup is in the midst of a multiyear turnaround under Fraser, involving streamlining business units, cutting jobs and focusing on high-margin markets and services. The stock has risen for three straight years after jumping more than 70% in 2025, almost 42% in 2024 and 19% in 2023.

The move will allow clients’ autonomous agents to pull data and insights directly from the firm’s stock administration platforms, ShareWorks and Equity Edge, bypassing the traditional software interfaces built for human users, according to Mark Mitchell, chief product officer of Morgan Stanley at Work.

In April, Morgan Stanley executives attributed $1.2 trillion in assets gathered to its workplace strategy.

“The way we see it, in a future state, our corporate clients will not be logging into ShareWorks or Equity Edge,” Mitchell said.

Instead, they’ll be “using agentic AI-powered tools on their desktops within the four walls of their companies, interacting with our platforms in a purely agentic way,” he said.

The bank has already granted a handful of clients early agentic access and plans to open it up to the firm’s 3,400 administration clients by next year, Mitchell said.

It’s the latest sign that Wall Street is preparing for a future where AI agents handle tasks now performed by software users.

Rivals including JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs are using AI agents internally for things like writing code, but have yet to publicly announce steps to allow external agents to connect directly to their firms’ systems.

“The ChatGPT moment was when people said, ‘Holy smokes, the next generation of entrepreneurs, their coding language is spoken English,'” said Samir Kaul, a partner at the venture firm Khosla Ventures, an early backer of OpenAI.

“Now you’re seeing 50 engineers do what it would’ve taken 500 engineers to do five years ago,” Kaul said. “We had to completely reshuffle how we valued these companies.”

While the shares of public software companies like Salesforce, ServiceNow and Workday got hammered this year because of the threat from artificial intelligence, a quieter reckoning has been unfolding in the private markets.

The AI boom that funneled more than $250 billion into OpenAI and Anthropic ahead of their expected mega-IPOs this year has left hundreds of startups built before ChatGPT’s arrival in 2022 stranded — effectively cut off from venture funding because of their inflated valuations and outdated technology, yet not profitable enough for the public markets.

There are 857 U.S. startups valued at $1 billion or more, the threshold for being deemed a “unicorn” company, according to PitchBook data. But nearly half of that group hasn’t raised fresh funding in the last three years, making those valuations stale, according to the private markets data firm.

Startups that last raised in 2021 are now worth 68% less on average, while those that last raised in 2022 saw a 52% decline, according to Pitchbook’s own valuation estimates.

As a result, more than 220 companies that had reached billion-dollar valuations in the venture boom are now fallen unicorns, according to PitchBook, which provided a list of the companies exclusively to CNBC. The estimates are based on factors including headcount growth and comparisons to public companies.

“A lot of those companies are pre-AI, not just in their cost structure, but also in their products,” Mercury CEO Immad Akhund told CNBC. His company, which raised $200 million in funding last month, provides banking services to a third of early-stage U.S. venture-backed firms.

“They’re definitely in a difficult spot,” he said. “All the attention’s on AI, so if you’re not an AI-first company, you need really strong numbers to raise.”

The list of fallen unicorns includes well known brands like Glossier, The Farmer’s Dog, Rothy’s, Brooklinen and Savage X Fenty, the lingerie company founded by musician Rihanna. The companies were part of a wave of direct-to-consumer firms built on the hope that digital retailers could earn software-like margins.

Also included are mainstays of podcast advertisements including the powder supplement maker AG1 and the roboadvisor pioneer Betterment, as well as the online ticket marketplace SeatGeek.

These companies came of age in an environment that rewarded growth at nose-bleed valuations based on two broad assumptions: interest rates would remain low and a startup could always be acquired for its engineering talent.

But the arrival of generative AI has redrawn the venture landscape, redirecting capital toward AI-native firms while making it impossible for many older startups to justify their previous valuations.

