vertical-saas

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, but every winner is vertical.

Anthropic shipped Claude Managed Agents on April 8, 2026 at $0.08/hour; twenty days, 2,029 tweets and four converging platforms later, agent infrastructure has commoditized and domain expertise is the new moat.

Sequoia says the next $1T company will be 'a software company masquerading as a services firm,' a sentence that buries vertical SaaS as a category without ever naming it, and Harvey, EvenUp and Rillet are among the companies that fit.