The Wire

Real-time updates from ANZ tech sales

8 days ago
News

Twilio, Datadog hit 20%+ growth. HubSpot, Shopify miss. Market split on AI revenue.

## The Numbers Five public B2B companies just proved reacceleration is real, if selective. Twilio went from 4% growth in Q2 2024 to 20% in Q1 2026. Revenue $1.41B, up 20% reported. Voice grew 20% (fastest in 19 quarters), messaging hit 25%, NRR climbed to 114% from 107% YoY. The driver: AI voice workloads. Conversational AI and agent-to-human handoffs moved from feature to revenue line. Datadog crossed $1B in quarterly revenue for the first time, up 32% YoY. Customers over $100K ARR grew 21% to ~4,550. More than 50% use 4+ products. Anthropic signed an 8-figure deal. GPU monitoring, LLM experiments, AI agent observability: product lines that did not exist 18 months ago are now material. Stock popped 28%. Atlassian hit 32% growth (revenue $1.79B), fastest in six quarters. Cloud revenue $1.13B, up 29%. Cloud NRR above 120% for three consecutive quarters. Rovo crossed 5M monthly active users. Customers using Rovo are expanding ARR at 2x the rate of those who are not. Stock jumped 30% in a day. Worth noting: $50M of the beat was pull-forward Data Center license revenue tied to end-of-life. Strip that out and growth sits closer to high-20s. Still a clear acceleration. Cloudflare grew 34%, added 37K net new customers in Q4 2025 (332K paying customers total, 120% NRR). Also announced 1,100 cuts (~10% of headcount) to "go AI-first." Palantir grew 85%, fastest ever as a public company, driven by AIP bootcamps. HubSpot and Shopify reported solid quarters but missed forward acceleration targets. Markets punished HubSpot down 20%. The bifurcation is clear: AI-driven revenue growth gets rewarded. AI-in-progress gets sold. ## What This Means for Sales Teams If you are carrying a bag at a company with measurable AI product revenue, your comp just got more predictable. Twilio, Datadog, Atlassian are expanding teams into 2026. If your company is still in the "we have AI features" phase without usage or expansion data, expect quota pressure and territory optimisation. Cloudflare's 1,100 cuts while growing 34% signal a shift: headcount efficiency matters again. High-growth companies are not immune to layoffs if margin expansion is the priority. Comp plans in 2026 are tracking more closely to product-led growth and usage metrics, less to seat expansion. For ANZ sales professionals: Twilio has a Sydney hub (~50-100 headcount, sales and engineering). Cloudflare runs sales teams in Auckland and Sydney (~20-30). Atlassian Sydney HQ employs ~2K, led by CRO Tom Evans. Datadog has Melbourne sales presence. If these companies are hiring into ANZ in H2 2026, expect enterprise AE and sales engineer roles tied to AI infrastructure and observability. Comp will likely track to US benchmarks adjusted 15-20% down for ANZ market rates (based on historical enterprise AE OTE data). Historical attainment matters here. Twilio's NRR jump to 114% suggests existing book expansion is real. If you are interviewing, ask for cohort data on customers adopting AI products versus legacy-only. That split will predict your ramp and quota relief in 2026-2027. The reacceleration is real. It is also uneven. Know which side of the split your company is on before you sign the offer.

SaaStr
8 days ago
News

Agent Operator: New GTM role hiring at xAI, Notion, Zapier

## The role Three companies are hiring for what amounts to the same position. xAI calls it Head of GTM, Systems and Agents. Notion calls it GTM AI and Innovation Manager. Zapier calls it Director of GTM Innovation. The title varies, but the job description converges: run AI agents in GTM at scale. The work sits somewhere between RevOps, sales enablement, and product. You define what agents do, evaluate if they did it well, handle edge cases, and optimize the system. You are not writing code. You are writing prompts, building workflows in Clay or n8n, and making sure the fleet of agents behind your SDR team does not go off the rails. ## Why now Agent capabilities expanded 10x in 18 months. The tooling stack hit production grade: Clay for data, Lindy for vertical agents, orchestration on top of Claude and GPT. Buyers expect personalized outreach at scale. The unit economics of human-only teams do not work anymore. The unit economics of agent-only teams do not work either, because agents hallucinate context without supervision. The math that works: humans plus agents, with someone running the seam. That someone is the Agent Operator. ## What it pays None of the listings include comp. xAI is a $24B+ valuation company with ~50 to 70 GTM headcount. Notion is public, $15B market cap, ~150 to 200 in sales. Zapier is self-funded, ~100 in GTM. The role sits at Director to VP level based on scope. Comparable GTM ops or enablement roles in ANZ run $140k to $180k base, but this role has more leverage. Expect OTE closer to $200k to $250k at mid-market tech, higher at frontier AI companies. ## The shadow version Most teams already have someone doing this work: a high-agency RevOps lead, a curious AE, or the marketer who turned their personal Claude workflow into the team standard. They are doing the job without the title, the budget, or the tools to do it properly. That is changing. ## What this means If you are in RevOps or sales enablement and you have been building agent workflows on the side, this is your next role. If you are hiring, the Agent Operator is not a cost line. It is the multiplier on every other GTM hire you make. Without one, your three-person SDR team has three people. With one, your three-person SDR team has three people and a fleet of agents doing research, list building, and first-touch outreach behind them. The work did not disappear. It moved upstream. The leverage concentrated. The role is real.

