Vibe Coding Meets Reality in Vertical AI
with Alex Oppenheimer, GP @ Verissimo Ventures
Alex Oppenheimer is Founder and General Partner at Verissimo Ventures, a pre-seed and seed fund investing across the US, Israel, and Europe. Before launching Verissimo in 2020, Alex spent years at NEA, where he became a specialist in SaaS mechanics. He’s written 80+ checks since, backing vertical software, infrastructure, and fintech companies at the earliest stages. Tune in for a sharp debate on whether the vibe coding wave is actually a threat to Vertical SaaS, or just to the cheap end of it — and where the new lines of build vs. buy are being drawn.
Software is dead. We’ve all heard it. AI has made it trivially easy to spin up a tool — a scheduling widget, a personal CRM, a dashboard — and the natural conclusion is that nobody needs to buy software anymore.
While the conclusion is wrong, it’s not for the reasons most people assume. What AI can replace and what’s worth investing in are two very distinct categories. The cheap end of the market (discrete, small-scope tools) and the complex end (truly enterprise-scalable platforms) are night-and-day. They have wildly different build times, maintenance costs, and ultimately, economics. Many have assumed that all of software should take a hit — in reality, enterprise solutions may have gotten harder to build in the AI era, with rising expectations of interoperability and customization. While the simple solutions, designed for prosumers to execute on a small, repeatable task, have more-or-less lost pricing power altogether.
To read the full piece, head over to The Verticalist on Substack.