Is AI That Knows Your Industry The Smarter AI? Betting On Verticals

When AI learns your business, is vertical AI the next big shift? A Dallas startup called Upsmith announced a $10 million Series A funding round this week.

And at first, I wasn't really sure if there was a story in this, but Upsmith builds AI for home services companies.

So think HVAC contractors, plumbers, and electricians.

Its software can respond to leads, schedule and confirm appointments, follow up on estimates that may be never closed or even renew service memberships and reach back out to customers who maybe haven't called in a while.

Now, all of those are useful things as we know in business, but also none of them are particularly new for AI.

Think about Salesforce and it being able to deploy agents across sales and customer service.

Service Titan, the software a lot of home services companies already run on its own, has its own AI called Atlas.

And there are plenty of other startups that are chasing the same or similar markets.

And there are definitely platforms that make it easier every month for companies to build agents themselves.

So the question is, why did investors just put another $10 million into a company doing something that on the surface looks like plenty of others can already do? Well, to be fair, the more I looked at Upsmith, the more I thought that question maybe was the story.

Because the opportunity may not be building a better AI agent.

It may be building one that understands a particular business better.

And if that's where we're headed, there's something very familiar about it.

You know, we may be watching the vertical software playbook start all over again, only this time, the software isn't just helping us organize the work, it's actually doing some of it for us.

So today, I want to talk through and go over three Texas companies that point in that direction.

Then we'll look at kind of the other end of the spectrum, because on Tuesday of this week, HubSpot, you know, one of the biggest names in business software, especially for mid-market companies, restructured its company around this exact idea.

Now, one ground rule as we go into the information, I just want to make sure that you recognize that all of the data and performance numbers that I'm going to share today are from these specific companies reported by them.

And so it hasn't been, you know, independently audited or verified.

So just keep that in mind.

And let's go into now those numbers.