New Kroll report tracking 2,672 software deals shows growth rate drives valuation, but margins above 25% add nothing. Two companies with identical Rule of 40 scores trade 73% apart based on category alone. Engineering software gets 5.2x, HCM gets 3.0x, same growth and margin.
Issue-tracking platform Linear reports agents installed in 95% of paid workspaces, creating half of all work items versu...
Sales TechJason Lemkin's team deployed 20+ AI agents against their CRM and hit storage overages without touching the UI. Meanwhile...
Fintech giant Airwallex backed 10 Australian AI startups with $100k each through its Latitude 37 program. Equity-free funding, plus network access to a company doing $1.3bn in annualized revenue. Worth watching: what happens when fintech infrastructure players start acting like VCs.
Only seven public B2B software companies are growing faster than 30%. In 2021, that was the median. Five years later, the median is the 90th percentile. If you are running a $200M ARR company at 18% growth, you are not behind: you are the peer set.
Melbourne analytics startup Diversity Atlas ($6m), NSW clean energy player MGA Thermal ($5.7m), and NZ comms startup VXT (NZ$1.8m) led a mixed-stage funding week. Different sectors mean different GTM motions: enterprise analytics, deep-tech partner sales, and early SaaS distribution.
## Growth Premium Widened, Margin Premium Disappeared Kroll's Summer 2026 Global Software Sector Update tracked M&A and public comps through June 30. The headline: software companies growing above 20% trade at 7.2x forward revenue. Companies growing 10% to 20% get 4.1x. Below 10% gets 3.1x. The growth cliff got steeper. The margin premium vanished. Companies with EBITDA margins above 25% trade at the same median multiple as companies running 10% to 25%. Kroll's data shows no valuation benefit for profitability above 25%. The market pays for growth. Full stop. ## Rule of 40 Explains None of the Category Spread Engineering software and HCM both run a 46% Rule of 40. Engineering trades at 5.2x. HCM trades at 3.0x. That is a 73% premium for identical growth plus margin. Collaboration software and vertical SaaS both hit 42%. Collaboration gets 3.1x. Vertical gets 3.7x. Marketing and cybersecurity both run 38%. Marketing gets 2.1x. Cyber gets 5.2x. Category matters more than your operating metrics. Two explanations fit: either buyers pay for revenue durability (EDA and CAD have 20-year switching costs), or they are pricing which categories AI agents make more valuable versus which ones agents replace. ERP and supply chain trade at 6.5x. Customer experience trades at 1.8x. The lowest multiples sit in categories where the underlying work is most automatable. ## Deal Volume High, Deal Value Low Annualised 2026 M&A volume is 2,672 transactions, second-highest on record. Announced deal value annualises to $240 billion, but one transaction accounts for half: SpaceX bought Cursor for $60 billion. Excluding that, annualised deal value is $120 billion, near a decade low. 2021 did $429 billion. More companies are getting acquired than almost any year on record. The aggregate price paid is near the bottom of the range. If your banker has meetings but no term sheets, this is why. ## What This Means for Sales Orgs If you are selling into software companies, know that buyers are not optimising for Rule of 40 anymore. They are paying for growth and category position. A 15% grower in the right category gets better multiples than a 25% grower in the wrong one. For sales professionals evaluating equity comp: check which category your company gets comped against. That matters more than several points of growth or margin. Salesforce paid 9.5x for Fin inside a category that trades at 1.8x, because Fin got positioned as AI agents, not customer service software. The comp set your CFO picks is worth more than the quota your CRO sets.
## The storage bill arrived. Nobody was typing. SaaStr ran into Salesforce storage overages weeks after moving marketing data over. The humans hadn't logged into the CRM in a week. The culprit: AI agents writing task records, email metadata, enrichment data, and call logs around the clock. Data went from 5GB to 40GB in roughly 30 days. About 21 million records. Founder Jason Lemkin's take: "If you're deploying agents against your CRM, your storage line is going to move dramatically. And the storage costs are often much higher than you might expect." Worth noting: SaaStr is running lean, three humans with 20+ agents in production, and the agents reportedly "love Clay" for GTM data workflows. Clay, the $3.1B-valued data platform approaching $100M in revenue, is positioning itself as an AI-native operating layer for sales teams, competing with traditional sales engagement and RevOps tooling. ## The ServiceTitan-Podium split ServiceTitan cut off Podium's integration after nine years and roughly 1,000 shared customers. The issue: Podium went agentic, crossed nine figures in agent revenue, and started holding the customer record. What used to be a lead handoff partner was suddenly doing what ServiceTitan does. ServiceTitan gave 30 days' notice. Smaller competitors stayed on the platform. Lemkin's read: "If a customer talks to your agent on someone's website and that agent keeps them, the CRM underneath that interaction may not be needed at all." ## The Postgres question SaaStr asked Claude to estimate what 21 million records would cost on Postgres. The answer came back roughly a thousand times cheaper than Salesforce. On Neon, Supabase, or Databricks, 40GB is nothing. Lemkin's defence of staying on Salesforce: ten years of clean data, no drift, native integrations with Artisan and Qualified. "If it costs a few nickels more, fine. The question is what happens when it stops being nickels." ## What this means for RevOps Vendors are talking about raising API prices because customers buy fewer seats. That logic breaks when agent-generated data goes up 100x. A 20% API price increase becomes 200% or 2,000% when volume explodes. What that buys you: the customer puts the next 100GB somewhere else. The same architecture that makes Salesforce 10x more powerful through headless operation makes it 10x easier to split. An agent sitting on top of your API has no trouble sitting on top of three. For CROs evaluating AI agents inside Salesforce-centric stacks: watch your data volume projections, your API usage, and your storage overages. The meter is running whether you log in or not.
