The Wire

Real-time updates from ANZ tech sales

18 days ago
News

Airtree offers A$350k for ANZ founders in San Francisco residency

## Airtree opens Silicon Valley residency with A$350k SAFE notes Airtree launched a San Francisco version of its Frontier residency program, offering US$250,000 (about A$350,000) to Australian and New Zealand founders building businesses in the U.S. The capital comes as an uncapped SAFE note, plus cloud and AI service credits. The program targets ANZ founders already in the States: former operators at tech companies, academic researchers, or anyone with ambition but not yet a crystalised idea. Solo founders looking for co-founders can apply. "We are targeting Aussies and Kiwis based in the U.S. who have the ambition to build something big," said Sid Kasbekar, who runs Airtree's San Francisco office. "They might be working at a tech company already, in academia, or something else." ### What this means for ANZ founders The U.S. residency raises Airtree's support from the A$250,000 it offers Sydney-based Frontier participants. That gap (roughly A$100k) reflects the higher cost of establishing a beachhead in Silicon Valley: rent, talent, and the expectation that you will spend faster to validate product-market fit in a more competitive environment. Airtree's Sydney Frontier cohort already includes repeat founders and alumni from Eucalyptus, SafetyCulture, Airwallex, and Atlassian. The San Francisco expansion gives the firm earlier access to founders who might otherwise raise from U.S.-only investors. ### Why the U.S. push matters now The launch comes as Australia debates capital gains tax changes that some founders say will accelerate offshore relocations. A Cloud Guru co-founder Sam Kroonenburg warned earlier this year that the reforms could push more builders to establish companies in the U.S. from day one. Treasury released updated draft legislation last week that removed a proposed lifetime cap on the startup CGT concession and eased eligibility. Consultation on the changes is open. For ANZ founders weighing where to incorporate and build, Airtree's San Francisco residency is a capital and network bridge. Applications are open now at airtree.vc/frontier.

Startup Daily
18 days ago
News

Defence manufacturing could replace auto supply chain, worth A$2.4bn for top contractors

Australia's defence manufacturing sector is shaping up to replace the industrial ecosystem the car industry used to provide. Worth tracking if you sell into manufacturing, systems integration, or government contractors. ## The Numbers BAE Systems Australia: A$2.4 billion revenue, 5,500 staff across 40 sites. Saab Australia: A$377.7 million revenue, 1,038 employees. The Top 40 Defence Contractors list shows Boeing Defence Australia, Downer, Ventia, ASC, Raytheon Australia, and Lockheed Martin Australia turning over A$500 million to A$2 billion each. Government is backing this with real money. Defence Industry Development Grants delivered A$17 million across 44 businesses in January 2026, then A$22 million across 60 businesses in July 2026. Earlier rounds funded capacity upgrades at firms like ANCA Engineering Solutions, Griffin Marine Services, and HIFraser. ## What This Means for Sales Teams The opportunity sits in three tiers. First, the primes: large integrators with multi-site footprints and established government relationships. Second, grant recipients: these are businesses government is actively funding to scale domestic production. Third, mid-sized suppliers building sovereign capability in shipbuilding, vehicles, munitions, electronics, and robotics. Arkeus co-founder Simon Olsen, whose company develops AI-powered optical sensing systems for defence, sees the car industry parallel clearly. Larger Australian companies take major contracts, then source technology, components, and manufacturing from smaller domestic businesses. That creates a tiered supply chain: tier-one primes, subcontractors, machining, electronics, welding, systems integration, testing. Venture activity confirms demand is real. Advanced Navigation raised US$68 million Series B. DroneShield is scaling headcount rapidly. Leidos and QinetiQ are reportedly active in Australia. ## The Practical Play If you are selling into manufacturing or industrial: track the grant recipients. Government is signalling which businesses it wants to scale. If you are in enterprise software, systems integration, or supply chain: the primes are building deeper local capability, which means more contracts flowing to Australian suppliers. If you are recruiting: defence manufacturing is hiring across engineering, production, and commercial roles. The comp data is not public yet, but the sector is government-backed, well-funded, and expanding. Worth a look if your patch includes industrial or government customers.

SmartCompany
18 days ago
News

Buildkite raised $21M after burning $23M, CEO ousted

## The Numbers Buildkite raised $21 million via convertible note in January 2026. Cash burn: $23.4M in FY25, up from $4.9M the year prior. Cash reserves dropped from $33.7M to $10.1M. Revenue grew 16% to $43.2M, but net loss more than doubled to $28.4M. Employee costs: $39.1M. Hosting: $11.3M. Current headcount: 134 people. The convertible note's pricing, conversion terms, and investor remain undisclosed. ASIC filings do not show whether the burn rate continued into FY26. ## Leadership Changes Co-founder Keith Pitt exited as CEO in March 2025. Kevin Gounden took over five months later. Co-founder Lachlan Donald returned as CTO. Chris Larkins was promoted to CRO in December 2025, after serving as VP of Sales. Pitt later discussed the exit on Valley of Doubt, mentioning mental health struggles and a call from Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar checking in. ## What It Means for Sales Buildkite sells enterprise CI/CD infrastructure to developer teams at Canva, Shopify, Slack, Twilio, and Lyft. The company has been formalising its go-to-market structure under new revenue leadership while managing cash carefully. The ANZ customer base includes MYOB, Iress, Whispir, and Tyro. The sales motion is enterprise adoption and usage expansion, typical for developer platforms competing against CircleCI, GitHub Actions, and GitLab. Employee costs hit $39M for 134 people. That works out to roughly $291K per head, which includes engineering, support, and G&A, not just sales. For context, DevOps sales engineer total comp in senior roles typically ranges $180K to $250K OTE in ANZ markets, with equity upside in private companies tied to eventual liquidity. Convertible notes often signal bridge financing before a priced round. The company raised a $28M Series A in 2020 and $31M Series B in 2022. This $21M appears to extend runway while the business works toward profitability or a cleaner funding story. Buildkite has not posted open sales roles publicly since the funding close. The CRO hire suggests the company is stabilising rather than scaling aggressively right now.

