The Wire

Real-time updates from ANZ tech sales

3 months ago
News

Airwallex hits $16B valuation, $460M Series H while AUSTRAC investigates

## The Numbers Airwallex closed a $460 million Series H led by Addition, valuing the Melbourne-founded fintech at $16 billion. That is a 37% jump from its $8 billion valuation in December 2025. Revenue sits at $1.3 billion ARR, up 74% from last year. The company processed over $130 billion in transactions across 150,000 customers including TikTok, Canva, and Deel. More than 90% of revenue now comes from customers using multiple Airwallex products. ## The AUSTRAC Problem The raise lands while AUSTRAC investigates Airwallex for potential failures to comply with anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing laws. AUSTRAC appointed an external auditor in late 2025 to review the company's compliance programme. Airwallex has not publicly disclosed the investigation's impact on sales operations or enterprise deal cycles. Worth noting: regulatory scrutiny typically extends sales cycles for financial infrastructure deals, particularly in banking and government sectors. ## What This Means for Sales Teams Airwallex has raised $1.2 billion total across 14 rounds. The company employs approximately 2,000 people globally across Singapore (HQ), San Francisco (co-HQ), Melbourne, and other markets. Specific sales team size and ANZ headcount are not publicly disclosed. The company emphasises enterprise sales in ANZ, North America, and Europe but has not announced hiring targets tied to this round. For sales professionals evaluating fintech roles: Airwallex competes with Wise, Stripe, PayPal, and Revolut. The company positions itself as API-driven financial infrastructure for businesses, not consumer payments. Customer base skews enterprise and mid-market, which typically means longer sales cycles but higher ACV. ## The AI Play Funding goes toward AI-based product development and expanding into new markets. CEO Jack Zhang is betting on autonomous finance and agentic commerce products. Addition's Lee Fixel said the winners in AI-driven finance will be companies building on real infrastructure, not around it. Airwallex holds banking licences via acquisitions and positions itself as a borderless financial platform. The valuation reflects strong retention and product diversification beyond cross-border payments into treasury, corporate cards, and embedded finance. ## Market Context Airwallex is Australia's third tech unicorn. The company went from $5.5 billion (October 2022) to $16 billion in under four years. Backers include Sequoia Capital China, Square Peg Capital, Mastercard, ANZ Bank, Tencent, and Salesforce Ventures. No IPO timeline has been disclosed. At $16 billion, the company sits well above typical IPO valuation thresholds, but regulatory scrutiny and market conditions will dictate timing.

Startup Daily
3 months ago
News

Benchmark GP: First $1M now harder than next $99M in AI sales

## The Inversion Benchmark Capital GP Chetan Puttagunta laid out a counterintuitive reality for AI sales: scaling from $1M to $100M ARR has never been faster, but reaching that first million now takes longer than it did in the cloud era. The firm, which limits itself to 10 investments per year from a $4.8 billion fund, is seeing portfolio companies compress traditional 180-day enterprise sales cycles into 30 days. One legal AI company, Legora, went from $1M to $100M ARR in 18 months. Another, Manus, hit $100M in eight months. But those wins required longer upfront work. Legora spent over a year embedded inside a law firm before they had anything to sell. ## What Changed Puttagunta's thesis: when code becomes cheap, the moat moves to everything that is not code. Customer research, trust building, and last-mile implementation work now define defensibility. The product itself is table stakes. This shifts the sales motion. Product-led growth, the darling of the 2020s, is giving way to direct sales and forward-deployed engineers. AI companies are hiring sales teams earlier and bigger than their SaaS predecessors. The math: legal services represent a $1 trillion market. Legal software is $40 billion. AI companies are selling into the services budget, not the software line. That requires different conversations, longer pilots, and more handholding. It also means bigger deal sizes and faster expansion once you land the account. ## The Playbook Benchmark-backed companies are collapsing sales cycles through tightly scoped pilots and what Puttagunta calls "magical demos." Show immediate value, prove it in production, then expand. One AI app purchase triggers enterprise buyers to evaluate 100 more. The firm is looking for founders with technical insight that creates demand pull. Not just a better mousetrap, but a solution to a problem the market did not know it could solve. For sales teams at AI startups: expect to hire earlier, staff heavier, and spend more time on implementation than you did in SaaS. The first deal takes forever. The next 99 happen fast. ## What This Means If you are building or selling at an AI startup, the old SaaS ramp timelines do not apply. Quota relief periods might stretch longer early on, but attainment curves get steeper once product-market fit hits. Comp structures need to account for this: lower quotas in year one, aggressive acceleration once the motion proves out. Benchmark launched its first growth fund ($2 billion) to follow winners past Series B. That capital is chasing companies with proven sales motions, not just impressive demos. The window for AI-native startups to build dominant positions is open, but it is not infinite. Incumbents are moving fast. For sales professionals evaluating AI startup offers: ask how long the company spent with customers before launching, what the pilot-to-paid conversion rate looks like, and whether forward-deployed roles exist. Those signals matter more than the tech stack.