Linear disclosed that agents now create 50% of work items across its product management platform, up from 3% a year ago. The company shared the metric alongside news of a $99 million secondary tender at a $2.5 billion valuation. The number is composition, not growth rate. Half of the actual work going into Linear workspaces is now machine-generated. That happened in four quarters. For context, normal enterprise feature adoption moves from 3% to 15% over three years. Linear went to 50% in twelve months. Two caveats: Linear said "the share of work they create," not "50% of all issues," and we do not know if that is weighted by workspace or counted in aggregate. The 95% install rate across paid workspaces is an install metric, not an engagement metric. The 50% figure is usage. The cohort skews early adopter. OpenAI, Cursor, Cognition, and other AI-first companies run product development in Linear. These are the teams building agents and deploying them hardest internally. Your customers will get there later, but the direction is set. Linear also reported that issues with a pull request attached by engineering, product, or design grew sevenfold since January 2026. Work is not just being created by agents, it is being closed with code attached. Volume without completion is spam. Linear is tracking both. Atlassian reported that Jira work items generated through their MCP server are up nearly 4x quarter over quarter, with monthly active MCP users doubling to over 1 million. Growth rate off an undisclosed base. Atlassian has every incentive to publish composition if the number is good. They published growth instead. Atlassian also reported that 98% of MCP users were active in the Jira UI in the same month. The fear a year ago was that agents would consume the system through APIs and seat revenue would collapse. Instead, humans and agents are working the same records in the same system. MCP adopters expand paid seats faster and grow ARR at 2x the rate of non-adopters. **What this means for sales teams:** Workflow automation is not a roadmap item anymore. It is showing up in utilisation data inside tools your teams already use. Linear's metric is product and engineering work, but the pattern applies to sales workflows too. Track agent-created pipeline, agent-assisted follow-ups, and close rates on that volume. The first number can go up while your process gets worse. Measure completion, not just creation. Linear raised $134.2 million total, is cash-flow positive, and has more cash on hand than it has raised. The company is founder-led, with Karri Saarinen as CEO. No public CRO or ANZ presence identified, which suggests a lean GTM structure relative to its scale.
## The Deal Airwallex has funded 10 Australian AI startups with $100,000 each through Latitude 37, its new non-dilutive funding program. No equity taken. The cohort includes edtech (Polarbear AI), travel tech (SeatFinder), and robotics plays. Program includes SF and Singapore site visits, access to Airwallex's customer network, and investor intros. Co-founder Jack Zhang announced the initiative in April 2026. ## Why This Matters Airwallex is a $11 billion fintech, annualised revenue $1.3 billion as of March 2026, up 74% YoY. Transaction volume: $287 billion annualised. More than 90% of revenue now comes from multi-product customers, which signals strong cross-sell motion. The company is scaling hard: workforce at 3,119 globally as of March 2026, planning 50% headcount increase by end-2026. UK team growing 60% to 160+ staff. ANZ revenue up 93% YoY in 2024. ## Sales Context This is brand-building, not traditional venture returns. Airwallex is positioning itself as ecosystem player while hiring aggressively across markets. For sales professionals, the signal is expansion velocity: when a fintech this size is adding headcount 50% while funding external startups, they are building for scale. The cohort's diversity (edtech to robotics) suggests broad network-building rather than strategic product adjacency. Smart: exposure across sectors helps future enterprise conversations. ## The Cohort Polarbear AI: Melbourne edtech, VCE exam prep and ATAR estimation. Co-founders Haobo Zhang and Percy Ding, spun out of HZ Tutoring. SeatFinder: Flight seat aggregator from Yaroslava Kiseleva and Nicholas Van Hoorick, promising premium seats at economy prices. Eight other startups not detailed in announcement. ## Market Position Airwallex competes with Stripe, Wise, and Adyen but pitches as consolidated financial platform rather than point solution. The company's 90%+ multi-product revenue rate backs that positioning. For ANZ context: Despite global focus, local market remains strong growth engine with 93-115% YoY revenue increases reported across recent periods. Founded Melbourne 2015, now one of the region's most-funded fintechs at $1.8 billion total raised.
