Founderpath acquires SaaStock and rebrands Europe’s biggest SaaS conference as the AI Growth Summit

Update, 27 May 2026: Founderpath, the non-dilutive funding platform founded by Nathan Latka, has acquired SaaStock’s US and European conference operations. The events will be rebranded as the AI Growth Summit. The events have reportedly drawn a cumulative 30,000 attendees and 900 speakers across 14 flagship editions since 2016. An AI Growth Summit European tour is already underway, with free founder meetups scheduled across seven cities starting 30 May: Vienna, Berlin, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Barcelona, London, and Paris.

The acquisition adds a live events arm to Founderpath’s existing ecosystem of non-dilutive SaaS financing, a 65,000-subscriber newsletter, and a podcast with more than 15 million downloads. Latka is not new to the SaaStock orbit. SaaStock acquired his SaaSOpen Austin event for $1.6 million in 2024, and Founderpath had been a sponsor of SaaStock for four consecutive editions from 2022 to 2025, including a branded Centre Stage at recent events. The relationship between the two has been deepening for years, and the acquisition formalises what was already a close partnership.

For Theuma, the sale appears to be a clean break. He announced in April that SaaStock was being retired and replaced by Shift AI, a new event series built around the question of what software companies look like after AI agents have replaced the workflows their customers pay for. The first Shift Europe is scheduled for Barcelona on 13 and 14 October 2026. Theuma keeps Shift AI. Latka gets the SaaStock brand, its mailing lists, its sponsor relationships, and its decade of community equity, all repackaged under the AI Growth Summit banner.

The deal makes strategic sense for both sides. Theuma wanted to move on from the SaaStock identity but was sitting on a valuable asset: a conference brand with established relationships with hundreds of sponsors, including Chargebee, Intercom, Deel, and Paddle. Latka, whose Founderpath has deployed $271 million in non-dilutive capital to 727 SaaS founders since 2021, gets a direct channel to the founders he wants to fund. Live events are the most efficient customer acquisition tool in founder financing, and buying an established conference is cheaper and faster than building one from scratch.

The rebranding to AI Growth Summit follows the same logic that drove Theuma’s original decision to kill the SaaStock name. A conference called SaaStock, built around per-seat SaaS economics, cannot credibly host conversations about AI agents, outcome-based pricing, and the structural collapse of the subscription model it was named after. The AI Growth Summit name is generic enough to survive whatever comes next, which is exactly the point.

Whether Latka can maintain the community effect that made SaaStock valuable is the open question. SaaStock succeeded because Theuma, a former IT sales professional who started with a blog called SaaScribe in 2015, spent a decade building personal relationships with the European SaaS founder community. That trust does not transfer automatically with an acquisition. Latka brings his own network and media reach, but the SaaStock community was built around Theuma’s specific identity as a founder-operator turned community builder, not as a fintech CEO.

The original article from April, which covers Theuma’s decision to retire the SaaStock brand and the market forces driving that choice, follows below.

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 in April that the SaaStock brand was 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 that ran in Austin on 15 and 16 April was the final one under Theuma’s ownership. 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, roughly $2 trillion in SaaS market cap was erased. The per-seat model is under structural pressure it will not recover from. AI agents are replacing the workflows that SaaS 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 roughly 640 attendees. Within two years, it had grown to nearly 2,500 and begun expanding to the United States, Latin America, Asia Pacific, and Australia. At its peak in 2023, the European edition drew more than 3,500 founders, operators, and investors, and the conference 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 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 was not a pivot born of declining attendance or commercial pressure. It was a recognition that the category the conference was named after, software as a service sold by the seat and 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% to 15% of SaaS companies in the past twelve months. Seventy per cent of enterprises now demand usage-based or outcome-based contracts. Atlassian fell 35% after reporting the first decline in enterprise seat count in its history. Salesforce dropped 28% 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% 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% 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. 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. 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.