Veeva Systems was built by someone who spent a decade running software sales at Oracle — specifically for pharma clients. Toast was built by three product managers who had worked with restaurant technology. ServiceTitan’s founders grew up watching their fathers run service businesses in Los Angeles. The largest public vertical SaaS companies were almost never built by outsiders who spotted an opportunity from 30,000 feet. They were built by people who had spent years inside the problem.
The public vertical SaaS landscape
There are now several vertical SaaS companies on US exchanges that represent the model at scale:
Toast (restaurant technology) — went public 2021, $1B+ revenue. The software is the entry point; financial technology and payment processing is the business. Their fintech segment generates more revenue than software subscriptions.
Veeva Systems (life sciences cloud) — built on Salesforce infrastructure for pharma CRM, then expanded into clinical trials, quality management, and regulatory submissions. Deep vertical lock-in commands multiples that horizontal software peers don’t achieve.
ServiceTitan (home and commercial services) — built for HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and field service businesses. Went public late 2024. Payments, financing, and marketing products are layered onto core dispatch and job management software.
Procore (construction management) — workflow software for construction projects and contractors. Built Procore Pay to capture the payment layer.
The through-line: each started with a specific broken workflow in a specific industry, built deep penetration, then expanded by capturing adjacent financial services.
The operator-founder pattern
The founding stories matter because they explain why the products work. Vertical SaaS buyers in tight industries are skeptical of generic software. They’ve been pitched horizontal tools that “work for everyone” and discovered that tools built for no one in particular are optimized for no one in particular.
Founders who came from the industry they were building for solved this by default. Product decisions reflect operational knowledge. The sales motion works because the operator founder’s credibility opens doors that cold outreach can’t. Initial customers come from the founder’s network, not a growth team.
The payments expansion playbook
Every major public vertical SaaS company has added payments. The logic is identical across all of them.
When you own the workflow — when your software is how the restaurant manages its tables, how the HVAC company manages its jobs, how the construction firm manages its project financials — you sit on a large transaction stream. Enabling that stream to run through your platform converts a software business into a software + fintech business, at margins that are accretive even at thin payment take rates.
Toast’s financial technology segment generates more revenue than its software subscriptions. ServiceTitan’s payments and financing products are a core growth driver. Procore Pay is early but follows the same logic. This is the second chapter of the vertical SaaS playbook: win the workflow, then unlock the financial services that flow through it.
What “niche” means when the public companies do the math
The public vertical SaaS companies look like they’re in narrow markets. They’re not, when you count correctly.
The US restaurant industry has roughly 660,000 locations. Toast’s addressable market isn’t “restaurants that need POS software” — it’s the financial processing of every transaction those restaurants run, plus payroll, plus lending, plus insurance. The same expansion logic applies to every vertical.
When a founder says “this market is only $2B,” the relevant question is: what does that market look like when you add embedded financial services, adjacent workflow products, and expansion into adjacent customer segments? The public companies demonstrate that the answer is typically 5–10x the software-only TAM — not theoretical, but realized. That’s what makes a vertical software market venture-scalable.
What this means for a vertical SaaS founder today
You’re not building toward being Toast. You’re building toward becoming the dominant software company in your specific vertical before Toast-scale capital arrives and tries to displace you.
The patterns the public companies exhibit are replicable at much smaller scale: find a workflow that’s broken, build software that fixes it, achieve high penetration in a defined segment, add a payments product when you’ve earned the trust. Each of these steps is achievable in the first four years for an operator who knows the vertical.
The public companies are proof that the pattern works across multiple verticals, founding teams, and market conditions — not a destination to compare yourself against. Use them that way.