Seven public B2B software companies are growing faster than 30% annually: Palantir, Rubrik, Figma, Klaviyo, Snowflake, Shopify, and Samsara. That is not the top of the list. That is the list. Five years ago, the median SaaS company grew above 30%. The median became the 90th percentile in five years. If you are working at a $200M ARR company growing 18%, you are not underperforming. You are the peer group. ## What separates the seven Four of the seven do not charge by the seat. Palantir, Datadog, Cloudflare, and Snowflake bill against usage. When a customer runs more AI workloads, their bill goes up automatically. No seat expansion negotiation. No CFO approval for headcount growth. The AI boom flows through the pricing model without a sales cycle. Figma is the exception worth studying. It sells seats and grew 48% last quarter with 136% net dollar retention. The mechanism: it added a consumption layer on top of seats rather than replacing them. Customers expanded on both dimensions. One enterprise customer added 25,000 paid seats through an AI credit add-on. Gross margin fell five points year-on-year because Figma does not charge for products in beta. That is what the transition looks like from inside: accelerating top line, compressing margin, harder comps ahead. ## The cluster just below the line Atlassian, CrowdStrike, HubSpot, and Zscaler all missed the 30% mark by two to seven points. These are not struggling companies. They sit in a band that earns a 5.5x median revenue multiple, while sub-10% growth earns 1.9x and 10-20% growth earns 3.1x. A handful of points of growth is worth more than it has been in a decade. That delta affects your quota, your comp plan, and whether your territory gets carved up next quarter. ## Now look at the AI-native cohort Anthropic's revenue went up 14x year-on-year at multi-billion dollar scale, with positive adjusted operating income. Higgsfield crossed $500M annualised run rate in its first year of existence. In the AI-native cohort, 30% growth would be last place. The public market reset so hard that what used to be exceptional is now table stakes. If you are carrying a bag at a traditional B2B company, the benchmark just moved again.
Five ANZ startups raised $21.2 million this week, not two as initially reported. The funding spread across B2B software, clean energy, and communications platforms. ## The Breakdown **Diversity Atlas** (Melbourne) raised $6 million for its diversity and inclusion analytics platform. Enterprise and mid-market buyers. Competitive set: workplace analytics, HR tech, people-data platforms. Watch for AE hiring as they scale into larger accounts. **MGA Thermal** (NSW) closed $5.7 million, bringing total funding to $14 million for its thermal energy storage system. Industrial energy storage market. Long sales cycles, complex enterprise deals. Not a typical SDR-driven motion. **Sumday** (Tasmania) secured $5.3 million seed from Planeteer Capital, with Blackbird, Wedgetail, and Canva co-founder Cameron Adams participating. Accounting software for SMBs. Competitive against broader finance and bookkeeping platforms. Seed round typically means 2-4 sales hires in next 6 months. **VXT** (New Zealand) landed NZ$1.8 million pre-Series A for its business communications platform. Crowded space: cloud telephony, contact-centre software, collaboration tools. Pre-Series A usually signals first dedicated AE hire or small SDR team. ## What This Means for Sales B2B software rounds (Diversity Atlas, Sumday, VXT) are the relevant ones for sales hiring. Seed and pre-Series A stages typically add 3-6 sales roles total. Series A would mean 8-12. Diversity Atlas is the most interesting: $6m round in enterprise analytics usually funds 2-3 enterprise AEs and potentially an SDR team. Watch for Melbourne-based hiring in Q4 2024. Sumday's investor list (Blackbird, Canva connection) suggests they will scale aggressively. SMB sales motion means volume: expect SDR and inside sales roles. MGA Thermal and the fifth unnamed startup are less relevant for typical B2B sales roles given their industrial/infrastructure focus. ## The Reality Check Funding does not equal hiring timeline. Most startups wait 60-90 days post-close to open sales roles. Comp at seed/pre-Series A stage typically runs 10-15% below market rate, offset by equity (which may or may not matter). Worth noting: ANZ startup sales roles often list "competitive OTE" without numbers. If these companies are serious about scaling, they will post real comp data.
Online retail up 13% YoY and you're still pitching digital transformation like it's 2019.
Online retail is up 13% year-over-year, which sounds great until you realise every retailer now has budget for their own tech stack instead of yours.
Half of ANZ tech sales reps are working without proper commission documentation, and that legal settlement just proved why that's about to cost you.