Sales Hacker
3 months ago
News

Airspeed raises $20M Series A, 200 customers, no CRO yet

## The Numbers Airspeed closed a $20M Series A led by DN Capital, with participation from Vi Partners, Framework Venture Partners, and Atlassian Ventures. Total funding now sits above $25M. The company serves 200 customers across 20 countries. ## What They Built CEO Adam Liska and co-founder Devang Chong left DeepMind's Gemini team in 2022 to build what they call a sales execution layer: AI agents that update CRM records, flag deal risks, and generate follow-ups without waiting for humans to trigger them. The platform pulls from calls, emails, tickets, and CRM systems to act in real time. Their thesis: the gap between knowing what to do in a deal and actually doing it is where most pipeline dies. They call it the execution gap. "I'll follow up on that" is how deals go quiet, forecasts stay inflated, and quota gets missed. ## The Team Liska and Chong co-founded with Ken Chong and Matt Sawchuk, who scaled Uber Eats from $0 to $6B GMV. That is strong GTM experience at the founding level. What is missing: public disclosure of a CRO or VP Sales. The sales org is early. First hires, first funding rounds under the original name (Glyphic), then a rebrand to Airspeed on May 20, 2026, five weeks before the Series A announcement. ## The Market Position Airspeed competes indirectly with CRM automation and GTM platforms like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Gong, but positions as proactive rather than reactive. Instead of waiting for reps to log activity or managers to review calls, the AI acts autonomously. It is a sales execution platform, not a sales enablement platform. Execution means it does the work. Enablement means it gives reps tools to do the work. For sales ops teams evaluating alternatives to Salesforce or looking at execution layer software, Airspeed is positioning as the agent-native option. The market is crowded with sales operations software, but most tools still require human triggers. Airspeed's bet is that autonomous agents change the workflow entirely. ## What This Means Series A with 200 customers and no disclosed sales leadership suggests strong product-led or founder-led growth. The next 12 months will show whether they can scale with a formal sales org or if they stay lean and agent-native in their own go-to-market motion. Either way, $20M buys time to figure it out. For AEs and SDRs: this is another signal that execution layer tools are a real category now. If your CRM feels like data entry instead of a system that acts on your behalf, that gap is what these platforms are solving for. Whether Airspeed or a competitor wins, the shift from manual to autonomous is already happening.

Sales Hacker
3 months ago
News

July 1: Payday super, AML expansion hit every Australian business

## What changed From July 1 2026, Australian businesses face four major shifts: **Payday super:** Employers pay superannuation contributions with each pay run, not quarterly. This affects cashflow for every business with employees. The quarterly buffer is gone. **AML/CTF Tranche 2:** Anti-money laundering laws now cover thousands more businesses. Accountants, bookkeepers, lawyers, and real estate agents become designated services under the AML/CTF regime. AUSTRAC transitional rules give some breathing room, but compliance programs are mandatory. **Minimum wage up 4.75%:** Base rates rise across Modern Awards. For sales teams with SDRs or junior AEs near award wages, comp just increased. **Instant asset write-off permanent:** Small businesses (under $10M turnover) can immediately deduct assets up to $20,000. Previously temporary, now permanent. Saves an estimated $32M annually in compliance costs across small business. ## What it means for sales teams If you are hiring: factor payday super into cashflow. Onboarding three SDRs at $80k base means paying super fortnightly, not in arrears. If you sell to accountants, lawyers, or real estate: your buyers just got hit with AML compliance requirements. Expect longer sales cycles while they build compliance programs. AUSTRAC guidance says designated services need risk assessments, monitoring, and reporting. That is budget and headcount. If you are in fintech, regtech, or compliance software: your TAM just expanded. Every newly designated service needs tooling. ## The comp angle Minimum wage rises flow through to award-based roles. If your SDR comp sits near Modern Award rates, check if July increases affect your base. Some orgs discover their "market rate" OTE was actually tied to award minimums. Parental leave extends to 26 weeks (four weeks use-it-or-lose-it per parent). Matters for retention, especially in growth-stage teams burning through new parents. ## Other changes Small Business Super Clearing House shuts down. Move to commercial platforms. SMS Sender ID registration mandatory (anti-scam). If your SDRs send bulk texts, compliance applies. Seafood country-of-origin labelling required in hospitality. Niche, but if you sell into food service, your buyers care. Division 296 super tax starts: 15% on super earnings above $3M balance. Affects high earners hitting President's Club repeatedly. ## Worth noting These are not optional. Payday super non-compliance carries penalties up to 200% under the new Superannuation Guarantee Charge regime. AML breaches can mean serious financial and criminal penalties under AUSTRAC rules. The government estimates these reforms affect over 13 million Australian workers. If you employ people, sell B2B in ANZ, or operate in newly regulated sectors, July 1 2026 is a hard deadline. Plan accordingly. Update payroll, brief finance, and if you sell compliance or HR tech, start prospecting the newly designated services.

SmartCompany
3 months ago
News

ANZ businesses risk 'Unverified' SMS label from July 1 without sender ID registration

## What's Changing From July 1, 2026, any business text sent with a branded sender ID (like 'JoesPlumbing' instead of a phone number) must be registered with ACMA's SMS Sender ID Register. Unregistered messages will appear as 'Unverified' and get grouped with suspected scam texts. If you send booking confirmations, appointment reminders, delivery updates, or outreach texts under your business name, this applies to you. Messages sent from standard phone numbers without branded IDs are exempt. ## Why Sales Teams Should Care If your team uses SMS for prospecting, follow-ups, or customer communication, an 'Unverified' label kills open rates. Customers will assume it's spam. Legitimate appointment reminders get deleted. Confirmation texts go unread. Worse: applications are already backlogged. Register now and you might still be pending on July 1, meaning your texts get flagged while you wait for approval. ## How to Register Contact your telco or messaging provider to register each sender ID you use. If you send messages through a platform (Salesforce, HubSpot, booking software), clarify who owns registration: you or the platform. Direct registration with ACMA requires an active ABN and proof of brand or domain ownership. Common delays: outdated ABR details like wrong addresses or former directors still listed. Fix those before applying. ## What This Means for Your Process If your sales process relies on SMS, audit every branded sender ID your team uses. Register each one. If you use third-party tools for texting, confirm registration status with the vendor. Messages from unregistered IDs will still send, they will just look like scams. That is not a compliance risk, it is a conversion risk. ## The Bigger Picture This is part of Australia's anti-scam push. Scammers impersonate real businesses with fake sender IDs. ACMA's fix: make businesses prove they own the sender ID they use. For sales teams, it is one more compliance box. For customers, it is supposed to mean fewer scam texts. For your pipeline, it means register now or watch your SMS open rates drop. Participating telcos are listed on ACMA's site. If you receive an 'Unverified' text after July 1, verify the sender through official channels before clicking anything. Report suspected scams to 7226 or Scamwatch.