Startup Daily
19 days ago
News

Evatto raises $1.02m pre-seed, hiring for event ops platform

## Evatto raises $1.02m pre-seed, hiring for event ops platform Sydney event-tech startup Evatto closed $1.02 million pre-seed led by Perth VC Purpose Ventures. The company is building an AI-powered platform for enterprise event operations, targeting the spreadsheet-and-email workflows that still run most large-scale event programs. Co-founders Hailey Mason (CEO) and Chris Toward (COO) launched in 2025 after 50-plus combined years producing events for Red Bull, Casio, FIFA, and other major brands. They graduated Startmate Summer '26 cohort and are now working with customers including Invictus Games and Canada Snowboard. ### What this means for sales roles Evatto is very early stage: LinkedIn shows 1 to 10 employees, which likely means founding team plus a fractional Chief Product & Technical Officer (Owen Senior, listed from January 2026). No disclosed revenue. This is first institutional capital, so the business is still in build-and-validate phase, not revenue-scale. Pre-seed startups typically hire first sales hires 6 to 12 months post-raise, once product-market fit signals are stronger. If Evatto follows standard trajectory, expect SDR or founding AE roles mid-2027. Comp at this stage usually leans equity-heavy: think $80k to $100k base, 0.5% to 1.5% equity for first sales hire, with OTE structure coming later once pricing and deal cycles are proven. The raise will fund product development, international expansion, and "fresh faces on the team," per the company. No specific hiring numbers disclosed. ### Market context Event operations is fragmented: point solutions for planning, delivery, asset coordination, but no dominant ANZ platform. Evatto is positioning as system of record for enterprise event teams at agencies, venues, brands. Early customers are large-scale sports and entertainment programs, which suggests enterprise deal cycles and multi-stakeholder sales. Purpose Ventures' Kylie Gerrard backed the founders' domain depth and international ambition. Mason and Toward are founder-led sellers for now, which is standard at pre-seed. When they hire, they will need AEs who can navigate complex event buyer organisations and translate operational pain into platform value. For sales professionals watching this space: Evatto is 12 to 18 months from serious go-to-market hiring. Track them if enterprise event-tech is your patch, but this is not a near-term opportunity yet.

Startup Daily
19 days ago
News

ATO ruling hits Apple, Google on cross-border software payments

## What Happened The Australian Taxation Office issued a ruling that reclassifies certain cross-border software payments to offshore entities as taxable royalties. Translation: when Apple or Google moves money offshore for software licensing within their own corporate structure, the ATO can now tax it in Australia. This is not about profit shifting. This is about the character of the payment itself. ## Why It Matters to Sales Apple Services (App Store, subscriptions, digital payments) and Google Cloud both run on international settlement structures that now face new tax treatment. Apple's most recent quarterly revenue: $109.4 billion. Google parent Alphabet: $119.8 billion in Q2 2026. Google Cloud alone contributed $20 billion in Q1 2026. Those are not rounding errors. When compliance costs rise, pricing models shift. For ANZ enterprise sellers in the tech ecosystem, this means: - Procurement cycles may slow as legal and finance teams review cross-border payment structures - SaaS and cloud pricing could face upward pressure to absorb new withholding obligations - Contract negotiations with large platform vendors will include new tax allocation clauses Apple and Google both operate large ANZ commercial footprints, mostly through enterprise, channel, and public sector relationships rather than direct sales teams. That means the impact hits partner and enterprise sellers first. ## The Timing Australia has spent a decade trying to tax multinationals more effectively. Traditional profit-shifting rules have not kept pace with how platform companies operate. This ruling takes a different approach: rather than chase where profits end up, it taxes the payment on the way out. The ATO's corporate tax transparency data shows the scale of local operations. The ruling does not name specific companies, but the exposure is clear: any large tech company with Australian revenue and offshore software licensing now faces new tax treatment on those transactions. ## What Changes For sales teams selling into or alongside large tech platforms: expect customers to ask harder questions about total cost of ownership when cross-border payments are involved. Finance teams will model the withholding tax impact. Deals that were straightforward three months ago now include tax clauses. Worth noting: this is an ATO ruling, not legislation. Implementation details will emerge. But the direction is set, and the companies affected have the resources to fight it or price around it. Either way, enterprise sales cycles just got more complex.

Startup Daily
20 days ago
News

38% of Australian small business owners paid themselves under $40k in FY25

# 38% of Australian small business owners paid themselves under $40k in FY25 Nearly four in 10 Australian small business owners paid themselves less than $40,000, or nothing at all, in the 2025 financial year. The number comes from the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry's latest Small Business Conditions Survey, which polled 1,000+ businesses with up to 24 full-time equivalent employees. ## The economics of founder pay ACCI chief executive Andrew McKellar told SmartCompany that owners often pay themselves last, after rent, rates, suppliers, and staff wages. "In many cases," he said, "that meant owners were taking home less than some or even most of their staff." The data breaks down like this: 38.5% of owners paid themselves under $40k or zero. Meanwhile, 62.9% identified rising costs as their biggest challenge, and 48.9% cited maintaining profitability. ## What this means for B2B sales If you are selling into Australian SMBs, your buyer is operating on tight margins. They are not making discretionary software purchases. They are weighing your product against their own salary. SmartCompany reaches the 99.8% of Australian businesses with up to 200 staff, a segment that employs 70% of the workforce and contributes 50% of GDP. That is the market. These are the economics. For enterprise AEs used to six-figure deal cycles, this is the reality check: your small business prospects are often earning less than your OTE. Budget authority sits with someone who might be taking home $35k while working 60-hour weeks managing compliance, payroll, and accounts. The survey also found owners spend unpaid time on admin outside normal business hours. Translation: your demo needs to show immediate ROI, not a 12-month payback period. ## The compensation structure question The ACCI data does not break out how owners structure their comp: salary versus distributions, base versus profit share. That matters for vendors trying to qualify budget timing. An owner on a low salary might still have access to business cash flow, but profitability pressures mean discretionary spend is under scrutiny. For sales teams targeting SMB: understand that "business owner" does not automatically mean "well-paid decision maker." It often means someone grinding harder than their staff for less money, which changes how you position value.

