Top 12 Moments from Verticals, So Far
Slice, Broadlume, Moxie, ServiceTitan, Qualia, EvolutionIQ, and more
Since launching Verticals late last year, we’ve had the honor of hosting 25 founders, operators, and VCs who have collectively built billions in vertical enterprise value. It’s been an incredible first quarter. Our guests have gone deep on Vertical AI, sharing what worked and didn’t in their platform-building journeys. If you’ve been watching on YouTube or listening on Spotify, you’ve caught some of these moments already.
This week, we’re taking a look back to recap some highlights to date — and the key lessons we learned from each. From Slice and Broadlume, to Qualia and ServiceTitan, there’s a masterclass here for you. We’ve also added links to essays and playbooks from Euclid Insights relevant to each episode, so you can dig deeper.
If you haven’t, please take a moment to subscribe to Verticals on YouTube below (it’s only place we post full episodes and shorts). It’s been an incredible first quarter… and we look forward to bringing you many more.
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Ilir Sela, Slice (Ep. 1)
“Independent, Not Alone”
Our very first guest framed the thesis for the entire show. Ilir built Slice into a billion-dollar platform for independent pizzerias by running the reverse franchise playbook: give operators the shared stack and economies of scale of a Domino’s without forcing brand uniformity. The moment that stuck? Slice’s AI voice ordering hits ~90% transaction completion—but humans still clear 98%+. For low-margin shops, that 8-point gap is existential. Until AI clears the bar, humans stay in the loop. Cold pragmatism that every vertical AI founder selling into cost-sensitive end markets should internalize.
Jeremy Yamaguchi, Cabana (Ep. 2)
The AI-First Roll-Up Math
Jeremy laid out the honest economics of buying, operating, and AI-enabling legacy service businesses from his POV running Cabana. The takeaway: you’re running three businesses at once—an operating company, a tech company, and a PE shop. The magnitude of AI margin uplift is still unproven, but the structural advantage is clear: if you own the P&L, you can force AI adoption in verticals that would otherwise resist it for a decade. We unpacked the model further in our AI-First Roll-Up essay.
Todd Saunders, Broadlume (Ep. 5)
Community as Moat
Todd—whom we’ve called the “grand vizier of flooring”—explained how Broadlume turned community, content, and first-party data into durable defensibility in an industry most VCs wouldn’t touch. He parlayed that strategy into a strong exit to PSG — after having given up nearly $10M in ARR to undertake a risky pivot... incredible story. His return for our 2026 Predictions special only reinforced the point: the operators who know their verticals cold are the ones building platforms that last.
Mike Kopko, Pearl Health (Ep. 6)
Healthcare’s First Inning in AI
Healthcare is the largest category in Vertical AI by deal count and capital deployed. Mike — the founder / CEO of Pearl Health — made the case for why it’s barely started: a quarter of the US economy, byzantine money flows, a huge chunk of vertical investment (as we’ve covered in past Vertical Reports) and enormous room for AI to align incentives in value-based care. His key point for founders: sell provable time-to-value and measured ROI for discrete use cases—not “AI.” In non-tech-forward verticals, forward-deployed resources aren’t overhead; they’re the product.
Sam Youssef, Valsoft (Ep. 8)
The Compounding Machine
Sam runs Valsoft, a 130+ portfolio-company, $750M+ revenue vertical software aggregator in the tradition of Constellation Software. And the bigger the vertical, the less interesting it usually is for them. Large markets attract aggressive VC dollars and irrational competition. Smaller verticals—forestry, niche manufacturing, obscure back-office workflows—tend to be calmer. Rational budgets, rational pricing, rational competitors. That’s Valsoft’s domain. While he’s not alone in the world of vertically-focused PE shops (as we covered a while back in our Buyout Frenzy piece), Sam takes a uniquely single-minded approach. The episode was another reminder that “small TAM” markets often harbor enormous, defensible value once you’re inside the workflow.
Dan Friedman, Moxie / Boulton & Watt (Ep. 9)
Business-in-a-Box Done Right
Dan’s Moxie—a platform helping aesthetic clinicians launch, run, and grow compliant medspa businesses—is a case study in an important business model: business-in-a-box. There are many variations: we called it the Synthetic Roll-Up, others like Ilir at Slice (see our first episode above) see it as unbundling the franchise. Dan’s core lesson: start with off-the-shelf software and services to earn trust, before worrying about making the entire tech stack proprietary. Just as important is picking what not to do early. He also discussed how compliance was a unique moat for Moxie; operating across 50 different state regulatory frameworks is just one way they could help. This episode is also worth it to hear about Dan’s unique incubation model in Boulton & Watt.