SmartCompany
3 months ago
News

Adobe defers $500M price increase, first major crack in B2B pricing power

Adobe just did something no major B2B software company has done in four years: it voluntarily deferred a price increase. Not delayed a launch, not softened a tier. Pulled a $500M ARR lever it has pulled like clockwork since 2022. ## The numbers Adobe posted strong Q2 FY2026 results: $6.62B revenue (up 13%), $5.96 non-GAAP EPS (up 18%), and $27.1B total ARR (up 12.5%). Firefly ARR is approaching $300M, growing 50% quarter over quarter. AI-first ARR across the company hit $500M, up 3x year over year. The stock still dropped 38% year to date. The market is not reacting to the quarter. It is reacting to what the deferral reveals. ## What changed Adobe's official line: we are trading near-term ARR for a freemium land grab. Get hundreds of millions of users in for free, convert them later. The Adobe Reader playbook for Firefly and Express. The real story: Adobe's pricing power has bifurcated. At the enterprise tier, the moat holds. The company is still pushing 8-12% increases on multi-year ETLA deals, capturing full 2025 list price on renewals. Named wins include SAP, ServiceNow, Workday, Coca-Cola, Merck. At the prosumer and SMB tier, the moat is weaker. That is where the price increase got deferred. Canva hit $4B ARR growing 30%. Figma is at $1.2B growing 40%. Canva made Affinity free. The bundle now does Creative Cloud's job for $15/month against Adobe's $55+. William Blair downgraded Adobe to Market Perform in March on exactly this thesis. When you defer a price increase, you are admitting that raising it would accelerate defection. ## What this means for B2B sales For four years, the B2B playbook has been identical: raise prices every 12-18 months, add an AI SKU, push net revenue retention above 110%. Customers grumbled and paid because where else were they going to go. Adobe breaking from that script matters. If the most pricing-powerful company in SaaS is walking away from $500M because the substitutes are credible, every VP Sales running a 2025 pricing strategy needs to check their competitive math. The bifurcation is the tell. Enterprise pricing power holds when switching costs are real and workflows are locked in. Prosumer and SMB pricing power collapses when good-enough alternatives show up at a quarter of the price. Adobe now trades at 14x forward earnings, the lowest multiple in a decade. The market has priced in disruption. Whether the freemium conversion works is a different bet. What matters for sales teams: the playbook that worked since 2022 just hit its first major crack. ## For ANZ sales teams Adobe maintains significant ANZ presence in enterprise sales and account management. If you are carrying Creative Cloud quota in enterprise, your pricing holds. If you are working prosumer or SMB, watch the Canva comparison closely. It is the same competitive pressure playing out locally. Worth noting: negotiation leverage on SaaS renewals just shifted. If Adobe is deferring increases, your enterprise customers will reference it. Have the bifurcation story ready, know where your product sits on the switching cost curve, and be prepared to defend your 2025 pricing with actual competitive math, not just "we always raise 10%."

SaaStr
3 months ago
News

Indeed data: AI job displacement not happening yet, productivity gains unclear

## The Numbers Indeed's Hiring Lab data shows AI mentions in job postings are climbing, but the predicted mass displacement is not showing up in ANZ labour markets. Graduate job ads dropped 24% in Australia in 2024, though Indeed attributes this to broader economic conditions rather than AI replacement. Globally, Indeed's research found 19.8% of US jobs are "highly exposed" to full automation. The rest are augmentation plays, not replacement. ## What Indeed's Economist Actually Said Callam Pickering, Indeed's senior economist, speaking at a Canberra government hiring event: "I probably doubt AI a little bit more than most in terms of where I think it can get us. I think there will be productivity gains at some point. But the implementation needs to be broad-based." He is sceptical the Reserve Bank's productivity rebound predictions will land. They have been wrong three years running. ## What This Means for Sales Teams The conversation around AI replacing SDRs and AEs is still mostly conversation. Job markets are not reflecting mass displacement yet. That said: **Entry-level roles** are seeing hiring slowdowns, though economic conditions are doing more damage than AI right now. If you are managing an SDR team, the pressure is coming from budget cuts, not bot replacements. **Skills gap is real:** Companies are posting AI-skilled roles, but most sales orgs are still figuring out how to use the tools they already have. Knowing how to use AI for prospecting, email generation, or pipeline analysis is becoming table stakes, not a nice-to-have. **Comp impact:** No evidence yet that AI is compressing OTEs or changing sales comp structures in ANZ. When that shifts, we will cover it with real numbers. ## Context Worth Noting Indeed processes 53 million job postings globally. They have a Melbourne office and significant ANZ presence, so this data is local, not just US projections. The company is owned by Japan's Recruit Holdings (acquired 2016 for $1.2 billion) and generates over $2.5 billion annually. Pickering's take is worth listening to because Indeed's data is closer to hiring reality than most AI hype pieces. When the job market actually shifts, they will see it first. **Bottom line:** AI is not replacing sales jobs at scale. Yet. But if you are not learning how to use AI tools in your workflow, you are behind the reps who are.