SmartCompany
20 days ago
News

Meta launches paid support tiers for ANZ businesses, starts at subscription price

Meta launched Meta One in Australia on Wednesday, a subscription service that gives businesses access to real customer support staff, prioritised case handling, and live phone support. For companies that depend on Meta platforms to run pipeline, this is the first time human help has been a line item instead of a lottery. The pitch includes AI-powered tools like Meta Business Agent for handling sales enquiries and collecting buyer details in WhatsApp, plus expanded posting options. Helen Ma, Meta's head of subscriptions, says the service replaces fragmented third-party workflows: scheduling, analytics, link-in-bio tools, and cloud storage. Some paid tiers unlock native link posting in organic Reels and profiles, plus performance benchmarking against similar accounts. Meta says a feature called Edits Plus is launching soon, though details remain vague. ## What this means for ANZ sales teams Meta posted $60.8 billion in Q2 2026 revenue, up 28% year over year. The company cut about 8,000 employees in May 2026, bringing headcount to 75,472 as of June 30. Subscription support is incremental revenue on top of an already massive ads engine, and signals Meta is prioritising retention for business customers who need faster service than standard support provides. For SMBs using Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp as primary sales channels, paid support could mean fewer lost deals due to account lockouts or content moderation delays. The subtext: if you are running real revenue through Meta platforms, support access is now a cost of doing business. Mark Zuckerberg remains CEO, with John Hegeman as Chief Revenue Officer and Nicola Mendelsohn leading the Global Business Group. Dina Powell McCormick joined as president and vice chairman in January 2026, part of a senior leadership expansion. Meta has not disclosed ANZ-specific headcount or regional pricing for Meta One tiers. For businesses already locked into Meta as a growth channel, the question is not whether to pay for support, but what the comp structure looks like when your pipeline depends on it.

SmartCompany
20 days ago
News

Medow Health raises $3.5m for AI receptionist, now in 1,000 ANZ clinics

## Medow Health raises $3.5m for AI receptionist, now in 1,000 ANZ clinics Sydney medtech Medow Health closed $3.5m from existing investors to scale its AI Front Desk product. The platform answers calls, books appointments through existing practice management systems, and routes urgent cases to human receptionists. This is the third capital injection since January 2025: $2m in January, $3m in November, and now $3.5m. The company is bundling all three as an $8.5m seed round. Returning backers include Chris O'Brien Lifehouse CEO Professor Michael Boyer and orthopaedic surgeon Dr Michael Solomon. The product is live in more than 1,000 specialist clinics across Australia and New Zealand. Medow predicts it will process around 3 million consultations in 2026. Cofounder Joel Freiberg said up to half of patient calls to specialist clinics go unanswered due to demand, staff shortages, and receptionists prioritising in-clinic patients. ### What this means for healthtech sales Medow started as an AI scribe for medical reports in 2023, founded by brothers Joel and Josh Freiberg. The AI Front Desk launch marks a shift from single-product (doctor-focused) to multi-product platform (clinic-wide). That usually means expansion of sales headcount and territory structure. No CRO, VP Sales, or commercial leadership was disclosed. Available data suggests Medow is still a small team using seed capital to scale audience and partnerships rather than building out a large sales organisation. For healthtech AEs, this is early-stage territory: the product has clinic traction, but the go-to-market playbook is still being written. The ANZ healthtech AI receptionist category is heating up. My AI Front Desk, Hyro, and Luma Health all compete in scheduling automation. Medow's clinic footprint (1,000+ sites) suggests product-market fit, but the real test is whether $8.5m seed buys enough runway to build repeatable sales motion before the next funding milestone. Worth noting: HIPAA-equivalent compliance (in Australia, that is Privacy Act 1988 and My Health Records Act 2012) is table stakes for healthcare AI tools. Any healthtech sales pitch that does not lead with data security and regulatory compliance will get shut down in discovery.