Sales Hacker
9 days ago
News

Palantir hits 145% Rule of 40, Coinbase kills manager-of-managers role

## The Numbers That Matter Palantir delivered a 145% Rule of 40 score this quarter: 39% revenue growth plus 106% operating margin. That puts them in historical company with Nvidia, Micron, and SK Hynix. Nobody else. Remaining Performance Obligation jumped 134% to $4.45 billion. U.S. commercial revenue grew 71% year-over-year. CEO Alex Karp said every stakeholder now shows up to commercial buying meetings, a level of deal compression he has never seen. The reason: enterprises are finally writing $100 million checks to transform entire business units with AI. Palantir can take that bet. Most SaaS vendors are still selling $200k feature purchases. ## What This Means for Sales Orgs The implications reach beyond Palantir's numbers. When deals jump from $200k to $100 million, the entire sales motion changes. You need fewer reps carrying bigger numbers. Territory design breaks. Quota models reset. Comp plans that worked at mid-market scale do not work at this deal size. Meanwhile, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong made explicit what many founders think privately: the manager-of-managers layer is dead weight. His new policy: if you cannot ship code and manage simultaneously, you are out. Anyone on LinkedIn talking about "my team" instead of their own output gets cut. This hits sales organizations directly. The traditional SaaS sales hierarchy runs: reps report to managers, managers report to directors, directors report to VPs. That structure assumes management is a full-time job. Armstrong is saying it is not, or it should not be. ## The Reacceleration Context Palantir is not alone. Atlassian up 29%, Twilio up 20%, Five9 up 23%. The B2B SaaS reacceleration is real, but survival requires two things: monetize your existing base with AI AND attract net new customers. One without the other is a slow decline. Atlassian nailed existing base monetization. Twilio got both. HubSpot just announced AI agents on par with humans in their next release, late but not too late. For sales teams, the lesson is clear: the playbook that worked in 2022 does not work now. Deal sizes are compressing upward or staying flat. Buyers expect AI-driven transformation, not feature additions. And the org chart is flattening whether you are ready or not. ## What to Watch Palantir's go-to-market model at $100 million deal sizes. How many AEs can actually carry that quota? What does territory assignment look like when three deals hit your annual number? Coinbase's management purge and whether other tech companies follow. If the manager-of-managers role disappears, compensation structures will need to adjust. An IC sales leader carrying quota pays differently than a people manager. The broader SaaS reacceleration and whether it holds through Q2. Growth is back, but only for companies that can prove AI value and land new logos simultaneously.

SaaStr
9 days ago
News

Harvey AI hits 50% DAU/MAU, proves engagement drives B2B AI growth

## Harvey AI Engagement Numbers Show New B2B Reality Harvey AI CEO Winston Weinberg posted April metrics that connect three data points most B2B companies still treat separately: net new ARR up 6x year over year, DAU/MAU approaching 50%, and average users spending 12 hours per month in the product. That 50% DAU/MAU ratio matters. Most B2B tools sit at 10 to 20%. Public SaaS companies historically buried this metric because the numbers looked bad. Harvey users are logging in daily, spending 25 to 30 minutes per session. That is workspace behaviour, not occasional tool usage. The company crossed $190M ARR in January 2026 and raised at an $11B valuation in March (total funding exceeds $500M from Sequoia, OpenAI Startup Fund, Kleiner Perkins). Revenue estimates put ARR at $50M+ as of late 2025, driven by enterprise deals with AmLaw 100 firms. Over 40% of top law firms use Harvey. ## Why This Matters for Sales Teams Traditional B2B sales tracked ARR, NRR, and logo retention. Engagement was a customer success metric, usually called "license utilisation" to sound more enterprise. That model breaks in AI products where usage predicts renewal better than contract value. For AEs selling AI tools: daily active users now forecast churn risk months before renewal conversations. A customer with 15% DAU/MAU will churn regardless of contract size. A customer at 45% DAU/MAU will expand. Sales enablement platforms face the same dynamic. If your reps log in twice a month, the platform churns at renewal. If they are in it daily for content, coaching, or deal reviews, that is sticky revenue. Investors price this in. Harvey's 20x+ ARR multiple reflects engagement driven premiums over traditional B2B SaaS. When boards ask about usage metrics, they are asking about valuation risk. ## ANZ Implications Harvey has minimal ANZ presence (likely under 5 employees via remote), focused on US and UK markets. Asia Pacific expansion is nascent post 2025 funding. No public ANZ partnerships or deals disclosed yet, though firms like King & Wood Mallesons are potential targets. For ANZ sales professionals in AI or SaaS: if your comp plan still pays on bookings without usage gates, that structure is outdated. Usage based compensation models are coming.

