Jason Lemkin
Founder of SaaStr, a community and media platform for B2B software founders, and managing director of SaaStr Fund; he previously co-founded EchoSign, acquired b...
“When agents pick you, it's a force of nature right now ... I'm literally building eight to 10 hours a day. And man, my agents have opinions and they're really hard to argue with. And if they want to use a vendor, it's a lot of energy. I know I'm anthropomorphizing it, but it's powerful when an agent decides something.”
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch · Startups & Venture · October 2026
The panel is discussing a hosting company said to be getting half of its new business from AI agents, up from 3% at the start of the year. Lemkin's point is that software agents now choose which tools to build on, and that as the human in the loop he finds it takes effort to overrule them.
Transcript
We're doing about 100. So 9x. Which, by the way, was right on the heels of the GFC. So the market was getting quite skittish in 2008.
One that I am interested by is actually one that Jason suggested, which is Versal at 600 million in ARR with agents being 50% of the new business, up from 3% at the start of the year. Jason, I always find you quite mind-expanding for me when you talk about these topics. How do you think about this? How much budget we should give to agents for 2027? What's the takeaway for us from Versal now getting 50% of new business from agents up from 3%?
Well, look, I would say maybe two different things. One, I think that there's a bunch of companies like Vercel that had the right infrastructure and the right product before AI and agents, right? So Vercell founded in 2020, right? I mean, Guillermo did not know that in 2026, the majority of his business would be from agents, right? Spinning up applications on their own, right? Nobody saw that. Some of the most amazing stories, even 11 Labs is a little bit of that. Certainly Replit founded in 2016 is like a big case study where you just, you just, you latch on to that and it just works. And they do have the tiger by the tail. There's a lot of competitors, a lot of really strong competitors, but agents pick Vercell. It's very strong. And, you know, it was interesting. I think, what did they say? They're growing 170% at 600 million from 20% increase in customers or something. I mean, the expansion revenue is astronomical. And it's just the thing is when agents pick you, and I'm sure Dev's thinking a lot about this, right? On the database side, when agents pick you, it's a force of nature right now. And agents, what I've learned from, well, you have 21 agents. We're building all day. Between me and Amiel, I'm literally building eight to 10 hours a day. And man, my agents have opinions and they're really hard to argue with. And if they want to use a vendor, it's a lot of energy. I know I'm anthropomorphizing it, but it's powerful when an agent decides something. And Vercel is a major beneficiary of this. Even last year, it looked great, but it never seemed it would be as important as it is today. Oh, that's just, that's just where I'm going to stick my code, right? Important, but back office infrastructure. But man, this is where so many agents and apps are running. And I would only want, I would take this one to the IC too.
I think this is really interesting about the point that Jason made is that agents are picking, making decisions, right? But for the last 25 years, every marketing person, every company has optimized how you show up on page one of Google, right? You educate human buyers. Now you have to make sure that agents can find you, understand what you sell, have current, accurate information about you across the sources they read. And if you're missing from an AI generated answer, it's like being invisible on Google. You know, full disclosure, Sequoia is a company called Profound that helps companies with those helping them. But I will tell you, this is a massive problem. And it's not just in tech. If you're an e-commerce site or you're a retail company trying to sell through e-commerce and agents are now making buying decisions, you got to figure out how to educate those agents. Otherwise, your business is going to zero.
You know, when I look at this market, we too have a company, Dave, Peak, and everyone's like, well, this is just like a next generation of SEMrush. Is it just a next generation of kind of SEO analytics providers with your profounds and your peaks? Or is this actually a much larger category?
I think the opportunity is more than just analytics by telling you where you're missing and all that. I think the opportunity for these companies is not just tell you what you're missing, but to help shape the content and create the content to help you solve that problem. If they can close the loop, that becomes a very compelling solution versus just telling you, you're here, you're not here. This is what the other guys are doing. I'm