Startup Daily
21 days ago
News

SaaStr runs 21 AI agents, closed millions, still needs human AEs

# SaaStr runs 21 AI agents, closed millions, still needs human AEs Jason Lemkin's SaaStr deployed 21 AI agents in production. They have closed millions in revenue. The human go-to-market team shrank from 6 people to 1.5. The agents book meetings on Saturday nights, resurrect leads abandoned six months ago, run invoicing and collections, and write to Salesforce without asking permission. Here is what the agents actually closed: SaaStr's inbound agent (Qualified) handled 442,000 chats, booked 614 meetings, and closed over $1 million in sponsorship revenue. Win-back campaigns through Agentforce hit 72% open rates on 1,000 ghosted sponsor leads, with 10%+ response rates and closed deals. The AI SDR layer sends 3,200 emails a month. A good human SDR at that scale sent 75 to 285. The agents open deals and process deals. The moment in the middle where somebody decides to spend money is still handled by a human. ## Agents take the easy half first Pylon's data on support says it plainly: deflected tickets are the easy tickets. Sales works the same way. PayPal put Agentforce on roughly 8,000 leads a month that no human was going to call. Meeting conversions went up 50% inside 14 weeks. That is coverage of abandoned pipeline, not agents replacing closers. Emergence's survey of 560+ B2B companies found 36% cut SDR headcount, only 14% cut sales engineers, and 28% grew AEs. The SDR compression is real and measured. The AE function is not compressing at the same rate because what agents leave behind is the hard residue: a buyer who is not sure, a champion who went quiet, a procurement team that wants terms nobody has offered, a competitive bake-off where the answer depends on reading a room. Anthropolis closing 54% of new enterprise logos self-serve is a great result. It works by removing the need for a closer, not automating one. The first place agents will truly close is anything that can close over text. That is a bigger share of mid-market than most founders admit. ## What this means for sales teams If you are an SDR, the coverage gap is closing fast. Agents already do qualification, scheduling, and infinite follow-up. If you are an AE, the job is concentrating on the part that was always hard: deals where the buyer needs convincing, procurement wants custom terms, or the competitive landscape is tight. The quota did not change when the agents showed up. The pipeline coverage did. Comp has not adjusted yet. OTE structures still assume human SDR support and manual follow-up. Worth noting: the ramp period for an AI-assisted AE role looks different than the traditional model, and hiring managers have not priced that in. SaaStr's model shows what full AI augmentation looks like at a small GTM team scale. The agents handle everything except the decision moment. That moment still requires a human. For now.

SaaStr
22 days ago
News

Kaggle founders raise $38.5M for Sumble, targeting ZoomInfo with context over contacts

## What Shipped Sumble, a San Francisco sales intelligence startup founded by Kaggle's Anthony Goldbloom and Ben Hamner, raised $38.5 million across seed and Series A rounds led by Coatue and Canaan. Marc Benioff and Nat Friedman are on the cap table. The company exited stealth in October 2025 with 19 enterprise customers, including teams from Databricks, Snowflake, and Figma. The pitch: sales intelligence built around what is happening inside an account, not just who works there. Instead of "this company uses Snowflake," Sumble surfaces which team uses it, who runs that team, how many people report to them, what they posted a job for three weeks ago, and what they have been migrating off since January. ## Why It Matters Contact databases got commoditised. Every rep has access to the same ZoomInfo list, the same Apollo contacts, the same LinkedIn filters. The differentiation moved to account context: org structure, tech stack mapped to specific teams, active hiring signals, live migrations. Sumble is positioning against ZoomInfo, 6sense, Apollo, and Cognism on three specific gaps: **Tech mapped to teams, not companies.** Knowing an account uses Grafana is a data point. Knowing the 72-person Platform Engineering team in Charlotte uses it, led by a named leader who posted three jobs mentioning it last month, is an opening line. **Real org structure.** Most tools infer reporting lines badly or do not attempt it. Sumble crawls job postings, company sites, and public filings to build actual team hierarchies. One customer example: a contact with the LinkedIn title "Implementation Manager" who actually ran an entire call centre. No title search finds that. **Timing signals.** Job postings are published intent data. When a company is staffing a cloud migration, that is when budget is live. Sumble reads job posts as buying signals rather than recruiting noise. ## The Numbers By October 2025: 19 enterprise customers, tens of thousands of users, roughly 30% on paid Pro plans, revenue up 550% year over year. Top-line revenue not disclosed. Headcount estimated at 29 employees as of January 2025. Pricing starts at $99 per month. Compare that to legacy vendors wanting $30k and a year-long contract before you see a record. ## The Product Angle Sumble ships an MCP server that drops its data directly into Claude, Cursor, or ChatGPT. Sales engineers can ask in plain English: "find Boston companies growing 20% year over year using Databricks and Looker with a data engineering team under four people." The model pulls decision makers and drafts outreach in the same pass. One team ran 1,800 accounts through it to find call centre usage, something no existing tool reliably surfaced, and got 61 qualified companies plus the actual budget owners. API and warehouse delivery into Salesforce, Snowflake, or Databricks. The workflow is built for RevOps teams running account-based plays, not just reps pulling lists. ## What This Means for ANZ Sales No evidence of a dedicated ANZ office or material ANZ headcount. Sumble appears US-based with global enterprise relevance. For ANZ teams buying sales intelligence, the market context is that pricing pressure is real. If a US vendor can enter at $99 per month versus $30k annual seats, ANZ buyers will start asking why local pricing sits where it does. The broader shift: sales intelligence is moving from contact volume to account context. If your current stack cannot tell you which team inside the account owns the budget, who they report to, and what they are hiring for right now, that is the gap Sumble is exploiting.

SaaStr
22 days ago
News

Harvey staffs 180 ex-lawyers as legal engineers, $220k-$320k OTE, 75/25 split

## Harvey's Legal Engineer Model: Domain Experts in Every Deal Harvey, the $11B legal AI company, has built a sales model that puts a former practicing lawyer into every customer deployment. Not just the big ones. All of them. The company has roughly 180 legal engineers, with an average of 8 to 10 years of legal practice before joining Harvey. CPO Anique Drumright walked through the model at SaaStr AI: these are attorneys who left practice to work in product deployment. ## The Comp and Role Structure Base through OTE runs $220k to $320k on a 75/25 split, plus equity. That is public on Harvey's careers page. The function splits three ways: pre-sales discovery, post-sales deployment, and custom solutions work. Minimum bar is a JD or equivalent plus three years at a top-tier firm, in-house team, or advising corporate legal. Most of the team practiced longer. ## Why This Matters for Enterprise Sales Harvey serves 1,400+ organizations across 60 countries, including over 60% of the AmLaw 100. The legal engineer model solves a credibility problem: a litigation partner can tell in one meeting whether you have actually run a matter. Harvey skips the six-month ramp by hiring people who already did the work. The role is not pure services drag. Legal engineers shape product roadmap based on what they surface in customer accounts. That feedback loop is what makes the $220k-$320k cost defensible at scale. For the biggest deployments, Harvey runs mixed forward-deployed pods: one or two legal engineers, a product manager, and software engineers working bespoke. ## The ANZ Context Harvey opened a Sydney office in 2025 with Ashleigh Whittaker as country manager. The company reports 40+ customers across Australia and New Zealand, including Gadens, Hall & Wilcox, Johnson Winter Slattery, Arnold Bloch Leibler, and Macpherson Kelley. Revenue has been reported at roughly $300M ARR by mid-2026. Headcount scaled from 340 employees in mid-2025 to an estimated 960-1,300 by 2026. ## What This Model Tells You The interesting move is Harvey now certifying legal engineers who do not work at Harvey. That is the play most people have not noticed yet. When you start credentialing your customer-side practitioners, you are building an ecosystem, not just a customer success function. For sales teams watching this space: forward-deployed engineer is becoming shorthand for embedded domain expert with technical chops. The comp reflects that. So does the hiring bar.

