We at Bowery Capital have been fascinated by vertical software since the beginnings of our firm in May 2013. While we focus heavily on software that sells into marketing or technology organizations at a horizontal level, we consistently saw a number of players in 2013 come through our doors with specific vertical solutions selling into industry. As the theory goes, the first wave of SaaS disruption came from some of the highly successful horizontal SaaS players and the second wave of disruption in enterprise cloud computing will come from vertical players who are creating purpose-built, vertically sliced tools. We’ve spent the past year out of this market but stayed close to the thoughtful work that our friends in industry have done around the spaces and verticals. Most notable for any vertically focused entrepreneur should be Emergence Capital’s work on what they call the Industry Cloud and the hallmarks that make successful companies in the verticals.
“Mass customization by vertical software or functional slice with a purpose-built solution that meets your customer’s unique needs is becoming the new key to success in the software industry.” – Gordon Ritter, Emergence Capital.
Over the past year we decided to put pen to paper and are today releasing a working document that we’re calling “Opportunities In Vertical Software.” This is Bowery’s POV on 10 vertical markets. It encompasses where we see the most opportunity as investors in the space, who the major and emerging players are in each vertical, some metrics around deals and dollar flows, and finally who the key internet natives are from an IT purchasing standpoint. With successful public vertical software companies like Veeva Systems, DealerTrack, Fleetmatics, OPower, and RealPage leading the charge as well as emerging growth vertical software businesses such as Drilling Info, Guidewire, Advent, and Mindbody winning in market we are excited to invest in this ecosystem and help it grow and flourish.
Bowery Capital – Opportunities in Vertical Software v1.0 from Bowery Capital
If you liked “Vertical Software Continues Its March To Victory” and want to read more content from the Bowery Capital Team, check out other relevant posts from the Bowery Capital Blog.