SmartCompany
3 months ago
News

PayPal AI SDR hits 8,000 leads monthly, conversions up 50% in 14 weeks

## The Setup PayPal turned on an Agentforce AI SDR agent 14 weeks before SaaStr AI 2026. It is fully in production today across a 200-rep org. Meeting conversion is running about 50% higher than what the humans were doing alone. Eitan Saban, Head of Sales for North America Mid Market at PayPal, shared the specifics at SaaStr AI 2026. PayPal onboards north of 100,000 merchants monthly. A chunk of them stop processing mid-journey. That leaves roughly 8,000 leads to chase every month. No sales org has the capacity to work 8,000 nudge cycles monthly, so those merchants just got dropped. The agent runs a 10-nudge cadence against every single one. It does not get tired. It does not skip weekends. It does not cherry-pick the fattest commission. The win is not the agent closing the deal. The win is the agent doing the heavy lifting to book the meeting, so a human shows up with full context already loaded. The conversion lift comes from that handoff. Reps start way further down the funnel, on a qualified lead, with the full story already in front of them. ## The Data Reality Adam Alfano, President at Salesforce, was direct: do not try to solve world hunger on your data before you turn an agent on. Salesforce runs its SDR agent at 70% deliverability, which is better than its human reps. The agent has an understanding of a well-curated data environment. Most companies are not there yet, and that is fine. You can stand up a web agent that understands your website, your FAQs, and your product data while you are still consolidating everything else. It still has a safe, accurate conversation. Using the agent is itself the fastest way to figure out what data and structure you actually need. ## The ANZ Angle PayPal maintains significant ANZ operations as part of its international expansion. The company generates over $33.7 billion in revenue, with transaction-based revenues accounting for more than 90% of total income. The AI-driven scaling effort reflects a strategic shift toward AI-powered sales agents to handle large lead volumes efficiently across global markets, including Australia and New Zealand. PayPal feeds the Agentforce agent every conversation from Gong and the transcripts behind them, plus account data hosted in Seismic. The agent learns exactly why deals were lost and what drove lower conversion. ## What This Means This is not a pilot. This is a massive, regulated, global payments company putting agents on real pipeline and watching the conversion math move in one quarter. The agents are not replacing reps. They are feeding them. The real unlock is headless: the CRM becomes tooling your agents execute against, not a place humans go to fill in fields. Worth noting: PayPal did not deploy agents to cut headcount. They deployed them to work the leads no human was ever going to touch. The 200-rep org is intact. The pipeline just got a lot bigger.

SaaStr
3 months ago
News

Gilmour Space adds ex-NASA deputy Pam Melroy to board after $217M raise

## Board Appointment Follows Unicorn Round Gilmour Space Technologies added Pamela Melroy, former NASA deputy administrator and retired US Air Force Colonel, to its board. Melroy commanded two Space Shuttle missions and brings 30+ years of aerospace leadership across civil, defence, and commercial sectors. The appointment follows Gilmour's $217 million Series E in early 2026, jointly led by the National Reconstruction Fund ($75 million) and superannuation fund Hostplus. The round valued the company at $1 billion, making it ANZ's first rocket unicorn. Gilmour Space, founded by brothers Adam and James Gilmour in 2013, builds Australia's first integrated launch and satellite capability. The company operates from Yatala, Queensland, with a licensed orbital spaceport in Bowen, North Queensland. Its 23-metre Eris orbital rocket made its first launch attempt in July 2025. ## What This Means For Sales Teams Aerospace companies typically scale government and defence business development roles alongside engineering headcount. Gilmour has not publicly disclosed its commercial team structure, sales leadership, or quota attainment metrics. The Series E funding is earmarked for rocket development, satellite manufacturing scale-up, and spaceport expansion. That usually translates to enterprise sales hires for government contracts and commercial launch services, but Gilmour has not announced specific role counts or compensation bands. Former Citibank executive Paco Ybarra also joined the board as director, suggesting a focus on institutional partnerships and commercial expansion. ## ANZ Aerospace Sales Context Australia's space sector remains small compared to US defence contractors, but government investment is increasing. The National Reconstruction Fund's $75 million stake signals federal support for sovereign space capability. Sales professionals considering aerospace roles should note: long sales cycles (12-24+ months for government contracts), technical product knowledge requirements, and security clearance needs for defence work. Compensation data for ANZ aerospace sales roles is limited, but typically tracks below US defence contractor rates. Gilmour Space is backed by Blackbird and multiple Australian superannuation funds. The company has not disclosed whether it is hiring sales roles or what that compensation looks like.

Startup Daily
3 months ago
News

Sydney health firm faces court over sales reps posing as doctors

# Sydney health firm faces court over sales reps posing as doctors The ACCC has filed Federal Court proceedings against Miyagi Pty Ltd, a Sydney-based health and wellness company, alleging its sales team posed as medical professionals to sell programs costing up to $7,500. Between 2022 and 2025, the company allegedly directed unqualified staff to use scripted language designed to sound like medical advice. "In my professional opinion, with your [disease], it's safe to say that you're at risk of things getting worse," sales reps reportedly told customers. Over 6,000 Australians with health conditions including heart disease, menopause, and obesity were targeted. The programs ran 6 to 18 months and required upfront payment or payment plans. ## What the sales team was told to do Miyagi promoted free phone consultations via social media, then allegedly used fear-based messaging to drive enrollment. The ACCC claims staff followed the same script regardless of customer condition, falsely positioning themselves as qualified to provide medical opinions. The watchdog also alleges Miyagi used unfair contract terms and refused refunds to customers attempting to exit programs. "We are extremely concerned that consumers, including many with complex health conditions, signed up to Miyagi's program on a false premise," said ACCC Commissioner Luke Woodward. "Many consumers were left significantly out of pocket." ## What this means for sales compliance The case highlights liability risks when sales scripts misrepresent credentials or expertise. In Australia, misrepresentation carries penalties under consumer law, separate from industry-specific regulations around health claims. For sales teams in regulated sectors: scripts matter. If your team is positioned as advisors, consultants, or specialists without the qualifications to back it up, you are creating legal exposure for the business and yourself. Miyagi operated with what appears to be a significant sales operation, given the scale of affected customers, though exact headcount is not public. The company may have U.S. ties through a Delaware entity called Miyagi Health USA, suggesting multi-jurisdiction operations. The Federal Court proceedings are ongoing. Worth noting: the ACCC does not bring cases it expects to lose.

