The Vertical Software Conference

About one year ago, SaaS was pronounced dead. The reality, some businesses have been geneuinely disrupted while others are thriving. Founders take stock of who's winning, and losing, and who's best positioned to win the next era of vertical software.

Services, hardware, forward deployed offering. The most innovative vertical AI companies look nothing like a traditional software business anymore. This panel brings together founders building these new models, and where they think the category goes next.

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A live chat with Roland Ligtenberg, Co-Founder & Chief AI Officer of Housecall Pro (HCP), on why and how they are becoming the complete financial OS for their customers. In their unique way, HCP has launched payments, bill pay, payroll, accounting, capital, and expense cards, tying these together with their own orchestration. Hear about the obstacles overcome and the opportunities ahead for Housecall Pro, particularly leveraging AI to unlock financial insights that increase their customers' profitability.

How Financial Products Help Vertical Software Companies Win: how a software company made financial products a core part of its growth strategy — the problem it set out to solve and how it brought the product to market with Unit. Together we'll explore how embedding financial products changed the company's go-to-market motion and how the new offering was received by end customers, supported by specific results where available. The session gives attendees a practical view of how financial products can be built around an existing workflow, make the core software more valuable and harder to replace, and augment existing GTM / drive new business.

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Srikanth Mallya built UPS Capital from pre-revenue to a $4B valuation before leading Ware2Go as President. He’ll share what he learned on both sides and why vertical software platforms have an unfair advantage when it comes to serving SMBs with embedded capital.

Over 68% of local searches now include AI Overviews, shifting consumer behavior from comparing options to accepting AI recommendations. This session reveals the data behind AI visibility and shows how SaaS platforms can embed AI-driven creation and optimization to increase customer retention and open new revenue streams.

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Getting disrupted by AI isn't a hypothetical for many businesses, it's already happening. This session is proof your company can adapt and reposition itself. Founders discuss the path to continued growth and the work it takes to achieve it.

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This is not a payments 101 session. This is for operators who live in the trenches every day. Real operators talking about how they make product decisions, pricing structures, and attack the back book. Come ready to go deep.

Every vertical SaaS roadmap has more good ideas than engineers. So why did BQE put payroll ahead of them? In this session, BQE walks through the real decision: how payroll stacked up against competing bets, why embedded financial services earned a permanent place on the roadmap, and what they'd sequence differently today. You'll also hear what generic payroll gets wrong for architecture and engineering firms, where project-based labor costs, job costing, and compliance requirements don't behave like they do in other verticals, and the practical advice BQE would give any platform weighing its first embedded finance product.

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The integration is the easy part: an opinionated guide to embedded finance GTM. A step-by-step guide for launching a new embedded finance product, from contract signing to GTM launch — extremely prescriptive and opinionated guidance at each stage. The talk won't focus specifically on accounting, but rather embedded fintech products with a sales-led motion in general.

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Like product development, AI has made content creation easier than ever. The reality, most of it is slop. Human-based, community-driven marketing is the opposite. It compounds and scales over years and a competitor can't replicate it overnight. This discussion highlight why no platform can afford to overlook this channel.

Embedded fintech doesn't just add a revenue line, it changes the shape of the deal. Companies doing it well are closing faster, landing bigger contracts, and holding onto customers longer, because ripping out fintech products is a lot harder than ripping out software. This session gets into what that actually looks like for the people running fintech, revenue, and the business itself.

Thank you to our happy hour sponsor: Ingenico