Luke Sophinos

Sophinos founded CourseKey, a vertical SaaS company providing software for trade schools that was later renamed Portico, in his college dorm room. He recalled that the company grew from its dorm-room beginnings into a venture-backed business with close to 100 employees.⁠[1][1][2][2][3]

In 2015, Sophinos attended the annual Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry summit in San Francisco as one of the “final 50” candidates. The two-year program gives young people $100,000 to drop out of college and build a business. He recalled that during the summit he and 11 other candidates were stuck in an elevator in the Founders Fund office building for about an hour. In 2016, he formally became a Thiel Fellow.⁠[4][4][4][4][5]

Around 2020, Sophinos founded Linear, a weekly email newsletter for the vertical software industry that shares, for free, his learnings from founding, operating, and scaling in vertical SaaS. He said that at the time there was no email newsletter dedicated to vertical software.⁠[5][3][3][3]

On January 7, 2025, growth equity firm PSG announced a strategic growth investment in CourseKey and combined it with two vocational education software companies PSG had previously invested in, a provider of customer relationship management and student information systems and Campus Ivy, a provider of financial aid software and services, into a unified software suite. CourseKey’s products are a mobile app for vocational school students and a retention platform for schools, which automates attendance through GPS, sound, and biometric verification. Sophinos, then CEO, said joining PSG would help build a one-stop shop software suite for vocational schools.⁠[6][6][6][6][6][6][6][6][6]

Sophinos wrote that he had pitched PSG on the idea of rolling up the trade school software space. Looking back, he noted that CourseKey served hundreds of enterprise customers, including Paul Mitchell, Lincoln Tech, and Legacy Education; the company went through two big headcount reductions (one of which took it from nearly 100 to 40 employees), had its money locked up in Silicon Valley Bank during the 2023 bank run, lost key customers and co-founders, and at one point had less than 30 days of runway. He said he had sold the company to PSG and is now an advisor and small shareholder.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1][1][1][2]

On April 21, 2025, Sophinos announced that he would hold the Vertical Software Summit, an event for vertical software founders, operators, and investors capped at around 200 people, in Miami in October of that year.⁠[5][5][5]

On August 4, 2025, in issue 136 of Linear, Sophinos argued that venture capital is good at betting on the technological frontier, which paves the way for the next wave of opportunities. Using the internet, mobile, cloud, and AI eras as examples, he wrote that in each technology shift VCs first invest in infrastructure (such as Cisco and AOL in the internet era), and once the infrastructure is stable an “app-layer flip” follows (such as Amazon, Google, and eBay), with the infrastructure layer usually producing far fewer winners than the app layer.⁠[7][7][7][7][7][7][7][7][7]

He argued that the AI era is shifting from the infrastructure phase to the app layer and that the next two to three years will see large, industry-specific vertical AI app companies emerge.⁠[7][7]

As of October 2026, Sophinos is an operating partner at the venture studio Atomic, where he co-founds vertical AI, vertical software, and AI roll-up businesses: identifying underserved markets, building early products, proving the company thesis, and recruiting management teams. He said he had co-founded two vertical software companies with Atomic, both still in stealth.⁠[8][8][2]

As an angel investor, he has also invested in about 20 vertical SaaS companies, including Joy for the wedding industry, Supermove for moving companies, Gemist for jewelry stores, and the sports betting company Betr. The Vertical SaaS Group he founded is a community for vertical software and vertical AI founders, operators, and investors, offering case studies, the Linear newsletter, a podcast, workshops, and an annual summit.⁠[2][2][9][9]

Vertical SaaS Group: Official website: https://verticalsaasgroup.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[9]

Linear newsletter: The vertical software email newsletter he edits: https://www.newsletter.lukesophinos.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[2]

X: Public account: https://x.com/lukesophinos (opens in a new window)⁠[2]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukesophinos/ (opens in a new window)⁠[2]