Vertical SaaS Unbundles Marketplaces
Ameet Shah, partner at Golden Ventures, on the economics of vertical SaaS marketplaces
Unbundling turns the old all in one marketplace into a thinner orchestration layer, while the real leverage moves to whoever owns the workflow and plugs in payments, logistics, financing, and data services piece by piece. That is why many newer B2B marketplaces start with software that helps buyers or sellers run an existing job, then add transaction rails later, instead of trying to own every operational function from day one.
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In practice, this means replacing manual middlemen with software at narrow choke points. A restaurant ordering platform can keep the customer relationship and menu control, while calling DoorDash Drive or Uber Direct only for the courier network. The marketplace no longer needs to own demand, software, and fulfillment in one bundle.
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The same pattern shows up in infrastructure. Payroll, payments, identity checks, and fulfillment used to be custom built or locked inside one large platform. API providers now sell each function as a building block, which lets vertical software companies assemble a specialized product for one market without recreating the whole stack.
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What gets unbundled is the generic plumbing, not the relationship with the customer. The winning company is still the one embedded in the daily workflow, seeing every order, payment, or schedule change. That position creates the data to launch lending, underwriting, and other higher margin products later.
Going forward, more marketplaces will look like software companies with a network attached, not giant closed systems. As infrastructure keeps getting cheaper and more modular, category winners will be the vertical products that control a specific workflow deeply enough to route transactions through whichever service layer is best at the moment.