Hit hardest are enterprise software companies like scheduling startup Calendly, which represent the single largest category among the fallen unicorns. There are 75 software-as-a-service, or SaaS, firms appearing on PitchBook’s list, which is double the number of fintech companies, the next-biggest group.

That reflects both the enormous valuations that software startups commanded during the 2021 venture boom and the degree to which generative AI has destabilized assumptions underpinning the sector.

David Zhu, an ex-DoorDash head of engineering, said that after the “ChatGPT moment” he looked across the software landscape — from startups to medium-sized firms funded with private credit to the largest public SaaS companies — and saw a seismic shift on the horizon.

“The thesis I had was that all workflow-driven enterprise SaaS companies will be either disrupted or dead in the next decade,” Zhu told CNBC.

The Saas model, where companies embed themselves in employee workflows and often charge by the user, is especially threatened by the rise of autonomous agents. After leaving DoorDash, where he led more than 200 engineers, Zhu founded Reevo, an AI platform that automates corporate sales and marketing teams.

Companies built before generative AI are weighed down by bloated staffing models and software designed for a pre-AI world, according to Zhu, making it hard for them to transform themselves.

“Unless they make a stark, 180-degree pivot to rebuild the exact same thing from scratch, they’re going to slowly fail,” Zhu said. “What that means is that investors would rather just bet on new entrepreneurs at lower valuations rather than double down on older startups.”

In February, Stash, the investment and savings app, was acquired by Singapore-based everything app Grab at an enterprise value of $425 million, below the roughly $660 million that investors put into the company during its lifetime.

That same month, another fintech, Step, was acquired by the YouTube star MrBeast for an undisclosed amount, leading investors to speculate that the purchase price was far below the roughly $500 million the startup raised before the deal.

“Many of these businesses just aren’t worth that much anymore, which is why you’re seeing them get acquired at steep discounts,” said Ryan Falvey of Restive Ventures, which invests in fintech firms.

Valuations have compressed by about six-fold from the 2021 peak of 50 times future revenues, meaning that a company with the same revenue is worth about 85% less in today’s market than five years ago, Falvey told CNBC.

Before the reset, a startup could often be sold to a larger technology company looking to acquire the smaller firm’s engineers for roughly $2 million per coder, according to Khosla Ventures’ Kaul. A firm with 100 engineers would be worth at least $200 million to $300 million, he said.

But that assumption, which provided a floor under startup valuations during the boom, evaporated after AI coding tools allowed far smaller teams to build products — leaving exit opportunities few and far between.

“I do think there might be opportunities, and so we are on the lookout,” Dimon told analysts at a New York financial conference.

“There might be, in the next couple years, a chance to put $10 [billion] or $20 billion to work buying something,” Dimon said.

The comments came with caveats. Dimon framed acquisitions almost as a tool of last resort, not a growth strategy, and warned that bankers who lean too hard on dealmaking are often compensating for poor organic growth.

“You sit around a lot of management meetings, the first thing they do when they’re not doing well in organic growth is they start to bulls–t about [mergers and acquisitions],” Dimon said. “I don’t want to hear about M&A … What are you doing to grow your business — sales, branches, tech, profits, products, services?”

Any takeover target, he said, would need to integrate cleanly into JPMorgan’s existing operations, fit the bank’s culture, and enhance core businesses rather than sit as a separate standalone unit.

“It can’t be just a pie-in-the-sky type of thing,” Dimon said.

JPMorgan has mostly grown organically in recent years, with the notable exception of its FDIC-assisted acquisition of First Republic Bank in 2023. It made a $10.6 billion payment to the regulator as part of that transaction.

Under Dimon, the bank’s largest and most consequential M&A deals were mostly crisis-era acquisitions of regulated banks, including First Republic, Bear Stearns and the retail operations of Washington Mutual.

The firm also acquired a string of smaller fintech firms but slowed down after spending $175 million to acquire Frank in 2021, a college aid startup that was later revealed to be a fraud.