SaaStock's founder steps down from the decade-old brand and introduces Shift AI for the era following SaaS.

      Alexander Theuma, founder of SaaStock, is retiring Europe's largest B2B SaaS conference after ten years and launching a new event called Shift AI. The final SaaStock will take place in Austin on April 15-16, while the inaugural Shift Europe is slated for October 13-14, 2026, in Barcelona. Theuma pointed to a loss of $2 trillion in SaaS market capitalization during Q1 2026 and the fundamental decline of the per-seat pricing model due to the influence of AI agents.

      The SaaStock conference, which served as a focal point for the B2B software founder community in Europe for a decade, is coming to an end. Theuma announced on LinkedIn that the SaaStock brand is being phased out in favor of Shift AI, a new event focused on how the introduction of AI agents is reshaping the landscape of software companies.

      The final SaaStock event will take place in Austin on April 15 and 16, with the first Shift Europe event set for Barcelona on October 13 and 14, 2026.

      Theuma was straightforward in his reasoning. He noted that "In Q1 2026, $2 trillion in SaaS market cap vanished," and that the per-seat pricing model is facing insurmountable structural challenges. AI agents are beginning to take over the workflows for which customers previously paid. He emphasized that the successful companies of the next decade will not resemble those that thrived in the past ten years.

      SaaStock was initiated in Dublin in 2016 with 700 participants from 34 countries. It experienced significant growth, doubling its attendance to 1,500 within two years and expanding into the United States, Latin America, Asia-Pacific, and Australia. At its height, the conference attracted over 4,000 founders, operators, and investors from five continents, serving as a critical platform for European SaaS companies to learn industry strategies like per-seat pricing and product-led growth.

      Notable companies such as Intercom, Paddle, Calendly, Miro, and Personio have all participated as speakers or sponsors throughout the decade. Theuma, who spent over a decade in IT and telecom sales before founding the SaaS blog SaaScribe in 2015, developed the conference into a thriving community, which he later leveraged into BackFuture Ventures, an early-stage fund focusing on European SaaS investments.

      The decision to retire the brand he built from a blog and podcast is not a reaction to dwindling attendance or financial strain. Instead, it reflects an understanding that the traditional category of "software as a service," based on per-seat sales and annual recurring revenue, no longer aptly describes the industry.

      The term "SaaSpocalypse" has emerged among investors to describe the current upheaval. Between January and mid-February 2026, the software sector saw about $2 trillion in market capitalization disappear, with $285 billion vanishing in a single day on February 3. SaaS companies are racing to incorporate AI, but those whose business models are still heavily reliant on human staff are facing market backlash.

      The statistics paint a clear picture: the adoption of purely per-seat pricing has dropped from 21% to 15% among SaaS companies in the past year, while 70% of enterprises now prefer usage-based or outcome-based contracts. Atlassian's share price fell by 35% after it reported its first decline in enterprise seat count ever, and Salesforce's stock dropped 28% as investors recognized that its core workflows—such as task tracking, data entry, and customer logging—are areas where AI agents excel.

      Gartner predicts that by the end of 2026, 40% of enterprise SaaS contracts will incorporate outcome-based pricing models. While the per-seat model is not disappearing instantly—Bain highlights that hybrid models with a base fee combined with variable components are gaining traction, with 43% of SaaS companies using them—the era in which a conference could be named after it while remaining relevant is clearly coming to a close.

      The rebranding represents more than just a name change; it reflects the shift in critical discussions. Theuma believes that founders who have built companies based on SaaS economics need a new point of convergence as they adapt to this new era. The founders who spoke at SaaStock—those who scaled companies to tens of millions in annual recurring revenue through per-seat subscriptions and product-led strategies—are now grappling with how to price AI agents, restructure their go-to-market teams, and construct businesses based on outcome delivery rather than just occupancy.

      Barcelona's selection for Shift Europe is a strategic one. The city has emerged as a vibrant tech hub in Europe, boasting a burgeoning number of AI startups, lower operational costs compared to London or Paris, and the necessary infrastructure to support a conference of this nature. While Dublin served as the hub for the European SaaS era, Barcelona marks a new chapter with different geographical significance.

      The question