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. 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, infrastructure has commoditized — domain expertise is the new moat.

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.