SaaStr
23 days ago
News

Technical CEOs run 82% of fastest-growing AI companies, zero came through sales

## The archetype is shifting Frank Slootman took three enterprise software companies public: Data Domain, ServiceNow, and Snowflake. Combined peak valuation exceeded $200 billion. That was the model for 20 years. Founder builds product, board brings in operator, operator installs sales machine, sales machine builds billion-dollar company. One detail matters: Slootman never carried a bag. He joined Compuware in 1993 as a product manager, ran products at Borland, then became CEO. No VP of Sales or CRO role anywhere on the resume. The sales reputation came from how he ran companies, not how he got there. Now look at who runs the fastest-growing B2B and AI companies. Databricks is worth $190B, growing 80%, led by a Berkeley professor. Replit hit $1B ARR, CEO wrote code in Amman internet cafes as a teenager. Harvey is at $11B, CEO is a securities litigator. Fireworks AI crossed $1B annualized, CEO ran PyTorch at Meta. Zero came through sales. ## The numbers 82 out of 100 fastest-growing AI startups are led by technical CEOs. In the 2013 Unicorn Club, that number was 49%. Across all founders, 86% of the AI cohort is technical versus 59% a decade ago. Databricks and Snowflake ran the controlled experiment. Same category, same era. Snowflake hired professional outside CEOs twice. Databricks promoted Ali Ghodsi, a Berkeley professor with no business experience. Databricks is now at $190B growing over 80%. Snowflake then replaced Slootman with Sridhar Ramaswamy, an engineer. Product revenue growth went from 26% to 34%. Ramaswamy's explanation involved rebuilding the sales organization, which is the part everyone skips. ServiceNow is the counterpoint. Bill McDermott, the archetype of the sales-operator CEO, is delivering 24.5% growth at $15.8B subscription revenue. The stock spent most of 2026 down roughly a third. The sales-guy CEO still produces the number. The market has stopped paying for it. ## What this means for sales careers The path from VP of Sales to CEO is narrowing in high-growth tech. Technical founders are staying in the seat longer. Domain experts, physicians running healthcare AI, lawyers running legal AI, are building billion-dollar companies without ever managing a territory. Snowflake still runs a 916-person quota-carrying sales organization out of 4,159 total sales and marketing headcount. The machine still matters. The question is who builds it and who runs the company afterward. For sales leaders eyeing the CEO track: the comp is still there, the operating role is still critical, but the succession plan has changed. Technical CEOs are hiring strong CROs and keeping the top job. If you want to run a B2B software company in 2026, your edge is not that you carried a bag. Your edge is that you can build go-to-market around a product the founder actually understands.

SaaStr
24 days ago
News

Miro sold for $1.4B with $435M cash: profitable since 2020, priced at 2.3x ARR

## The Deals Bending Spoons acquired Miro for $1.355 billion enterprise value in September 2026, closing five weeks after picking up Airtable for $1.285 billion. Miro sits at roughly $600 million ARR, nearly 90% from business and enterprise customers. Airtable reported approximately $480 million ARR growing over 20% year over year. Both companies were flush. Airtable held $965 million in cash. Miro held $435 million. Combined, $1.4 billion of the $2.6 billion in total enterprise value was money the companies already had sitting in their accounts. That cash came back at face value: 1.0x. The ARR got priced at 2.7x for Airtable, 2.3x for Miro. ## What This Means for Revenue Teams Miro was profitable in 2020, before raising $400 million at a $17.5 billion valuation in January 2022. It raised $476 million total across fourteen years. Airtable raised roughly $1.4 billion and burned through a chunk of it, including 491 layoffs across two rounds. Miro cut 394 people across two rounds (119 in February 2023, 275 in October 2024). Opposite capital strategies. Similar outcomes. Miro appointed Harold Klaje as Chief Revenue Officer in early 2025 to sharpen go-to-market execution. The company runs about 327 quota-carrying sales reps as of 2026 estimates, down from prior peaks. Airtable's headcount sat at roughly 927 employees in March 2026 after reductions. Both companies built recognisable B2B brands. Both survived the efficiency reckoning. Both got priced as cash-flow assets trading around public market comps for 20% growers, which sit near 2x ARR. ## The Numbers That Matter Miro: $600M ARR, 4 million paying users (about $150 per paying user annually), 750 customers over $100K ARR. No disclosed growth rate. Airtable: $480M ARR, 20%+ growth disclosed. Miro's release included user counts and customer segmentation but skipped the growth figure, which tells you something. Airtable ran a full AI rebuild under CEO Howie Liu, shipped Omni and Field Agents, acquired DeepSky (bringing in former OpenAI engineering lead David Azose as CTO), and launched Superagent in January 2026. The rebuild stabilised the business. It did not move the growth trajectory enough to change the multiple. Cash bought time. Profitability bought optionality. Neither changed the exit price by more than rounding error. The growth rate set the multiple, and twenty percent on half a billion dollars gets priced as a mature asset whatever the roadmap says. ## What Sales Leaders Should Track Every dollar in the bank account earns the worst multiple on the cap table. Airtable's ARR was worth 2.7x. Its cash was worth 1.0x. Miro's ARR was worth 2.3x. Its cash was worth 1.0x. In a company growing 60%, ARR might price at 8x or 10x. At 20%, you are trading near public comps regardless of brand strength or balance sheet depth. Both deals cleared within 40 basis points of each other on ARR multiple despite different growth profiles, different capital strategies, and different cash positions. The market priced them as B2B SaaS companies generating predictable cash flow in the low-twenties growth band. Capital efficiency is a good habit. It was not the variable that moved the outcome here.