SmartCompany
3 months ago
News

SaaStr runs 21 AI agents in production, revenue swings 66 points YoY

## SaaStr Runs 21 AI Agents, Learns What Breaks in Production Jason Lemkin's SaaStr is running 21+ AI agents across sales, marketing, and finance operations. Revenue moved from -19% to +47% year-over-year. Episode 007 of *The Agents* podcast covers what broke, what worked, and what that means if you are deploying AI agents in your own go-to-market motion. ### Over-Guardrailing Kills Performance SaaStr runs a free VC pitch deck grader at saastr.ai. It has processed 4,600+ decks. During their recent SaaStr AI Annual event (10,000 attendees), the agent started failing 88 of 305 submissions and handing out F grades to 53% of completed decks. The cause: 14 accumulated guardrails. Each rule was added to fix a specific error (pulling projections instead of current ARR, misreading TAM numbers). By the 14th exception, every deck triggered multiple conflicts. Ambiguity defaulted to "no data," which stored zeros, which collapsed all scores to F. The fix: scrap most rules and rebuild. The lesson: guardrails past a threshold become technical debt that breaks the product. ### Same Spec, Different Platform, Different Agent SaaStr rebuilt their AI VP of Marketing (called "10K") on Lovable using the same spec that ran on Replit for months. Same data sources, same APIs, same instructions. The agents behave differently. The Replit version returns three ideas and structures them like a B2C performance marketer (motivation, channel, audience, success criteria). The Lovable version ("10K Prime") returns four ideas and is more aggressive: it recommended paid LinkedIn ads targeting GTM leaders and a flash sale, which the Replit version never suggested. Two platforms, one spec, two personalities. The platform shapes agent behavior as much as your instructions. ### AI VP of Finance Built Inside AI VP of Marketing SaaStr planned a standalone AI VP of Finance for collections and cash visibility. Instead, they built it inside their existing AI VP of Marketing (10K). Why it worked: 10K already had access to Salesforce (closed deals), Stripe (daily ticket sales), YoY data, projections, and historical financials. A clean finance agent would have started blind. The merged agent had full context from day one. You would not make your VP of Marketing your VP of Finance in real life. In agent land, context matters more than org chart logic. ### Agent Negotiated a Vendor Renewal One SaaStr agent took over a software renewal negotiation. The vendor did not love it. Lemkin did not elaborate on the outcome, but the fact that they let it run is the story: AI agents are moving from lead gen and SDR automation into account management and renewals. This is the shift. AI SDRs and AI AEs were the first wave. AI agents for customer success, renewals, and retention automation are the next. If your CS team is not experimenting with this, someone else's is. ### What This Means for ANZ Sales Teams AI sales agents are moving past the hype phase. SaaStr is not a vendor selling AI SDR software. They are a media company running agents in production and reporting what breaks. That makes this data more useful than most vendor case studies. If you are deploying AI agents for outbound, lead generation, or account management, the lessons are: - Guardrails accumulate silently and can strangle performance - Platform choice affects agent behavior more than you expect - Context beats clean separation: merge agents if it gets them better data - AI agents are already handling renewals, not just top-of-funnel The revenue swing (from -19% to +47% YoY) is not broken out by agent contribution vs. other factors, but the fact that they are running 21+ agents in production while most companies are still piloting one is the real signal. AI sales automation is no longer speculative. It is in production, breaking things, and getting fixed. If your team is not testing this, you are behind.

SaaStr
4 months ago
News

Ovum closes $4m seed, triples valuation: pre-revenue femtech in hiring mode

## Ovum closes $4m seed, triples valuation: pre-revenue femtech in hiring mode Ovum, an Australia-based femtech startup, closed $4 million in seed funding and tripled its valuation. The round was led by Admiralty Capital Group, with participation from Antler, Giant Leap, Brisbane Angels, and LaunchVic's Alice Anderson Fund. The company raised $1.7 million in pre-seed funding two years ago. Worth noting: Ovum is still pre-revenue. Founded by Dr Ariella Heffernan-Marks in 2022, Ovum is building an AI-powered women's health platform. The product tracks symptoms, provides personalised insights, and connects users with telehealth. Planned pricing sits at $180 per year, suggesting a consumer subscription model rather than enterprise SaaS. The company already has health fund and corporate partnerships in place, according to VentureCrowd. That is solid early traction for a pre-revenue business, but the real test comes when they start converting partnerships into recurring revenue. ### What this means for sales hiring Ovum says the funding will support "team growth," but no specifics on sales roles, headcount targets, or commercial leadership appointments were disclosed. For a pre-revenue startup moving into go-to-market, that hire usually comes next. The femtech space has seen increased investment activity across ANZ and remote roles. Companies in women's health are hiring for medical device sales, account management, and SDR positions, particularly in remote-friendly structures. Ovum's partnership-first approach suggests they may be building a channel or partnership sales motion rather than a traditional outbound team. ### Market context The $180 annual price point puts Ovum in direct competition with other digital health platforms targeting women. The differentiation play is AI-driven insights and a holistic health focus rather than single-condition tracking. Pre-revenue at seed is not unusual in health tech, where regulatory pathways and partnership cycles extend time to first dollar. The question for any sales professional watching this space: when do they hire commercial leadership, and what does that comp package look like? For now, Ovum is a company to watch if you are tracking femtech sales opportunities in ANZ. Team growth is coming. The real story will be what roles they open and what the OTE looks like when they do.