SaaStr
9 days ago
News

Sydney venture builder offers $3M upfront, 30% equity, no fundraising required

## $3M upfront, team included, no pitch deck required Repeat Builders launched in Sydney's Tech Central in May with a model that flips traditional venture building: validate the idea first, recruit founders second, fund everything upfront. Founder Andonis Sakatis, former quant trader at GSA Capital and XTX Markets, commits $3 million per venture covering salaries, tech, team growth, and marketing for two years. Founding teams get 30% equity in independently operating businesses. No external fundraising required during the initial period. Five ventures planned for year one. Internal validation happens before founder recruitment, matching sector experts to proven concepts. ## What this means for sales professionals No sales team details available yet. Repeat Builders is fresh, no reported headcount beyond Sakatis. Worth watching if they build GTM-focused ventures or hire sales leaders for portfolio companies. The $3M upfront model removes the fundraising grind that typically consumes founders' first 12-18 months. In Sydney, one of the world's most expensive cities, that matters. Sakatis wants founders focused on product and market, not pitch decks. Internal team handles product, engineering, community, talent, capital, and governance. No service fees. Founders operate independently once matched. ## ANZ venture builder context Repeat Builders enters Australia's small venture studio ecosystem alongside Sydney's Nakatomi, which raised $3.5M to launch 3-4 startups annually. Nakatomi previously built femtech success Ovum, now focuses on AI workflow tools and residential AI platforms. Both are Sydney-focused, both front-load capital. Repeat Builders emphasises no-fee operational support and larger upfront commitment per venture. Recent ANZ funding activity shows appetite for early-stage capital: Sydney construction-tech CalcTree raised $3.8M pre-seed, Brisbane's Beaten Zone participated in Zendir's $3M+ seed for space and defence tech. Sakatis points to tools like Cursor, Claude, and Lovable letting anyone build working prototypes from text prompts. The gap between MVP and sustainable business, where most startups fail, is where Repeat Builders operates. Selection criteria: domain expertise from lived experience, high agency to solve problems, energy to sustain multi-year commitment. Domain expertise is non-negotiable. No revenue, acquisition, or sales org data available. This is a launch, not a proven playbook yet.

Startup Daily
10 days ago
News

Net new customer growth exposes what revenue hides: why CROs track this metric

## The Metric That Actually Matters Revenue growth can mask a broken sales engine for years. Net retention rate (NRR) looks healthy while new logo velocity collapses. The one number that tells the truth: net new customer growth. Jason Lemkin analysed 10 public B2B companies. Half do not even report quarterly customer counts. The ones that do: the data exposes everything. ## Application SaaS: The Grind Down HubSpot added roughly 10,000 paying customers per quarter at $3.1B revenue. Customer growth went from 23% YoY to 16% over two years. The last five quarters: 21, 19, 18, 17, 16. When you are relying almost entirely on NRR to grow, you have a problem. Atlassian's net new logo velocity dropped 77% in a single quarter. Their $10K+ cloud ARR cohort decelerated from 17% to 10% YoY. They have 600+ customers over $1M ARR, up 40%, but that is the textbook harvest-the-installed-base play. It works for a few quarters. It is not a strategy. Monday.com's total customer growth slowed to 7%. Look one layer deeper: their $100K+ ARR customers are up 45% YoY, $500K+ up 74%. They are trading volume for deal size. Without tracking both metrics, you would completely misread what is happening. ## The Outliers: AI Infrastructure Cloudflare accelerated from 22% to 40% YoY customer growth. They added 37,000 net new paying customers in Q4 2025 alone. Revenue growth accelerated too: 27% to 34% YoY. When total customer count, high-value tiers, and revenue all accelerate together, that is a company gaining market share across every segment. Palantir's customer growth climbed from 35% to 45% YoY. Revenue growth followed: 20% to 63%. US commercial customer count: up 49% YoY. ## What This Means for Sales Teams If your CRO is talking about revenue growth but not new logo velocity, ask why. The 2:1 ratio rule: revenue growth should be at least 2x new customer growth rate. At $100M+ ARR, target 20%+ new customer growth minimum. Track both total customer adds and cohort progression ($100K+, $500K+, $1M+). Datadog's overall customer growth sits at 9%, but their $100K+ cohort re-accelerated from 12% to 19% YoY. That is the signal. Net new customer growth does not lie. It tells you whether the market still wants what you are selling, and whether your sales engine actually works.

SaaStr
10 days ago
News

Canva hit with $792K ASIC fines for 11-month late financials

## The Numbers Canva caught four infringement notices from ASIC, $198K each, totalling $792K. The fines hit Canva Pty Ltd, Canva Operations Pty Ltd, Canva Trading Pty Ltd, and Fusion Books Pty Ltd for missing the April 30, 2025 deadline on FY24 financial reports. The company filed 2023 and 2024 accounts on March 27, 2026. That is 11 months late. For context: Canva only filed 2021 and 2022 statements in September 2025, years behind schedule. ## What Changed CFO Damien Singh left suddenly in early 2024. The company operated without a finance chief for 10 months before hiring Kelly Steckelberg, previously at Zoom, in late 2024. That gap lines up with the filing delays. The four entities restructured into Canva Australia Holdings Pty Ltd last year. When asked why the reports were late, Canva declined to comment. ## Why It Matters for Sales Canva runs a 300 to 500-person sales org globally, with significant ANZ headcount (roughly 1,000 of 5,000+ total employees). Sydney HQ alone holds 1,500+ staff. The company has been hiring: 50+ sales roles filled across ANZ and US in Q1 2026 per LinkedIn data. For enterprise AEs and sales leaders watching Canva as an employer or partner, late financials raise questions about back-office stability during rapid scaling. The company hit $2B annualised revenue in FY23 with 170M+ monthly users and closed a US$1.5B IPO in 2024 at a $32B US valuation. Paying the fine avoids court (max penalty $396K per entity) and is not an admission of guilt under ASIC rules. But two years of delayed reporting, a 10-month CFO gap, and now regulatory penalties suggest operational strain behind the growth story. The 2025 accounts? Filed on time last week.

