SAAS NORTH will feel a little different this year

Every autumn, SAAS NORTH gathers Canada’s SaaS industry under one roof. But this year will be different. 

The conversations unfolding on November 5 and 6 at the Rogers Centre in Ottawa will not be predictable, and the on-stage matchups won’t be obvious. In other words, SAAS NORTH 2025 has been designed to surprise.

“We designed this year’s program so that every leader walks away with ideas and strategies they can put to work immediately.”

David Tyldesley, SAAS NORTH

The theme for 2025 is Future-Proof SaaS in the Age of AI. The conference, which has been around since 2016, aims to pressure-test industry assumptions, and ask whether the models that have defined the last decade are still applicable today.

“You can’t look at the pace of change in software this year and run the same conference you did last year,” said David Tyldesley, Co-Founder of SAAS NORTH. “We designed this year’s program so that every leader walks away with ideas and strategies they can put to work immediately.”

One of the clearest windows into the “Future-Proof” theme will be on the BetaKit Keynote Stage on November 5. Hot Tub Time Machine will feature Mallorie Brodie, CEO and co-founder of Bridgit, and Eldon Sprickerhoff, founder of eSentire. The session will rewind through the SaaS industry’s biggest moments before fast-forwarding into an AI-driven future. The session promises to be equal parts retrospective and raw.

From there, the focus shifts to the very model of SaaS itself. From SaaS to RaaS features Michael Litt, Vidyard founder and Garage Capital investor, exploring a future where customers no longer pay for the product but for results.

The Funding Game will also put a SAAS NORTH twist on a classic dating game. One investor takes the role of Bachelor or Bachelorette, while three founders vie for their attention.

On day two of the conference, the lens narrows on people. Work Rewired will bring leaders from Klue, Fellow.ai, Gadget, and Quest together to share how they’re building lean, AI-first organizations. The session addresses one of the most pressing founder questions: how to balance automation with culture as the way work itself changes.

And the story doesn’t stop with startups. On November 6, BetaKit’s Editor-in-Chief Douglas Soltys will sit down with Savinay Berry, Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer at OpenText, for a look at how one of Canada’s largest enterprises is going all in on AI and what it means to “future-proof” when the stakes are measured in billions.

Threaded through the program are the fault lines defining SaaS right now: the push and pull between human judgment and automation, the shift from subscription pricing to outcome-driven models, and the choice between rebuilding systems entirely or iterating in real time. 

SAAS NORTH has also long been a platform for war stories, and this year is no exception. JD Saint-Martin, President of Lightspeed, will pull back the curtain on scaling a SaaS business to $1 billion in annual recurring revenue, a milestone achieved by fewer than one in 10,000 companies.

In another session, Vitaly Pecherskiy, CEO and founder of StackAdapt, will share how his company deliberately sidestepped the hype cycle to quietly scale to $500 million in revenue.

And closing out the list of standouts, Kris Nicolaou, founder and CEO of Brain Box Labs, will deliver a keynote packed with tactical lessons from more than 20 years of building and refining product systems for clients, startups, and his own teams.

BetaKit is once again a proud media partner of SAAS NORTH, and as in years past, some of the conference’s most highly anticipated conversations will take place on the BetaKit Keynote Stage. For Litt, the value of the conference comes from the density of peers and rivals gathered in one place.

“SAAS NORTH is a really exciting conference,” he said. “I saw all the people I should be spending more time with that are my peers within the SaaS ecosystem. Whether they are investors, mentors, advisors, CEOs, founders, customers, everybody in Canada tends to be here.”

The conversations at SAAS NORTH rarely stay confined to the stage. Ideas tested in Ottawa next month will resurface in strategy decks, boardroom conversations, and in the sessions competitors reference long after the conference ends.

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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 Cube Business Media.