SmartCompany
4 months ago
News

SaaStr's Lemkin: 90% of VP candidates fail one question

# SaaStr's Lemkin: 90% of VP candidates fail one question Jason Lemkin, founder of SaaStr and investor in nearly $90m of B2B software deals, has a straightforward executive hiring filter. After a VP+ candidate completes 8 to 10 interviews with the team, Lemkin asks: 'Tell me what you've learned.' More than 90% cannot answer it well. They can repeat the pitch deck. They say the company is exciting. They liked the CEO. But they cannot articulate the real risks, the unit economics, the burn rate, or the retention numbers. After 10 meetings, they have vibes. Not knowledge. 'If you're not curious enough to learn the business in 10 interviews, how will you run it?' Lemkin wrote. ## What the question filters for The best candidates reverse-engineer the revenue model from the pricing page. They ask about churn in every conversation. They talk to customers unprompted. They figure out where the org chart has gaps. They brief Lemkin on the state of the company. That is maybe 1 in 10. Lemkin's view reflects a broader SaaS hiring standard: executive candidates must demonstrate market insight, risk awareness, and commercial judgment, not just enthusiasm. The question is not trivia. It tests whether a candidate digs past the sell job to understand the business they are betting their career on. ## The training programme story Early at one fast-growing startup, a candidate kept mentioning a 'really extensive training programme.' Lemkin asked if the candidate knew what the programme looked like at a six-person company. The candidate did not know. There was no training programme. That candidate had done 10 interviews without surfacing the most basic operational reality. 'A VP or CRO who joins without having seen the board pack, without knowing the real retention numbers, without understanding the actual stage of the company... that tells you how they'll operate once they're in the seat,' Lemkin said. ## Why it matters for ANZ sales teams Lemkin's philosophy aligns with his broader view that a VP Sales should join after a repeatable sales process exists, not before. The role should scale a working machine, not invent one. For ANZ sales leaders evaluating VP+ candidates, the implication is clear: curiosity is the filter. If they are not asking hard questions as a candidate, they will not ask hard questions as an executive. Lemkin's advice: be the last interview when you can. Ask what they have learned. You will know in 90 seconds whether you are talking to someone genuinely curious about the business, or someone who is just interviewing well.

SaaStr
4 months ago
News

Metigy founder jailed 9 years after misleading investors, misusing $7.7m

David Fairfull, founder and CEO of Sydney AI marketing startup Metigy, was sentenced to nine years in prison by the Federal Court for misleading investors and misusing company funds. Fairfull pleaded guilty in November 2025 to one count of making false or misleading statements to investors and one count of dishonestly using his position as director. He received seven years and six months for the misleading statements charge, three years for dishonest conduct (18 months concurrent), with a non-parole period of five years and four months. The dishonesty charge involved borrowing $7.7m from Metigy for personal use: a $10.5m house in Mosman and a $7.7m property in Kangaroo Valley. He had repaid $3.7m before the company collapsed. Liquidators sold both properties in December 2022, making a $1.5m profit on the Mosman house and taking a $1.45m loss on the country property. The misleading conduct covered three capital raises between 2018 and 2020 (raising $23m), a secondary share sale in 2021 ($15.7m), and a planned $50m raise before collapse. ASIC originally charged Fairfull with five counts; he pleaded guilty to one. Metigy raised between AUD$14.6m and AUD$28m (sources differ) from investors including Regal Funds Management, Five V Capital, and Thorney Investments. The company was positioned as an AI-driven marketing platform for small businesses in the crowded SMB martech segment. ASIC alleged Fairfull gave false revenue and income information to investors. The case underscores governance and disclosure risks in venture-backed ANZ tech: institutional investors backed Metigy based on growth claims that became the subject of federal charges. Fairfull was originally charged by ASIC in 2024. The conviction turns what appeared to be a growth story into a cautionary tale about fundraising controls and director conduct in the ANZ startup ecosystem.

Startup Daily
4 months ago
News

Snowflake CMO ditched dashboards, talks to data in plain English

## The Dashboard Died at Snowflake Denise Persson runs marketing for Snowflake. That is a 700-person organisation, new-business pipeline accountability, and the kind of data compliance most B2B teams never touch. She does not start her day with a dashboard anymore. She interrogates her data in plain English. Nobody on her team gets Slack messages asking why pipeline moved in US West. She asks the data. It answers. The sales-marketing data war is over because there is one source of truth now. No more burning hours arguing whose dashboard is right before you discuss the actual business. ## The Numbers That Matter Snowflake posted $1.39 billion revenue last quarter, up 33% year over year. They are not a flat-growth software company. They are still scaling hard, which makes Persson's mandate interesting: deliver 40-50% growth with flat or fewer resources. She shipped a 30% reduction in cost per opportunity over six months. The unlock was pulling fragmented media channels into one place and letting the system recommend daily optimisations instead of waiting until a campaign ended to learn it failed. ## What Changed for Sales-Adjacent Teams Dashboards only answered what happened. They never answered why. So you would ping someone, schedule a meeting, sit with the sales team, and argue about what the numbers meant. Persson now asks her data the why directly and gets recommendations back in real time. The morning brief goes past pipeline. Org health. Who joined marketing this week, who left, whether there is an attrition issue forming. Intelligence that used to live only with finance now surfaces before her first meeting. ## The Hiring Profile Flipped The old job spec was a list of certifications: Marketo, Salesforce, the platforms. Now soft skills matter more than the stack. Adaptability, curiosity, self-leadership, change management. Snowflake hires for what they call the GTM engineer. Business analysts, much less so. If you ask for more headcount in 2026 planning, leadership will look at you like you do not understand where the company is. The expectation is that AI absorbs the growth, not new hires. ## The Part Most Teams Underestimate Building AI fluency across 700 people was the single biggest investment of the last year. Weekly skills training. Weekly AI challenges where someone records a video on an agent they built. Function-level hackathons. An AI council. Quarterly company-wide AI day. A usage leaderboard. Every person sets an AI goal in quarterly OKRs. It can be small. The point is everyone moves. The top of the leaderboard was not the people you would predict. Persson's top three power users came off the brand team. They are now running into other functions to help with hackathons. ## What This Means for Sales Leaders The pattern here applies beyond marketing. If you run a large sales organisation and still spend mornings in dashboards, you are about to get lapped. The teams that win are asking their data why quota shifted, why close rates dropped in enterprise, why ramp periods extended. Not scheduling meetings to guess at it. Bad data plus AI does not give you bad decisions. It gives you bad decisions faster and at scale. The Salesforce hygiene lesson from 15 years ago, except the cost of getting it wrong compounds far faster now. Persson's advice to anyone starting: invest in your data estate first. Skip it and it bites you a year from now.

