Nicolas Bustamante

A founder who built two vertical SaaS companies — one in legal, one in finance competing with Bloomberg — argues that LLMs are systematically destroying the moats that made vertical software defensible: learned interfaces, custom business logic, and data parsing infrastructure. The $1 trillion selloff in software stocks is structurally justified because these moats were largely artificial value layered on top of genuinely scarce data. What survives is narrower: proprietary data, compliance infrastructure, and workflow orchestration at scale.

Nicolas Bustamante shares hard-won lessons from two years building Fintool, an AI agent platform achieving 97% accuracy on financial benchmarks with clients like PwC and Kennedy Capital. The core insight: regulated industries require fundamentally different architectural choices — in context management, tool design, and evaluation — not just more capable models. The gap between a compelling AI demo and a production-ready system is measurably wider in financial services.