SaaStr
25 days ago
News

Snowflake hits $6B run rate, 126% NRR: what reacceleration means for enterprise sales

## The Numbers Snowflake reported Q2 fiscal 2027 on 2 September. Product revenue hit $1.49 billion, up 37% year over year. That is the third consecutive quarter of acceleration, after quarters of 26%, 32%, 29%, 30%, 34%, then 37%. At $6 billion run rate, reacceleration almost never happens. Net revenue retention: 126%. Sequential product revenue adds went from $68M to $108M to $158M across three quarters. The last quarter was a record dollar add against their own best quarter. Full-year guide raised from $5.84B to $6.07B in one quarter. A $230M raise. Stock traded at $118 a year ago, closed at $306 before earnings, opened at $370 the next morning. ## The AI Motion CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy split the acceleration: half came from AI products (CoCo coding agent, CoWork knowledge worker agent, Cortex AI Gateway), half came from those products pulling more core platform consumption behind them. Adoption: CoCo surpassed 9,100 accounts, adding 2,000 in the quarter. CoWork reached 5,800 accounts. Total customer count: 14,554. Roughly 60% of the base is touching the coding agent. The pricing decision matters: AI runs on the same consumption meter customers already have. No separate SKU, no separate quota. Every AI query runs on data already in Snowflake, so the AI dollar and the core dollar arrive together. That is why the acceleration shows up in one revenue line. Ramaswamy noted the cost-management skill inside CoCo ranks in the top ten skills customers use. Snowflake shipped an agent that helps customers spend less on Snowflake. Consumption accelerated 7 points anyway. ## The Margin Trade Non-GAAP product gross margin: 74.7%, down from 76.4% a year ago. Full-year guide: 74%. CFO Brian Robins was direct: higher revenue mix from AI workloads that carry lower contribution margin. Snowflake buys the inference, so margin takes a hit. Operating margin guidance went up on the same call. The trade: give up two points of gross margin to fund AI, but drive enough volume that operating leverage improves anyway. ## What It Means for Sales New CRO Mike Gannon took over in March 2025, replacing Chris Degnan. The AI attach motion is landing without a separate sales cycle. That matters for quota structure: AEs are not carrying two numbers, they are landing expansion on the same consumption contract. Total RPO grew 30%. Current RPO grew 42%. Only 49 net new customers crossed $1M in the quarter. The growth is coming from existing accounts, not new logo hunting. Enterprise sales teams should note: 126% NRR at this scale means the land-and-expand motion is working, and the AI products are accelerating it without creating sales friction. Snowflake competes against AWS Redshift, Google BigQuery, Microsoft Azure Synapse, Databricks. The premium positioning holds, but the AI acceleration matters because it proves the platform can drive consumption growth even while giving customers tools to optimise spend. That is a rare combination in enterprise SaaS.

SaaStr
25 days ago
News

Startup CGT carve-out: 3-year hold, no $10m cap, 15-year window

Treasury released draft legislation Friday for a CGT carve-out aimed at startups, walking back some of the harsher provisions after sector blowback. The Innovative Business CGT Concession preserves the existing 50% CGT discount for qualifying founders, early-stage investors, and employee share scheme participants while broader CGT changes take effect from July 2027. The new draft cuts the minimum holding period from 5 years to 3, removes a proposed $10m lifetime cap on gains, and extends the age threshold from 10 years to 15 years since incorporation. Eligibility targets businesses with aggregate turnover under $50m that meet Treasury's test for "genuinely innovative" products, services, or processes. The carve-out also applies to active-asset businesses: the small-business CGT concession threshold is lifting from $2m to $10m in turnover, expanding coverage across a much larger base. Worth noting: the broader CGT changes are already law. From July 1, 2027, the existing 50% discount for individuals, trusts, and partnerships is replaced with cost-base indexation and a 30% minimum tax on gains. The startup carve-out is a policy response to lobbying pressure, but consultation is still open. Submissions close September 28. Context: the May Budget CGT changes triggered immediate pushback from the venture and startup community, with founders and investors warning the discount cut would stifle capital formation and push talent offshore. The IBCC is Treasury's attempt to thread the needle: collect more tax from passive investors while protecting early-stage risk capital. Practical impact for sales teams: if you are at a scale-up hiring against equity comp, or considering a role with an ESOP component, this matters. The 3-year hold is more realistic than 5, and the removal of the $10m cap removes a ceiling on upside. But the "innovative business" test is untested, and the legislation is still in draft. Watch the fine print before you bank on the discount in your comp modelling. Treasury wants feedback by late September. If your company has issued or plans to issue equity, make sure finance is across the consultation.