Rahul Hampole, ServiceTitan (Ep. 10)
The Vertical Fintech Playbook
Rahul ran fintech at Yelp, Plaid, and now ServiceTitan. His message was surgical: optimize for customer value first, take rate second. Have 20 of your best customers on a text channel—they’ll tell you transparently what’s keeping them up at night. That feedback loop is your early warning system for which fintech products to build next. For vertical SaaS players focused on SMBs, aspire for 80–100 basis points on card transactions as a starting point—and fight for it. Generalizing this episode left us with a nice framework for finding PMF (in line with our own product-market fit guide, “Nobody Wants Your Product!”) and considering when to launch new platform products.
Nate Baker, Qualia / Fractal (Ep. 14)
TAM Is Not Fixed
Nate challenged one of the most persistent investor objections in vertical software: the TAM is too small. Having built Qualia into the backbone of title agents across America (500K+ professionals, 600 employees) and launched 150+ vertical SaaS companies through Fractal, his view carries weight. In vertical markets, TAM expands with each new layer of value you create. Companies that seem to have a $5K ACV ceiling routinely break through to $50K+ by solving adjacent problems. The episode is a great real-world case study building on the quantitative frameworks we explored in our Vertical AI market sizing series. Nate’s boldest claim: every business that isn’t seriously reevaluating its product offerings right now will be cooked.
Michael Saltzman, EvolutionIQ (Ep. 15)
From $50K First Year to $750M Exit
Everyone talks about how the revenue bar has permanently elevated. Michael’s story is the counterpoint. EvolutionIQ’s first year: one design partner, ~$50K total revenue. A few years later, 8-figure ARR and a $750M exit to CCC. The playbook: sell guidance (not automation) into a workforce that believes it already has strong expertise. Build a “digital twin” of data rather than writing back into core systems. And make results—not pitch decks—do the early selling. Architecture that can adapt as models improve was the real moat. For founders: this is not only an incredible exit story, but also a reminder of what initial design partnerships in enterprise Vertical AI can really take.
Mike Powers, BuildVision (Ep. 16)
Give Away the SaaS, Capture the Decision Layer
Mike is betting that in the age of AI, the value of the “interface” goes to zero. BuildVision gives away the workflow software for free, captures the network, then monetizes the transaction, the risk, and the capital flow in commercial construction procurement. His take on certain popular AI point solutions was provocatively bearish: Claude can already do a lot of what companies have raised hundreds of millions to solve. The defensible asset isn’t the wrapper—it’s the proprietary data moat and the decision layer (or what many are now calling the Context Graph). As always, Mike is a poster child for the importance of domain expertise — both lived and learned — for AI distribution into traditional industries like construction.
Darren Fike, Santé (Ep. 17)
AI as a GTM Weapon
Darren’s approach to using agentic AI to collapse switching costs might be the most underrated tactical insight from the show. In the $80B U.S. liquor retail market—90% independently owned—every prospect has been on the same system for 10+ years. Santé uses AI to download a prospect’s data, show the system pre-populated on the demo, and collapse the psychological distance between “considering” and “we can use this today.” Recently, this method yielded Darren 30 deals in a single month, zero feature requests. It’s a really unique case study on how founders are not only building novel products with AI, but also leveraging it to solve some of SaaS’s traditional friction points (for further reading on this, check out “Vertical AI’s Integration Problem”).
Nick Tippmann, TipTop VC (Ep. 18)
SaaSpocalypse & Distribution Tactics
In the span of weeks, $400B of SaaS enterprise value evaporated in the midst of the “SaaSmageddon”—the category's largest non-recessionary drawdown in over 30 years. Nick, founder of TipTop VC, joined us to make sense of the carnage. The bears say SaaS is dead. We disagree—AI is still software, and the market is expanding. But the question shifts from "will software survive?" to "who wins?" We shared our answer in our recent post, “The Dispatcher Problem.” Nick thinks distribution is a big part of the answer too — and shares his top tips (pun intended) on early Vertical AI GTM in the back half of this episode.
On behalf of both Euclid Insights and Verticals, we’re so thankful to have you as a reader, watcher, and / or listener — at least in our careers, there’s been no more exciting time to be a part of the growing Vertical AI community.
New episodes of Verticals drop every Wednesday — Subscribe on YouTube or Spotify!
And if you’re an operator ideating on something new in Vertical AI, the Euclid team would love to hear from you. Drop us a link on LinkedIn or our DMs here.