Service-as-a-Software
The one thing you need to know in AI today | AI-Ready CMO
Y Combinator just dropped its summer 2026 Request for Startups. We covered the spring edition in February — AI-native agencies operating at software margins. Every CMO has had the agency-margin conversation by now. If you haven’t, well…
The summer RFS goes one layer deeper and deserves a new acronym because the old one no longer means what it used to.
For 20 years, SaaS meant Software-as-a-Service. You paid for a subscription. You got access to a tool. Your team did the work inside that tool.
YC just funded the inversion: Service-as-a-Software. You pay a subscription. You get the outcome. Nobody on your team does the work — because the service itself is now the product. Plug-and-play workforce is the endgame.
The summer RFS describes the three layers that make this possible:
Layer 1 — Company Brain. Extract tribal knowledge from people’s heads, Slack threads, tickets, and old emails. Structure it. Keep it current. Make it executable. Any startup that builds solutions for a company brain w…