SaaStock Founder Launches Shift AI, Retires Old Brand

The gravitational center of Europe’s B2B software community is undergoing a fundamental transformation. Alexander Theuma, founder of the influential SaaStock conference, has announced the brand’s retirement after a decade. It will be replaced by Shift AI, a new event series launching this year. The final SaaStock event will be held in Austin on April 15-16, with the inaugural Shift Europe conference scheduled for Barcelona on October 13-14, 2026. Theuma pointed directly to a seismic shift in the industry, citing the erasure of $2 trillion in SaaS market cap during the first quarter of 2026 and the structural pressure on traditional business models.

For ten years, SaaStock served as the definitive playbook for European software founders. Starting in Dublin in 2016 with 700 attendees, it grew into a global gathering, attracting over 4,000 founders, operators, and investors at its peak. It was the forum where companies like Intercom, Miro, and Personio shared the proven formulas for success: per-seat pricing, product-led growth, and the metrics that captivated venture capital. Theuma built more than an event, he cultivated a community that later fueled his early-stage investment fund, BackFuture Ventures. Ending this brand is not a reaction to declining relevance but a stark acknowledgment that the very category it championed is no longer the industry’s defining framework.

Theuma’s blunt assessment aligns with what investors now term the “SaaSpocalypse.” The data reveals a profound disruption. In the first weeks of 2026, nearly $2 trillion in market capitalization evaporated from software stocks, with a single February session wiping out $285 billion. The core issue is the collapsing per-seat pricing model under pressure from AI automation. Adoption of pure seat-based pricing has fallen from 21% to 15% of SaaS companies in the past year, as 70% of enterprises now demand usage-based or outcome-based contracts. Market reactions have been severe, with giants like Atlassian and Salesforce seeing steep declines as investors recognize their core workflows are prime targets for AI agent replacement.

This rebrand to Shift AI signals where the critical conversation has moved. Founders who mastered the previous decade’s economics now face a radically different set of challenges. The new event will focus on navigating the agentic era, tackling questions like pricing AI agents, restructuring human-centric go-to-market teams, and building businesses where value is measured by delivered outcomes, not occupied seats. The choice of Barcelona for Shift Europe is symbolic, positioning the event in a vibrant, cost-effective tech hub that contrasts with SaaStock’s Dublin roots and signals a new geographic center for this next chapter.

The central challenge for Theuma will be replicating the powerful community effect that defined SaaStock’s success. While the original conference served a clearly defined tribe of SaaS founders with shared language and problems, the target audience for Shift AI is broader and more diffuse. Every conference now claims an AI focus. Shift AI must convince founders it uniquely addresses their most pressing dilemma: not how to build AI, but how to survive the AI transition reshaping their commercial foundations.

In announcing the change, Theuma admitted to months of hesitation, ultimately concluding that a brand built for one era cannot lead in the next. The architects of the SaaS industry are not vanishing, they are evolving. They remain the same founders confronting existential questions, now simply in need of a different forum to find the answers.

(Source: The Next Web)