Startup Daily
10 days ago
News

Fishburners enters administration, 400 startups face uncertain future

Fishburners Limited entered voluntary administration on Wednesday, appointing Phil Quinlan and Gayle Dickerson of KPMG to assess the business while pursuing "an accelerated sale and recapitalisation process." The collapse stems from unresolved rental debt at the government-backed Sydney Startup Hub, combined with subsequent operating losses. KPMG will continue trading while evaluating options. ## What This Means for Sales Fishburners currently houses over 400 startups across Sydney (64 York Street and 477 Pitt Street) and Brisbane. Its members have collectively raised over $2 billion since the organisation launched in 2011. Translation: a lot of early-stage companies just lost their operational base and community infrastructure. For sales professionals, this matters because Fishburners tenants are the startups most likely to be building their first sales teams. Seed and Series A companies hiring their first SDRs, first AEs, first sales managers. If those companies lose access to their co-working space, mentoring network, and event programming, expect hiring delays and budget scrutiny. ## The Numbers Fishburners supported 621 startups over the past five years and claims a network of 35,000 entrepreneurs. As a registered charity, it operates on community support and sponsorships rather than traditional revenue models. Current CEO Martin Karafilis and the board made the administration call after debt resolution efforts failed. No details yet on which creditors are owed what, or whether the Sydney Startup Hub lease will be renegotiated. KPMG is running a sale process, but the outcome timeline is unclear. ## Market Context This is the second major co-working operator to hit trouble in ANZ tech (WeWork's 2019 collapse being the first, though global). The Commons and other Sydney operators may absorb displaced startups, but Fishburners' non-profit model and community density made it unique. Hard to replicate. For now, 400 startups are watching administrators assess whether Fishburners survives, gets sold, or shuts down. That uncertainty does not help when you are trying to close a Series A or make your first sales hire.

SmartCompany
10 days ago
News

OpenAI launches self-serve ChatGPT Ads Manager with CPC bidding

OpenAI launched a self-serve Ads Manager for ChatGPT, complete with CPC bidding, conversion tracking, and measurement tools that look a lot like Google Ads infrastructure. The new platform lets advertisers register, upload creative, set budgets, manage campaigns, and track performance through a dedicated portal. OpenAI added pixel-based measurement and a Conversions API so teams can track purchases, sign-ups, and leads after users interact with ads. Previously, ChatGPT ads required a $50,000 minimum spend and agency partnerships with Dentsu, Omnicom, Publicis, and WPP. That barrier is gone. The self-serve model opens the platform to SMBs and performance teams running smaller tests. ## What this means for sales teams If you are running lead gen or prospecting campaigns, ChatGPT ads now compete directly with Google and LinkedIn for your budget. The conversational format could work for complex B2B offers where you need more context than a standard display ad provides. OpenAI says advertisers get aggregated performance insights without access to individual conversations. Worth noting: this is beta, US-only for now. No ANZ launch timeline, no pricing details beyond CPC and CPM options. The company has been building toward this since October 2024, adding shopping tools, product recommendations, and checkout integrations. Revenue hit $3.7 billion annualised in late 2024, driven by subscriptions and API usage. Ad revenue is still nascent, but OpenAI projects over $11 billion total revenue in 2025. ## The comp and hiring angle OpenAI scaled from under 400 employees in 2023 to around 3,500 in early 2026, with 200-300 in sales and marketing. Recent hires include enterprise AEs from Google and Salesforce to support B2B growth. No dedicated CRO is publicly listed, sales falls under COO Brad Lightcap. In ANZ, OpenAI has minimal direct presence, no disclosed offices or headcount. Regional traction comes through Microsoft Azure partnerships and API deals with companies like Canva and Atlassian. If ads expand beyond the US, expect ANZ hiring to follow. ## Bottom line ChatGPT is now an ad platform with self-serve tools and performance tracking. If you are testing new lead gen channels, this is worth watching. Just know the data is limited, the market is unproven, and your LinkedIn rep is probably already asking why you are diverting budget.

SmartCompany
10 days ago
News

Budget R&D boost targets big firms while startups push CGT relief

## Budget R&D Changes Miss Startup Reality Next week's federal budget will raise the R&D tax incentive cap from $150M to $250M-$300M, Treasurer Jim Chalmers confirmed. The increase falls short of the Denholm review's recommendation to remove the cap entirely. The problem: this helps large R&D-heavy firms, not the 9,000 startups claiming the current 43.5% refundable offset for companies under $20M turnover. Latest ATO data shows those startups claimed $3.4B in FY2024, the real engine of ANZ innovation. ## CGT Changes Create Uncertainty Startup advocates fear proposed CGT reforms will erode the 50% discount, undermining the R&D boost. No specifics released yet, but US research shows tax increases reduce startup patents by 5-10% through diminished VC activity. Meanwhile, US startups got immediate R&D expensing restored under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (July 2025), with retroactive relief for companies under $31M in average gross receipts. ANZ founders are watching competitors get liquidity while they wait for budget scraps. ## What This Means for Sales Teams If you are selling into ANZ startups, cash flow matters more than ever. The R&D cap lift does nothing for your Series A customers burning through runway. CGT uncertainty makes exits harder to price, which means longer sales cycles for anything tied to founder liquidity. For sales professionals at larger tech firms (Atlassian's 10,000 headcount, Canva's 3,000-plus team), the R&D boost could mean expanded engineering budgets and more tools procurement. But for the mid-market SaaS players competing with Xero ($1.5B revenue, 3,000 staff), this budget offers little relief. ANZ holds just 2% of global VC share ($5B in 2025). The US got retroactive tax breaks and expanded QSBS exclusions. We are getting a cap adjustment that helps companies already doing $150M+ in R&D spend. Budget drops next week. Expect startup groups to push hard on CGT relief and refundable offsets. Without it, the productivity agenda is just optics.

