SaaStock founder retires 10-year brand, launches Shift AI for the post-SaaS era

Alexander Theuma, founder of SaaStock, has officially retired the decade-long B2B SaaS conference brand to launch a new event called Shift AI. The final SaaStock conference is scheduled to take place in Austin on April 15 and 16, 2026, marking the end of an era for the gathering that served as the gravitational center of Europe’s B2B software founder community. Theuma replaced the brand with Shift AI, which will hold its inaugural European event in Barcelona on October 13 and 14, 2026. Theuma cited significant economic shifts as the primary driver for the transition. He noted that $2 trillion in SaaS market capitalization was erased during the first quarter of 2026, with $285 billion vanishing in a single trading session on February 3. According to Theuma, the per-seat pricing model faces structural pressure from AI agents that are replacing the workflows customers traditionally paid for. Consequently, the companies winning the next decade will differ fundamentally from those that succeeded in the previous ten years. SaaStock launched in Dublin in 2016 with 700 attendees and grew to draw over 4,000 founders, operators, and investors across five continents at its peak. Major European SaaS companies such as Intercom, Paddle, Calendly, Miro, and Personio featured as speakers or sponsors throughout the conference's history. Theuma leveraged the community he built into BackFuture Ventures, an early-stage fund investing in European SaaS companies, before deciding to retire the brand he constructed from a blog and podcast. Market data supports the timing of this pivot. Purely per-seat pricing adoption has dropped from 21 percent to 15 percent of SaaS companies in the past twelve months, while seventy percent of enterprises now demand usage-based or outcome-based contracts. Atlassian fell 35 percent after reporting the first decline in enterprise seat count in its history, and Salesforce dropped 28 percent as investors recognized that core workflows were being automated. Gartner forecasts that 40 percent of enterprise SaaS contracts will include outcome-based pricing components by the end of 2026. The selection of Barcelona for Shift Europe signals a change in coordinates for the industry hub, chosen for its growing concentration of AI startups and lower operating costs compared to London or Paris. Theuma acknowledges the difficulty of replicating the community effect that made SaaStock valuable, noting that the tribe targeting Shift AI—software founders navigating the AI transition—is larger and more diffuse. The challenge remains convincing founders that this specific gathering understands their problem of survival rather than just building AI.