Nick Tippmann / TipTop Ventures

Nick Tippmann is the Founder and GP at TipTop Ventures, a $15m fund betting on Vertical SaaS 3.0: intelligent, embedded, purpose-built software for specific industries.

Nick’s background is in vertical software. Before founding TipTop, he helped scale Greenlight Guru, a Vertical SaaS pioneer serving the MedTech industry. As CMO and part of the founding team, he saw how purpose-built tools outperformed horizontal solutions by deeply understanding workflows, regulations, and customer pain points.

That experience shaped his thesis: vertical software wins not just by focusing on one market, but by embedding itself into the core operations of that market. Add payments, financial services, AI. Now you don’t just have a better tool. You have a platform that redefines the job.

Our conversation gets into where SaaS has been and where it’s going. SaaS 1.0 was pure cloud: industry-agnostic tools like Salesforce and Zoom. SaaS 2.0 was verticalization: products like Toast and ServiceTitan that go deep in one sector. SaaS 3.0 is the new frontier. Vertical software powered by AI and embedded finance, capable of replacing entire workflows. Not just digitizing them.

As Nick puts it: “The best Vertical SaaS companies don’t stop at software, they become agentic operating systems.”

Full episode below, or on Spotify / Apple Podcasts