Startup Daily
25 days ago
News

First Table raises $10m, targets Australia double with off-peak model

# First Table raises $10m, targets Australia double with off-peak model New Zealand restaurant booking platform First Table closed a $10 million round led by Altered Capital. Existing backers Invest South, Mainland Angels and Snowball Effect shareholders participated, along with new investors K1W1 and Icehouse Ventures. The company sells off-peak restaurant inventory: diners get 50% off food when they book early tables, restaurants fill empty seats, First Table takes a booking fee and venues keep drinks at full price. Simple arbitrage on unused capacity. ## The numbers First Table operates across 65 cities in Australia, New Zealand, UK and Ireland. Current scale: 3.9 million users, 5,000 restaurants, 1,500 of those in Australia across 22 cities. The company is targeting 100% growth in ANZ over the next 12 months, focused on Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth. Founder Mat Weir launched in Queenstown in 2014. CEO Alex Cappy is leading the current expansion push. The company previously raised through Snowball Effect in 2023, targeting up to $4 million for international growth. It hired Casey Eden as global sales manager during that phase, signalling investment in revenue capability as it scaled. ## Market context First Table sits in the restaurant discovery and off-peak demand generation space. It integrates with seven major reservation systems and positions itself as revenue management for hospitality, not a pure discount app. Main competitor: EatClub, the Melbourne startup backed by Marco Pierre White. EatClub raised a $27 million Series B in February at an estimated $200 million valuation, following an $18.2 million Series A in May 2025. That funding gap tells you where the market sees the opportunity. Industry backdrop: Australians are dining out 12% less than pre-2020 but spending 8-15% more per visit. That creates opening for platforms that help restaurants monetise inventory during cost-of-living pressure. ## What it means for sales teams First Table is scaling fast in a competitive category. If you are in hospitality tech, restaurant POS, or venue management software, this is your ICP raising capital and expanding territory. The hiring ramp is coming: 100% growth target means doubling headcount in customer-facing roles over 12 months. For sales professionals considering the space: check the comp structure carefully. Hospitality is a grind vertical with long sales cycles and high churn. Ask about quota attainment, ramp periods, and what happens when venues drop off the platform.

Startup Daily
25 days ago
News

Four ANZ startups raise $21.5 million: First Table, Metacognition AI, Dela, GoTroppo

## Four ANZ startups closed $21.5 million this week First Table, the Queenstown-born restaurant tech startup, raised $10 million from Altered Capital, Invest South, Mainland Angels, K1W1, Icehouse Ventures, and Snowball Effect shareholders. The platform connects diners with off-peak restaurant tables at discounted rates, helping venues monetise empty inventory during quiet hours. CEO Alex Cappy says the capital will fund deeper expansion into Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth. The company already operates in 22 Australian cities. Worth noting: constrained consumer spending is driving demand on both sides of the marketplace. "People are being careful with their money right now, so an offer like ours [works]," Cappy said. The business model is inventory optimisation for hospitality, which means repeatable revenue if the unit economics hold. ### What else closed The article mentions three other funded startups but provides no detail beyond the collective $21.5 million total: - **Metacognition AI**: Building "Windows for robots" (likely a robotics interface or operating system layer) - **Dela**: Anti-scam tools (fraud prevention, likely B2B SaaS) - **GoTroppo**: Rewards for internet users (consumer loyalty or attention economy play) No round sizes, stages, or investor details were disclosed for these three. That opacity makes it hard to assess team scaling or sales hiring plans. ### What this means for sales teams Funding rounds typically precede headcount expansion. First Table's metro push will likely require AEs, partnerships managers, and possibly SDRs if they are moving upmarket to restaurant groups. The other three startups remain opaque, but "Windows for robots" and anti-scam platforms both suggest enterprise sales motion. For sales professionals: watch these companies' LinkedIn pages over the next 90 days. Series A capital usually means 2 to 6 new sales hires. If comp gets posted, we will cover it. ### Context ANZ startup funding remains active in 2024 despite broader market tightening. Recent rounds have spanned AI, fintech, healthtech, and marketplace software. First Table's $10 million is a meaningful cheque for a restaurant tech play in the current environment. The fact that existing investors doubled down (Altered Capital, Invest South, Mainland Angels) suggests the unit economics are working. The lack of detail on the other three companies is frustrating but typical for weekly funding roundups. If any of them are hiring sales roles, the numbers matter: OTE, quota, ramp period, and realistic attainment. We will track and report when that data surfaces.

SmartCompany
26 days ago
News

ElevenLabs hit $600M ARR in 41 months, pays reps when AI agents close deals

## The Numbers ElevenLabs went from $0 to $600M ARR in 41 months. The growth rate accelerated as the company scaled: $0 to $100M in 20 months, $100M to $200M in 10 months, $200M to $330M in 5 months, $330M to $600M in 6 months. Series D closed in February 2026 at $11B valuation, $500M round led by Sequoia with backing from NVIDIA, Salesforce, BlackRock. Carles Reina was employee #4, first GTM hire, and for nine months the only seller. He built the commercial org before moving full-time to Baobab Ventures, the $15M fund he raised in 2025. He spoke with Sam Blond (founder/CEO Monaco, former CRO Brex and Zenefits) on the build. ## The Comp Decision That Unlocked AI Agents Two years ago Reina pitched building AI into the sales motion: AI SDR, AI AE, AI CSM. The team objection was obvious: am I getting replaced? The comp decision settled it. When an AI agent closes revenue on an account, ElevenLabs still pays commission to the human who owns that account. You pay twice, once for the agent and once for the rep. That is the price of removing the friction. The alternative is reps quietly working against the system. Reina now recommends this structure to portfolio companies. Two demonstrations helped: an AI SDR that calls back immediately converts better than a human replying in 30 minutes. An AI CSM working SMB and mid-market upsells unlocks revenue nobody had time to chase. No rep wants to guard the inbox. The agents do work humans do not want, and the humans get paid when it closes. ## Four Other GTM Decisions **Quota at 20x base, uncapped, public commitment to lower it:** Set aggressive quota with public promise to adjust if market proves you wrong. Pay uncapped commission. Commission only on recurring contracts, $0 on POCs regardless of size. **Grants program killed competitors:** Startups under 25 employees got three months free. Tens of thousands of grants distributed. Over 10% of enterprise revenue came from that cohort. Competitors were same size, same funding base, lived on developer adoption. Three months free took that growth off the table for them. Cost: three months usage per account. Return: 10%+ of enterprise ARR. **Market launches got written thesis, defined result, 3-6 month scorecard:** US, Europe, Japan, India, Korea, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Middle East. Each market got its own channel mix. Tax and invoicing constraints decided direct versus reseller. Writing expected result before launch gives you a date to score it on. **Started with one dev dedicated to GTM AI tooling:** Took a year of pushing to get one developer. Built from there. ## What It Means The comp structure is the story. AI agents are already in production in sales orgs. The question is whether your leadership pays you when the agent closes the deal. ElevenLabs did. That is why their reps helped build it instead of fighting it. Headcount scaled from early team to 660+ employees by 2026. The company is globally distributed with no significant ANZ footprint. Category leader in AI voice generation, competing with PlayHT, Resemble, Murf, and Google/Amazon voice services. If your org is testing AI agents for prospecting or account management, the comp question is not theoretical anymore. It is live. ElevenLabs showed one answer that worked at scale.