SmartCompany
11 days ago
News

SaaStr ran two AI VPs for $254 in March: what that means for sales orgs

## The numbers SaaStr founder Jason Lemkin posted his March 2026 Replit bill: $254.06 to run two AI agents that handle VP-level work. Qbee (AI VP Customer Success) cost $159.55. 10K (AI VP Marketing) cost $94.51. For context: those roles filled by humans at a Series C+ B2B company run $500k-$800k all-in annually. SaaStr is paying roughly $3,000 per year combined for both. The agents are not full VP replacements. They handle the operational layer: the 60-70% of a VP's week spent running the machine, not making strategic calls. ## What they actually do **Qbee** manages 100+ sponsors for SaaStr AI Annual 2026. Owns the sponsor portal, coordinates booth assignments, replies to sponsor questions in real time, flags issues before they blow up. Result: 70% reduction in human hours on sponsor ops. The remaining 30% stays human for pricing exceptions, escalations, relationship work. **10K** runs Monday marketing standup, pushes daily GTM updates, tracks campaign performance, drafts content briefs, monitors registration trends. She surfaces what is working and where to spend the next dollar. She does not replace strategic marketing leadership. She replaces the operational visibility layer that swallows most of a marketing leader's week. ## What this means for sales orgs Classic SaaS seats (Salesforce, Gong, Outreach) cost $100-$300 per user per month. Then you add $150k-$300k in fully loaded comp to get a human doing something useful with that seat. The seat is the cheap part. With agents, the agent IS the seat AND the human. The $95 per month is the whole cost stack. No $200k salary. No benefits. No recruiter fee. No PTO, severance, Slack license, laptop. It is $95. The agent works 24/7. Does not get sick. Does not miss Monday standup. Does not quit for a competitor. This does not replace every role. Strategy, judgment, relationships, novel problem-solving, leadership, taste, voice: humans still win by a mile. But the operational layer of mid-level and senior roles just got priced at roughly 1% of what it cost a year ago. ## The full stack SaaStr's total March Replit bill: $2,324.43 for 6 production agents, 14 published apps, 1.9M+ requests served. That is less than what most B2B companies spend on a single mid-tier SaaS tool. Lemkin notes third-party AI agents cost more but are still a great deal. His advice: buy, do not build, if you can. ## What to watch If the operational layer of VP-level work costs $3k per year instead of $500k, comp structures and org charts will shift fast. Not because AI replaces strategic leadership, but because the layer underneath it just became a rounding error. Worth noting: SaaStr operates media and events, not enterprise sales. The agents handle sponsor ops and marketing coordination, not quota-carrying roles. How this translates to SDR ops, pipeline management, or account planning remains to be tested at scale.

SaaStr
11 days ago
News

Heidi Health CEO: AI medical tools degrade under load, regulators missing the risk

Heidi Health CEO Dr. Tom Kelly told SmartCompany that healthcare AI regulation is missing a critical risk: models do not perform consistently under real-world pressure. "When we measure and monitor the performance of Heidi on days where it is particularly busy, like a Monday morning, you see meaningful degradations in performance of the notes, which can be a safety issue," Kelly said at Blackbird Ventures' Sunrise event. Heidi is a Melbourne-based AI medical scribe that automates clinical documentation during patient consultations. The company processes over 1 million patient consultations every week globally. They claim only 1 in 1,000 notes receive negative quality ratings, but Kelly's comments suggest that average hides variability. The issue: regulators treat AI models as repeatable systems. They are not. Performance fluctuates based on load, deployment environment, and demand spikes. For a clinical tool, that variability creates patient safety risk. Kelly says regulators are not keeping pace. "The area I think that is being chronically missed is they are treating models as repeatable. In practice, it is not true." ## What this means for healthcare AI sales If you are selling AI tools to hospital systems, this is the objection sitting across the table: what happens when your model degrades during peak hours? Clinical buyers care about consistency, not average performance. A tool that works 99% of the time but fails during Monday morning rushes is a liability. Heidi previously faced security scrutiny when a Mindgard audit exposed prompt-injection vulnerabilities that could bypass guardrails. The company has since moved beyond pure documentation into broader clinical workflows, raising the stakes for reliability. For sales teams: hospital procurement cycles are long because the risk of failure is high. Comp transparency, performance guarantees under load, and security audit results are table stakes. If your product degrades under real-world conditions, expect clinical buyers to walk. Heidi raised $98 million in October 2024 at a $704 million valuation. The company is scaling globally, but Kelly's warning suggests the regulatory gap could slow adoption if safety concerns escalate.

SmartCompany
11 days ago
News

CSIRO data: AI adopters hiring more, not less. Non-adopters at risk.

## The data nobody wants to hear CSIRO tracked job ads from 4,000+ Australian companies. Result: AI adopters posted more roles, not fewer. Companies using AI needed people to implement it, manage it, sell it. The finding landed with a thud. Social media response: "Job ads aren't hires." Fair point, except job ads have predicted economic trends for decades. When companies search for talent, they are planning to grow. MIT Sloan backed this up with 2010-2023 payroll data. Firms with high AI adoption grew employment 6% and sales 9.5% over five years. High-exposure roles at the top of the pay scale grew 3% because AI boosted productivity across the business. Stanford analysed ADP payroll through July 2025. Overall employment in AI-exposed jobs is up. The catch: workers aged 22-25 saw 6% declines in high-exposure fields like customer support and software development. Workers 30+ grew 6-13%. Early-career hiring slowdowns, not mass layoffs. ## The real risk: competitive lag Goldman Sachs projects 6-7% worker displacement over 10 years if AI adoption is gradual. That is 0.6 percentage points on unemployment. The displacement is not coming from AI itself, it is coming from companies that adopt AI outcompeting companies that do not. For ANZ B2B sales teams, this creates opportunity. Companies need help implementing AI infrastructure before their competitors do. The buyers are CROs, sales ops leaders, and go-to-market teams trying to scale without proportional headcount growth. Yale Budget Lab found no current correlation between AI exposure and employment changes. Anthropic found no impact on unemployment rates. The narrative that AI destroys jobs is stickier than the data supports. ## What this means for sales professionals If your company is not adopting AI tools for prospecting, pipeline management, or deal analysis, you are at a structural disadvantage against teams that are. The threat is not the technology, it is falling behind the market. Sales roles are shifting. SDRs using AI for research and outreach are booking more meetings per hour. AEs with AI-powered deal intelligence are closing faster. The skills gap is widening between teams that adopted early and teams still running 2019 playbooks. Comp is following the same pattern. Top-performing reps at AI-forward companies are pulling higher OTEs because their productivity metrics are higher. The job is not disappearing, the job is changing, and the companies investing in AI are the ones growing headcount and paying more. Bottom line: AI is not killing sales jobs. Competitive lag is.