SaaStr
4 months ago
News

Everlab raises $65m Series A, 11 months after Seed round

## Everlab raises $65m Series A, 11 months after Seed round Melbourne healthtech startup Everlab has closed a $65 million Series A led by Airtree Ventures, with participation from Europe's Plural and existing backers Left Lane Capital and b2venture. The round comes 11 months after the company raised $15 million in Seed funding. Founded in 2023, Everlab runs an AI-driven preventative care platform that combines full-body diagnostics, clinician networks, and wearable device data into a single patient record. The company's approach: catch disease risks early by analyzing complex health data with proprietary AI. The capital will fund global expansion into the UK, Europe, US, and Asia-Pacific in 2026, while growing Everlab's clinic network and AI platform. CEO Ian Clarke (previously flagged as a standout early-stage medtech leader) is running point on the international push. ### What this means for sales teams Rapid funding cycles like this (Seed to Series A in under a year, total raised now $76.8 million) typically signal aggressive hiring. While Everlab has not publicly detailed headcount plans, global expansion across four regions points to significant sales and clinical operations growth. The company operates in the preventative care and longevity market, competing with players like PeopleOne Health (which raised $32.3 million Series B). Everlab's differentiator: an AI-first approach to early disease detection, integrated with real-time wearable data. For sales professionals watching the ANZ healthtech space, Everlab represents a well-backed expansion play. Series A rounds of this size usually mean the sales team is about to scale. If you are tracking Melbourne-based SaaS or healthtech opportunities, this one is moving fast. ### The numbers - **Total raised:** $76.8 million across three rounds - **Series A:** $65 million (Airtree Ventures lead) - **Previous Seed:** $15 million (Left Lane Capital lead, July 2025) - **Founded:** 2023 - **HQ:** Melbourne - **Expansion markets:** UK, Europe, US, APAC (2026) Everlab is positioning itself as a shift from treatment to prevention in primary care. The AI platform integrates physician, specialist, and pathologist data, enhanced with wearable tech inputs, to build comprehensive patient records aimed at early risk detection. No public comp data yet, butwatch this space. When a Melbourne startup raises this much capital and targets four international markets, the sales hiring announcements usually follow within quarters.

SmartCompany
4 months ago
News

Labor's CGT changes hit startup equity, founders warn talent will leave

# Labor's CGT changes hit startup equity, founders warn talent will leave Australia's proposed capital gains tax overhaul will make it harder for startups to attract and retain talent, even after the government announced carve-outs for early-stage companies. Labor's May budget replaced the 50% CGT discount with inflation indexation and a 30% minimum tax on real gains, effective July 1, 2027. After backlash from founders and investors, the government carved out startups: unlisted companies under $50 million turnover, operating for under 10 years, can preserve the 50% discount for founders, employees, early investors and VC partners. Eligibility requires shares held for at least five years. The discount caps at $10 million in lifetime gains per person. Companies, foreign investors and super funds are excluded. ## The talent problem Startups rely on equity to compete for talent against enterprises that pay higher base salaries. Under the new rules, the maximum effective tax rate on equity gains for those outside the carve-out nearly doubles to 47%. One founder, speaking anonymously, said Australian startups already struggle to match offshore comp. The CGT changes make that gap worse. Early employees at high-growth companies now face higher taxes on equity that may take years to vest and liquidate. The government expanded small business concessions, lifting the 50% active asset reduction from $2 million to $10 million in turnover. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said this covers 2.7 million small businesses and around 98% of active businesses. ## What this means for sales teams If you are evaluating startup offers, run the numbers on equity comp under the new rules. That $200k equity package looks different when you factor in a five-year hold period and potential 47% tax on gains. For sales leaders at startups, expect harder conversations around equity comp. The math just got worse for candidates weighing your offer against an enterprise role with higher base. The carve-out helps, but it does not fix the core issue: Australia is making equity-heavy comp packages less attractive while competing with markets like the US where equity taxation is more favourable. That matters when you are trying to hire an enterprise AE who could take their skills to San Francisco. Final rules are still in consultation. The talent exodus argument is not hypothetical: it is what happens when comp math stops working in your favour.

