Vertical SaaS is the most overused phrase and the most underappreciated category in software. The companies that get talked about as vertical SaaS often turn out to be horizontal tools with a few industry templates bolted on. The companies below are different. Each one built a deep operating system for a specific industry, and each founder is a real, named operator whose decisions are documented through public filings, on-record interviews, or company communications.
Tooey Courtemanche — Procore (construction)
Courtemanche founded Procore in 2002 after watching the construction industry manage billion-dollar projects on email and spreadsheets. The company went public in 2021 and has continued to expand its surface area within the construction workflow — from project management into financial management, quality and safety, and resource management. The S-1 and subsequent 10-K filings document a customer base that includes general contractors, owners, and specialty contractors, with net revenue retention figures that reflect a deep multi-product expansion motion.
Peter Gassner — Veeva Systems (life sciences)
Gassner founded Veeva in 2007 specifically to replace Salesforce in the pharmaceutical and life sciences vertical. Veeva went public in 2013 and has since become the dominant commercial and clinical data platform for life sciences globally. The company's published financials show one of the highest gross retention rates in public SaaS, driven by the regulatory and operational depth that horizontal CRMs cannot replicate without a decade of industry investment.
Steve Fredette, Aman Narang, and Jonathan Grimm — Toast (restaurants)
Toast was founded in 2011 to build a cloud-native point-of-sale and restaurant management platform for full-service restaurants — a market that incumbents like Aloha and Micros had served with aging on-premise systems for decades. Toast went public in 2021. The S-1 and subsequent filings document the cross-sell economics across POS, payments, payroll, and inventory that turn the initial POS sale into a deep operating-system relationship per location.
Mike Wessinger and Dave Wessinger — PointClickCare (post-acute care)
The Wessinger brothers built PointClickCare into the dominant cloud platform for the long-term and post-acute care sector. The company is private and has been valued in the multi-billion-dollar range in secondary transactions and minority investments. Public reporting and the company's own communications confirm a customer footprint that includes the majority of skilled nursing facilities in the United States — a level of penetration that creates network effects between facilities, payers, and hospital systems that no horizontal player can replicate.
Howard Lerman — Yext, then Roam (a counter-example worth noting)
Yext was a vertical play for the local business listings management category. Lerman took the company public in 2017 and the company's financials demonstrated the value of deep specialization. He has since founded Roam, a different category entirely. The Yext example is included here as a documented case where vertical specialization built a public company, even though the founder has since moved on. The financial statements and proxy filings remain public and verifiable.
What this list demonstrates
Every founder named above has decisions, financials, and customer outcomes documented in public filings or on-record statements. The companies were built by going deeper than horizontal players were willing to invest in, and the depth created compounding moats that the financials reflect. The lesson is verifiable in the 10-K filings of the public companies on this list.
Vertical SaaS is not a marketing label. It is a structural commitment to depth that shows up in net revenue retention, gross retention, and customer concentration over a decade.
Sources: SEC filings (S-1 and 10-K) for Procore, Veeva, Toast, and Yext; private market reporting from PitchBook and The Information for PointClickCare; on-record interviews with each founder available through their respective companies' investor relations pages and major business publications.