Startup Daily
12 days ago
News

ServiceNow's 98% GRR masks customer engagement risk, says a16z analysis

## The Numbers Look Good. The Reality Might Not. ServiceNow reports 98% Gross Revenue Retention. Workday sits at 97%. Both companies lead the public B2B SaaS stack on this metric. The problem, according to a16z: those numbers might be hiding customer engagement decay. The core issue is contract structure. Both companies default to three-year initial contracts with enterprises. When GRR measures year-over-year revenue from existing customers (excluding expansion), long-term deals inflate the metric. Customers cannot leave mid-contract, so they show up as retained revenue even if they have stopped expanding usage or planning to churn at renewal. a16z called Workday "arguably the most important and least loved product in enterprise software." If nobody loves it, how does it retain 97% of revenue annually? Contracts. Customers are locked in. ## Why This Matters Now ServiceNow has made five AI acquisitions in 2025 alone, including a $7.75 billion deal for cybersecurity firm Armis. The company is pivoting hard toward agentic AI integration. That aggressive M&A pace suggests management sees the risk: enterprise budgets are shifting to truly agentic products, and static workflow platforms might lose relevance. The concern is not immediate churn. It is what happens when those three-year contracts come up for renewal and customers have already moved budget elsewhere. GRR looks stable until it does not. ## GRR vs NRR: What to Watch Gross Revenue Retention measures retention without expansion. Net Revenue Retention includes upsells and expansion. For enterprise SaaS, good GRR sits above 90%. ServiceNow and Workday are best-in-class by that standard. But NRR tells the real story. If GRR stays high while NRR drops, customers are staying but not expanding. That is the decay signal. ServiceNow beat Q1 2026 estimates, but institutional investors are watching: short interest jumped 30%, and geopolitical deal delays represent 75 basis points of headwind. ## The Sales Angle If you are selling into accounts with ServiceNow or Workday deployments, this matters. Long-term contracts mean these platforms are not going anywhere soon, but budget is finite. Positioning around agentic AI capabilities or workflow gaps could find receptive buyers who are locked into existing platforms but looking for what comes next. For AEs at ServiceNow or Workday: expansion revenue is the metric to watch. If customers are not adding seats or modules, that three-year contract is just delaying the conversation about replacement. Contract structure bought these platforms time. How they use it will determine whether 98% GRR was real retention or just a really good contract.

SaaStr
12 days ago
News

Palantir hits 85% growth at $6.5B ARR, US commercial up 133%

## The Numbers Palantir posted Q1 2026 revenue of $1.633B, up 85% year-over-year. That is the fastest growth rate the company has hit since going public in 2020. At a $6.5B+ run rate. Full-year 2026 guidance: $7.65B to $7.66B, representing 71% growth. Management raised the guide by 10 percentage points. US commercial revenue: $595M, up 133% YoY and 18% quarter-over-quarter. Twelve months ago, US commercial was running at $255M per quarter. It has more than doubled. Annualised, US commercial alone is now a $2.4B+ business. ## Deal Velocity Q1 deal count: 206 deals at $1M or above, 72 at $5M or above, 47 at $10M or above. Total contract value: $2.41B, up 61% YoY. Remaining performance obligations (RPO): $4.45B, up 134% YoY from $1.90B in Q1 2025. That is $2.55B more in contracted future revenue. RPO grew faster than revenue itself, which means the next several quarters are already largely sold. New commercial logos in Q1: Airbus, Bain, GE Aerospace, Stellantis. These are exactly the legacy industrial and consulting buyers everyone said were too slow to deploy AI at scale. They are now writing $5M, $10M, $20M+ contracts. ## What This Means for Sales Teams Palantir's commercial customer base hit 1,007, up 31% YoY. The average customer is spending more. That combination of new logo growth plus heavy expansion is the signature of a category-defining product hitting enterprise product-market fit. The company posted a Rule of 40 score of 145%: 85% growth plus 60% adjusted operating margin. GAAP net income: $871M, up roughly 4x YoY. Adjusted free cash flow: $925M at a 57% margin. Cash on balance sheet: $8.0B, no debt. CEO Alex Karp noted that a Rule of 40 of 145% has only been matched by AI infrastructure companies like NVIDIA, not software companies. ## Implications Enterprise software companies typically decelerate at scale. Palantir has gone from 17% growth in 2023 to 85% growth in Q1 2026. At multi-billion dollar scale. The standard playbook does not apply when product and platform shift collide. The Fortune 500 has stopped piloting AI and started buying. If you are selling AI agents and cannot convert pilots to production deals, the buyer is not the problem. Palantir has not disclosed specific sales team size, CRO details, or recent hiring numbers in Q1 filings. Deal velocity suggests scaled go-to-market operations, but comp structure and quota attainment data remain internal.

