services-as-software

A founder analyzed all 196 YC Spring 2026 companies and found 86 are the same shape: AI-native B2B Agent-as-a-Service. That convergence is YC's 2024 vertical-agent thesis executed at scale — and a wager that speed beats defensibility.

In one week in June 2026, a16z published a manifesto declaring small businesses 'the next frontier for AI' and led three rounds for companies promising to run the business itself. The pitch is horizontal. Every winner is vertical.

At AI Ascent 2026, Pat Grady and Sonya Huang argued long-horizon agents are functional AGI. The new claim is the meta-claim: Sequoia is now writing checks as if commercial AGI already arrived.

Sequoia says the next $1T company will be 'a software company masquerading as a services firm.' The sentence buries vertical SaaS as a category — without ever naming it. What that means and which companies fit.