SAAS
The Great Rebrand (or why your favorite SaaS platform is now “AI”)
A.I. Those two little letters have the power to determine whether or not a startup gets funded. And they’ve sent the entire software industry into an identity crisis.
For more than a decade, SaaS was Venture Capital’s darling. Then, generative AI entered the chat and rewrote the rules overnight.
The Pressure to Pivot is Real
Software stocks just lost $2T in value, the biggest drop in 30 years
20% drop in the S&P North American Tech Software Index in a single month
40%+ decline in Salesforce and ServiceNow shares over the past year
And the money has already traded hands. Nearly half of all VC funding in 2025 went to AI startups. Meanwhile, 135 of 151 companies in Y Combinator’s latest cohort call themselves AI.
Rebuild > Rebrand
But here’s the thing, you can’t just slap .ai on your domain name and call it done.
Take Jasper as a cautionary tale. The marketing platform built a shiny, $1.5B business on top of OpenAI’s model. But then ChatGPT went live and users cut out the middleman.
Intercom, on the other hand, decided to make a hard pivot. The customer service company launched a full AI agent within 90 days of ChatGPT taking off and growth followed… to the tune of ~$100M in annual revenue from the AI product.
Rebrands fade. Rebuilds compound.
Is it really AI… or just three SaaS companies in a trench coat? 🤔 - TL