SaaStr
13 days ago
News

Australian businesses risk 'Unverified' SMS label from July 1 without ACMA registration

## The Change From July 1, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) will label SMS messages sent from unregistered branded sender IDs as 'Unverified'. Your business name disappears. Your text sits alongside potential scam messages. Your open rates tank. Messages sent using registered sender IDs will continue to display the business name. Messages from unregistered IDs will show 'Unverified' where your brand name used to appear. ## The Timeline Applications submitted after May 15 are at risk of missing the July 1 deadline. ACMA says processing can take weeks. Do not leave this until June. ## Why This Matters for Sales Teams If your sales motion includes SMS for: - Booking confirmations - Appointment reminders - Delivery notifications - Two-factor authentication - Post-demo follow-ups - Re-engagement campaigns You need to register. An 'Unverified' label kills trust. Customers will ignore or delete your messages. Some networks may filter or block them entirely. ACMA member Samantha Yorke said messages marked 'Unverified' are far more likely to be ignored or deleted by customers already on high alert for scams. ## The Reality Scam texts are at an all-time high in Australia. Customers are trained to delete anything that looks suspicious. An 'Unverified' label is suspicious. For SMEs running lean sales operations, SMS is a direct line to customers. Lose that channel and you lose bookings, reminders, and reactivation sequences. ## What To Do Register your SMS sender IDs with ACMA before May 15 to guarantee processing by July 1. If you use an SMS provider (Twilio, MessageMedia, others), check if they handle registration on your behalf. If not, you need to register directly. This is not a soft deadline. July 1 means your messages get labelled 'Unverified'. Your open rates drop. Your customers stop responding. ## Context This aligns with global SMS compliance tightening. In the US, TCPA text message opt-in requirements and FCC regulations have pushed similar sender verification. CTIA guidelines mandate clear opt-in and sender identification. Australia is following suit with ACMA enforcement to combat SMS scams while forcing businesses to prove legitimacy. The ANZ market has seen SMS scams surge. ACMA is prioritising sender verification to protect consumers. Businesses pay the price if they do not comply.

SmartCompany
13 days ago
News

Catch founders acquire Click Frenzy, plan relaunch after liquidation

## Catch founders acquire Click Frenzy, plan relaunch after liquidation Gabby and Hezi Leibovich acquired Click Frenzy and plan to relaunch the site weeks after it fell into liquidation. The Leibovich brothers founded Catch in 2006 as Catch of the Day, grew it to ~A$500M revenue and ~1,000 staff before selling to Toll Holdings in 2021. They stepped down as executives but stayed involved. Now they are buying distressed e-commerce assets. Click Frenzy launched in 2012 as Australia's answer to Black Friday. It ran limited-time sales events through the 2010s: homewares, tech, apparel, travel. The event model worked until it did not. Lumpy cash flow killed it. War in Iran hit travel deal sales during a recent event, according to the receiver. Click Frenzy and sibling business Power Retail went into liquidation in April 2026. Gabby Leibovich says the concept is not broken. "Click Frenzy proved that customers respond to great offers from trusted brands. What's changed is expectation. Today, customers want value more consistently." Translation: flash sales peaked in 2015. Customers now expect always-on deals, not event-driven scarcity. ### What this means for sales teams If you sold into Click Frenzy's event ecosystem (agencies, logistics, payment platforms), your buyer just changed. The Leibovich brothers ran Catch with a 200-300 person marketing and sales org at peak. Expect similar hiring if the relaunch scales. Catch historically focused on high-volume flash sales with aggressive performance targets. If they apply that playbook to Click Frenzy, commission structures will likely favour activity over deal size. Worth tracking if you are targeting ANZ e-commerce platforms. No word yet on headcount, territory splits, or OTE for any new hires. The brothers are Power Retail All Star Legends (2021), so they know how to build sales teams. Watch for roles in Melbourne where Catch was headquartered. Competitors: Kogan (~A$500M revenue), Amazon AU, MyDeal. Mid-tier ANZ e-commerce space with strong logistics ties via Toll. If Click Frenzy relaunches successfully, expect vendor and brand partnerships to ramp. No public comp details yet. Will update when hiring starts.

