SAAS NORTH is serving up a new playbook for founders

Features that defined a product last year are now baseline. Customers expect automation baked in and priced down. Investors demand an AI story, whether it fits or not.

This is the backdrop for SAAS NORTH 2025, taking place November 5–6 at Ottawa’s Rogers Centre. Since 2016, SAAS NORTH has given founders a stage to wrestle with the toughest questions facing the sector. The conference turns ten this year, and the spotlight is on the subject dominating every boardroom: AI.

Speakers at SAAS NORTH 2025 include Oomira’s Katherine Homuth, Carbon6’s Kazi Ahmed, and Boardy’s Swish Goswami.

The theme, Future-Proof SaaS in the Age of AI, sets the stage for founders to confront how quickly the ground beneath them is shifting. 

How do you build a product roadmap when the tools you use to ship it could be obsolete within a year? What does pricing look like when buyers expect automation baked into the product? How do you hire for roles that didn’t exist two years ago but are now critical to growth? 

At SAAS NORTH, those questions won’t stay theoretical. The content tracks include product and innovation; sales and company building; leadership and culture; and finance and exits. Sessions will span product innovation, go-to-market strategies, growth, and more, but the common thread is how AI is already changing each domain. 

Founders and operators who have built enduring companies will share the stage, including Kazi Ahmed, fresh off steering Carbon6 through a rapid roll-up of Amazon-seller tools and a $300-million exit. 

Speakers also include Swish Goswami, who has Head of Growth & Marketing at AI networking tool Boardy, and Katherine Homuth, who built Sheertex into a global name and is now using AI to build her latest venture Oomira.

Vitaly Pecherskiy, who has been in the trenches since StackAdapt’s early days, taking the company from startup to one of North America’s most formidable ad-tech players, will also take the stage at SAAS NORTH. And Jo Lai, who now leads AI at Hopper, will examine customer experience as a daily stress test in one of the toughest industries to innovate.

Community has always been SAAS NORTH’s engine, and that remains true a decade deep. Attendees will have access not only to the mainstage sessions but also to founder-only breakouts, investor matchmaking, and the informal gatherings that make the conference memorable. 

The conference will also once again host Pitchfest, which will showcase startups future-proofing SaaS with smart, scalable, and defensible business models.

And as past participants attest, some of the most valuable moments happen in the conversations between panels, where a chance meeting can turn into a new customer, a new partner, or even a new round of funding.

“SAAS NORTH was probably one of the best conferences I have been to in the last two and a half years being in the VC ecosystem,” said Inovia Capital’s Kelly Jacques. “The panels were all well prepared and on specific topics, the companies in Pitchfest were great, and the events around networking were unique and interesting.”

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Get 20 percent off your pass to SAAS NORTH 2025 by using the code BETAKIT20 at checkout. We’ll see you there!

All photos provided by SAAS NORTH.