SmartCompany
4 months ago
News

SaaStr replaced sales team with 20 AI agents, now warns others to audit them

## The Setup SaaStr, Jason Lemkin's B2B software community, replaced its sales team with around 20 AI agents managed by roughly 1.2 humans. The company is running an AI-heavy GTM motion across sales, marketing, and outreach. Then a PR agency, acting on behalf of a hot AI startup, sent SaaStr a sharp email: never contact their client again. One of the startup's execs supposedly had a "terrible experience" with SaaStr. Lemkin and his team were confused. They thought the engagement went well. They reached out to the executive directly. Turns out: he had no idea what his own PR firm had sent. He said the experience was great and he wanted to do more with SaaStr. The PR firm had been fired. ## The Lesson Lemkin's takeaway: audit your agents. Both AI and human. Most B2B teams are deploying agents at scale now. AI SDRs running sequences. Human vendors managing outreach. BDRs working territory. AI agents responding to inbound. The volume is up, but real-time oversight is down. Lemkin cites examples from SaaStr's own stack: one AI SDR invited a prospect to "meet next week" at an event that was happening that week. Another vendor's AI agent pitched SaaStr a product they were already paying for. A human would have caught both in 30 seconds. No human was watching. The rule: if they are speaking for you, you are responsible for what they say. The prospect does not distinguish between a bad email from an AI agent and a bad email from your company. ## What This Means for Sales Teams If you are running AI agents (or human vendors acting as agents), you need: - Regular audits of actual output, not just approved scripts from six months ago - Spot checks on emails, calls, and sequences going out today - A process for catching drift and hallucinations before they burn relationships SaaStr got lucky: the executive came back directly. Most of the time, they do not. The damage is done before you know it happened. Lemkin has publicly said the AI-agent model requires daily training and QA to avoid drift. That is the cost of running GTM at scale with agents. The alternative is burning relationships you wanted to keep.

SaaStr
4 months ago
News

Salesforce pushes lead scoring for SMBs, but most teams still spray and pray

Salesforce published a lead scoring playbook for SMBs this week, walking through audience scoring mechanics: engagement points (opens, clicks, page visits) tracked separately from fit points (job title, company size, industry match). The approach is solid. Start with your ten best customers, find the common patterns, build scoring criteria from there. Use negative scoring to subtract points when contacts go cold or unsubscribe. Separate window shoppers from real buyers. The problem is execution. Salesforce's own State of Marketing Report says 84% of marketers still run generic campaigns. Same email to 847 contacts, three conversions, 844 silent. That is the reality most SMB sales teams are working with. Lead scoring has been table stakes in Salesforce and HubSpot for years. Einstein Lead Scoring, Account Engagement lead scoring, predictive models built into the platform. The tools exist. Teams are not using them, or they are using them poorly. For SDRs at small businesses, this matters. If marketing is not scoring leads properly, you are calling cold on contacts who opened one email six months ago. If fit scoring is not configured, you are chasing logos that will never close because they are two people in a garage, not the 50-person company you thought. The framework Salesforce outlines works. Engagement score plus fit score, negative points for decay, build from existing customer patterns. But a framework without adoption is just another PDF no one reads. Worth asking: does your CRM have lead scoring turned on? Do your SDRs actually look at the score before calling? Is it tied to routing rules, or is it vanity data sitting in a field no one checks? The gap between platform capability and actual usage is where deals die. Salesforce can publish all the scoring templates and frameworks it wants. Until teams stop batch-blasting the database, the score does not matter.

Salesforce Blog
4 months ago
News

Stripe, Google, Canva data: AI companies now hit enterprise GTM in year one

## The Numbers That Matter Stripe's Maia Josebachvili runs enterprise product for the fastest-growing AI companies. The data she shared at SaaStr AI 2026 shows how radically GTM timelines have compressed. Top AI companies grew 175% in 2026. Lovable hit $100M in eight months, then $400M eight months later. Cursor reached $1B run rate in under two years, then $2B three months after that. The install base is real: Stripe's Link data shows AI buyer count doubled to 14M, with top buyers spending $371 on AI tools, more than the average American spends on internet, streaming, and phone combined. ## Four Patterns Across Stripe, Google, Canva **Speed to first customer:** Companies embedding Stripe now reach first paying customer in under six weeks. iOS app releases jumped 24% month over month once agentic coding went mainstream. The share of technical founders increased seven points in a year. **Global from day one:** AI companies hit 42 countries in year one and 120 by year three. Gamma reported $100M in year one, majority from outside the US. Across top AI companies, 48% of revenue now comes from outside home market, up from 33% three years ago. Localized pricing drives 18% higher cross-border revenue. **Usage-based pricing is the new standard:** Two in three Forbes AI50 companies now run some form of usage-based pricing, up from under 50% last summer. Most run hybrid: subscription to anchor the relationship, credits that scale with value. Replit layered credits on top of flat subscriptions and reached $1B run rate. **Enterprise sales in year one:** The old decade-long journey to enterprise is dead. Cursor launched self-serve in 2023 and added sales-led motion to land enterprise contracts in year one. Channel sales through cloud providers went from niche to core. Agent traffic to Stripe docs 10x'd in a year. ## What This Means for Sales Teams If you are building sales at an AI company, the comp expectations and quota models from 2022 do not apply. Teams are expected to go global and enterprise faster, which means territory planning needs to account for international from quarter one, not year three. The agent-as-buyer trend is real. Stripe reports agents now read more docs than humans by end of year. That changes how you structure onboarding, support, and sales-assist motions. Pricing conversations are getting harder because value is elastic. The engineer running agents overnight and the casual user get completely different value from the same product. If your comp is tied to seat count and your product is moving to consumption, expect quota relief conversations. Canva's public case study with Stripe shows enterprise performance marketing scaled 20x using Canva Enterprise, which signals Canva's own GTM is enterprise-led with PLG at the base. Google is showing up as a distribution channel for AI commerce through the Stripe partnership, enabling businesses to sell inside Google AI Mode while keeping checkout on Stripe rails. The pattern: build and sell in parallel. Do not wait to layer in enterprise motion. The fastest companies are doing it in year one.

SaaStr
Load More