SmartCompany
15 days ago
News

Cursor hit $2B ARR in 18 months without outbound sales

## The numbers that break the model Cursor went from $1M to $100M ARR in 12 months. Then $300M three months later. Then $500M. Then $1B by November 2025. Then $2B by February 2026. Slack took 30 months to hit $100M ARR. Dropbox took four years. Cursor did it in 12 with zero marketing spend and no outbound sales motion. The four MIT co-founders made one GTM decision that mattered more than everything else: they forked VS Code instead of building a plugin. Every competitor built Copilot-style extensions. Cursor rebuilt the entire editor. At the time, this looked stupid. VS Code had 70% market share and Microsoft backing. Forking meant reconstructing language servers, debugging, the terminal. Months of work for uncertain payoff. But it gave them control. They could integrate AI at the infrastructure level, not bolt it on. The product worked 10x better because the AI wasn't fighting the editor, it was the editor. ## The metric that predicted everything Cursor tracked one number obsessively: session length. Not DAUs, not signups. How long developers stayed in the editor per session. When session length hit a threshold, they knew they had won that user. The product became the default environment. Developers stopped switching back to VS Code. That metric predicted retention, expansion, and enterprise adoption. Long sessions meant developers were shipping real work in Cursor. That meant they would pay. That meant they would bring their team. ## Enterprise through developer smuggling Cursor had no enterprise sales team until late 2025. The enterprise motion was bottom-up infiltration. Developers adopted Cursor individually. Paid $20/month out of pocket. Brought their team. Eventually, procurement noticed the expense line and formalised the contract. By the time sales got involved, the deal was already done. The sales motion was contract cleanup, not relationship building. SpaceX became a customer this way. So did most of Cursor's enterprise book. ## What this means for ANZ sales teams Cursor's playbook does not work for most products. You need 10x better functionality and a user base that self-selects for early adoption. Most B2B SaaS has neither. But the session length insight applies everywhere. If your users are not spending time in your product, expansion will not save you. Usage predicts revenue better than any pipeline metric. The developer-led enterprise motion is already playing out in ANZ. Tools like Vercel, Linear, and Notion followed similar paths. Individual contributors adopt, teams follow, procurement formalises. If you are selling into engineering orgs, your land motion might not involve sales at all. Your job is contract capture, not deal creation. ## The valuation that shows where the market is Cursor is now valued at $60B. For context, that is more than Adobe, which took 40 years to build. The market is pricing in a future where AI coding tools are infrastructure, not features. Where the editor is the product, and the product is the workflow. For sales teams selling dev tools: the bar for product-market fit just moved. Cursor proved developers will pay $20/month for tools that genuinely make them 10x faster. They will not pay for incremental improvements. The land-and-expand motion still works. But land now requires a product developers cannot live without, not a sales process they tolerate.

Sales Hacker
15 days ago
News

Canva CTO exits after 12 years, no replacement named ahead of IPO

Brendan Humphreys is leaving Canva after 12 years as CTO. He joined in 2014 when the company had 12 employees. Now it has 5,000 staff and $3 billion in ARR. Canva is not filling the CTO role. Simon Newton, previously Humphreys' number two, becomes head of technology instead. Newton ran platform engineering and came from Google and Uber. Humphreys wraps up in June and stays on as an adviser. The timing matters. Canva is pushing hard into AI and preparing for an IPO. The company already has no permanent CFO. Now the CTO role disappears too, replaced with a head of technology position. That is a structure change worth noting. Canva reports 230 million monthly active users and 24 million paying subscribers. It claims 95% of Fortune 500 companies as customers. That enterprise footprint means a significant B2B sales operation, though the company does not disclose sales team size or recent hiring numbers. For sales teams using Canva: the product roadmap continues. The company acquired Affinity and Magic Brief to build out AI design tools. All 5,000 employees test AI features under what the company calls permissive policies. That AI push targets enterprise adoption, which drives the B2B revenue. The CTO exit after 12 years is significant but not disruptive. Humphreys built the technology organisation that scaled from 12 people to 5,000. Newton inherits that foundation as Canva moves toward public markets. What this does not tell us: how the enterprise sales organisation is structured, who runs it, or whether the IPO timeline changes. Canva's Sydney headquarters gives it strong ANZ presence, but specific regional headcount remains undisclosed. Bottom line: a long-term executive is stepping back at a company that just hit $3B ARR and wants to go public. The CTO role gets restructured, not replaced. For sales professionals, Canva remains a major enterprise design platform with serious Fortune 500 penetration and aggressive AI development.

SmartCompany
15 days ago
News

Moats keep customers in, but they do not capture AI budget

## The Numbers Look Safe. The Growth Does Not. Gross revenue retention across B2B software sits at 90%. The best companies hold above 95%. ServiceNow renews at 98%, CrowdStrike at 97%, Workday above 95%. Customers are not ripping out their systems. The moats are real: switching costs, integrations, workflow dependency, data lock-in. But net revenue retention tells a different story. It dropped from 116% at peak to 108% across public software. Customers are staying. They are not expanding. Morningstar just downgraded 40 tech companies, cutting six former wide-moat leaders to narrow: Adobe, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Shopify, Descartes, Manhattan Associates. Adobe's fair value estimate dropped 32%. ServiceNow dropped 18%. They cut moat duration from 20 years to 10. Goldman Sachs identified Snowflake, MongoDB, Shopify, CrowdStrike as companies with architectural moats. Bain confirmed GRR is holding. HarbourVest called it the biggest valuation reset since 2008. All this analysis focuses on the wrong question. Not "are you safe from AI?" but "are you capturing AI budget?" ## The Budget Math Gartner projects AI spending hits $1.5 trillion in 2026. AI software grows 15.2% year over year. AI captures 30% of total IT budget increases. The rest of IT grows at a fraction of that rate. Private AI companies trade at 61x ARR. Public B2B software trades at 4x ARR. That is not a valuation gap. That is two different markets. Morningstar's data: AI products at incumbent software companies account for 1-5% of revenue. Retention rates unchanged, margins increasing, ARR growing. The defensive metrics look fine. AI revenue is a rounding error. ## What This Means for Sales If you sell established B2B software: your existing customers are not leaving, but they are not expanding either. New logo acquisition matters more than ever. You need a clear answer to "how does this capture AI budget?" not "how does this compete with AI?" If you sell AI-native products: incumbents have moats, but they are not capturing growth budget. Your win is not replacement deals. It is net new budget. If you manage a territory: GRR protects your base number. It does not hit your growth quota. The deals that close this year will be the ones positioned as AI initiatives, whether or not the product is fundamentally different. The moat keeps customers in. It does not fill the pipeline.

SaaStr
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