SaaStock is dead: founder kills Europe’s biggest SaaS conference and launches Shift AI

SaaStock founder Alexander Theuma is retiring Europe’s biggest B2B SaaS conference after a decade and replacing it with Shift AI. The Austin event on 15-16 April is the last SaaStock; the first Shift Europe runs in Barcelona on 13-14 October 2026. Theuma cited $2 trillion in SaaS market cap erased in Q1 2026 and the structural collapse of per-seat pricing under AI agent pressure.

SaaStock, the conference that spent a decade as the gravitational centre of Europe’s B2B software founder community, is dead. Its founder, Alexander Theuma, announced on LinkedIn this week that the SaaStock brand is being retired and replaced by Shift AI, a new event built around the question that has overtaken every conversation in enterprise software: what does a software company actually look like after AI agents have replaced the workflows its customers pay for?

The SaaStock conference running in Austin on 15 and 16 April is the final one. The first Shift Europe event will take place in Barcelona on 13 and 14 October 2026.

Theuma was characteristically blunt about the reasoning. “In Q1 2026, $2 trillion in SaaS market cap was erased,” he wrote. “The per-seat model is under structural pressure it won’t recover from. AI agents are replacing the workflows our customers pay for. The companies that win the next decade will not look like the ones that won the last one.”

A decade of SaaS playbooks

SaaStock launched in Dublin in 2016 with 700 attendees from 34 countries. Within two years, it had doubled to 1,500 and begun expanding to the United States, Latin America, Asia Pacific, and Australia. At its peak, the conference drew more than 4,000 founders, operators, and investors across five continents and became the place where European SaaS companies went to learn the playbook: how to price per seat, how to scale through product-led growth, how to hit the metrics that venture capitalists wanted to see.

The companies that passed through SaaStock’s stages read like a directory of the European SaaS generation. Intercom, Paddle, Calendly, Miro, and Personio all featured as speakers or sponsors at various points over the decade. Theuma, who spent 11 years in IT and telecoms sales before starting a SaaS blog called SaaScribe in 2015, built the conference into a community and then leveraged that community into BackFuture Ventures, an early-stage fund investing in European SaaS companies.

The decision to kill the brand he built from a blog and a podcast is not a pivot born of declining attendance or commercial pressure. It is a recognition that the category the conference was named after – software as a service, sold by the seat, measured by annual recurring revenue- is no longer the defining frame for the industry it serves.

The SaaSpocalypse is real

Theuma’s timing tracks with what investors have taken to calling the “SaaSpocalypse.” Between January and mid-February 2026, roughly $2 trillion in market capitalisation was wiped from the software sector. On 3 February alone, $285 billion in value vanished in a single session. Every SaaS company is scrambling to integrate AI, but the market is punishing those whose core business model remains tied to human headcount.

The numbers are stark. Purely per-seat pricing adoption has dropped from 21 per cent to 15 per cent of SaaS companies in the past twelve months. Seventy per cent of enterprises now demand usage-based or outcome-based contracts. Atlassian fell 35 per cent after reporting the first decline in enterprise seat count in its history. Salesforce dropped 28 per cent as investors recognised that its core workflows – task tracking, data entry, customer logging – are precisely what AI agents automate most effectively.

Gartner forecasts that 40 per cent of enterprise SaaS contracts will include outcome-based pricing components by the end of 2026. The per-seat model is not disappearing overnight – Bain notes that hybrid approaches combining a base fee with variable usage or outcome components are winning, with 43 per cent of SaaS companies now using them – but the era in which a conference could be named after it and remain relevant is clearly ending.

What Shift AI signals

The rebrand is more than a name change. It is a statement about which conversation matters now, and Theuma is betting that founders who built their companies on SaaS economics need a different gathering point as they navigate the agentic era. The founders who filled SaaStock’s stages – people who scaled companies to tens of millions in ARR through per-seat subscriptions and product-led funnels – are now working out how to price AI agents, how to restructure go-to-market teams that no longer need as many humans, and how to build businesses where the value metric is an outcome delivered rather than a seat occupied.

Barcelona as the location for Shift Europe is a deliberate choice. The city has become one of Europe’s most active technology hubs, with a growing concentration of AI startups, lower operating costs than London or Paris, and a conference infrastructure that can accommodate an event of this scale. SaaStock’s historical base in Dublin served the European SaaS era. Barcelona is a signal that the next chapter has different coordinates.

Whether Shift AI can replicate the community effect that made SaaStock valuable is the question Theuma will need to answer. Conferences succeed when they become the place where a specific tribe gathers, and SaaStock succeeded because SaaS founders in 2016 were an identifiable group with shared problems and a shared language. The tribe Shift AI is targeting — software founders navigating the AI transition – is larger and more diffuse. Every technology conference in 2026 claims to be about AI. The challenge is convincing founders that this one understands their specific problem: not how to build AI, but how to survive it.

Theuma’s LinkedIn post contained a line that captured both the difficulty and the conviction of the decision: “I kept finding reasons to delay.” Six months of hesitation, followed by the recognition that a brand built for one era cannot lead in the next. The people who built the SaaS industry are not disappearing. They are the same founders, facing the same existential questions, in need of a different room in which to ask them.