SaaStr
26 days ago
News

Metacognition AI raises $10M for robot OS, hiring researchers

## Metacognition AI raises $10M for robot OS, hiring researchers Adelaide-based AI startup Metacognition AI closed a $10 million round from CSIRO-backed Main Sequence to build what it calls "Windows for robots." The platform sits underneath large language models and lets workers train robots through verbal instructions. Operators can direct industrial systems by speaking to the AI, which remembers instructions and improves over time. **What they are building:** An operating system for AI agents that controls how they interact with machinery. The team has built simulations for open-cut mining operations and electricity grid management. **The team:** Founded in 2024 by Anton van den Hengel (chief scientist at the Australian Institute for Machine Learning), Stephen Gould, and Paul Dalby. Current headcount sits at eight. They are hiring AI researchers. **Initial target:** Existing industrial systems in manufacturing, mining, and infrastructure. The sales motion appears to be early-stage pilots rather than scaled deployment. **Market context:** Metacognition is entering a crowded AI robotics segment. Competitors include Mind Robotics and Rhoda AI at the enterprise end, plus earlier-stage players like CynLr and Shifters. The differentiation angle: training by non-experts through voice, not traditional programming. **What this means for sales:** Early-stage deep tech with an enterprise sales motion still being built out. If you are tracking industrial AI deals or looking at robotics GTM strategy, this is one to watch. The voice-training angle could reduce implementation friction, which matters when your buyer is a mining operator or grid manager, not a software team. **Worth noting:** No public data on revenue, customer count, or ANZ expansion plans. Main Sequence typically backs Australian research commercialisation, so expect local market focus initially. The hiring push suggests they are moving from R&D to commercialisation. If you are an AI researcher or enterprise AE with industrial experience, the timing lines up.

Startup Daily
27 days ago
News

SaaStr cut headcount from 20 to 3 using AI agents, revenue up 47%

# SaaStr cut headcount from 20 to 3 using AI agents, revenue up 47% Jason Lemkin's SaaStr is now a 3-person operation backed by 20 AI agents doing real work. Not chatbots. Not copilots. Agents running go-to-market operations, processing contracts, sending invoices, managing a 450,000-person email list. The shift drove revenue growth from -19% to +47% year-on-year, according to Lemkin. SaaStr previously had 20+ employees. That is now down to 3, with agents handling roles across marketing, finance, and revenue operations. ## What the agents actually do Their lead agent, "10K," started as a revenue dashboard in January 2026. Now it forecasts pipeline, runs LinkedIn and X ad campaigns end-to-end (including creative through Higgsfield), manages daily list hygiene on the newsletter database, flips deals to Closed Won in Salesforce when contracts sign, generates invoices, and runs collections with 7-day escalation. It runs commission calculations. It fired three vendors, including one it had researched and shortlisted itself. When it spotted two customers still being billed $300/month for a product SaaStr discontinued six years ago, it flagged them. Nobody on the human team knew. "Annie," their event website agent, has 46,000 lines of code and the highest commit rate of any agent in the system. She manages the SaaStr Annual site, runs attendee newsletters, and hooks into visitor data for behavior-based campaigns. ## What broke The finance workflow ran supervised for three deals before going autonomous. It has produced one incorrect invoice since. Worse failure: Five minutes before Lemkin went on stage at SaaStr AI, he asked 10K to email 1,000+ founders about an unpromoted brunch. The agent pulled the list, caught its own error mid-task (confused Lightfield CRM with Lightspeed Ventures), researched a mass-send API, and asked for approval. Then it sent from a prohibited address. An address that has been off-limits for years and written into core memory. When asked how, the agent said it forgot to read memory. A human marketing manager makes that mistake too. A human just cannot make it 1,000 times before lunch. Lemkin: "Irreversible actions need a hard stop that doesn't depend on the agent remembering to stop." ## What this means for sales teams SaaStr peaked at nearly 30 agents and consolidated back to 20. Agent sprawl arrived faster than SaaS sprawl, Lemkin says, because overlapping agents produce conflicting answers and both sound confident. About 6 agents are touched daily. The rest run autonomous. Humans still click publish on ads and newsletter sends. Those are the two places SaaStr deliberately left a person in the loop. For ANZ context: SaaStr is US-based with no clear ANZ headcount, but this is the most detailed public breakdown yet of what happens when a company replaces sales and ops roles with agents at scale. Lemkin runs a $4-5M revenue business that reaches 5M+ monthly email impressions and sells into VP+ revenue audiences. The take: This is not about AI SDRs sending cold emails. This is about agents doing the operational work behind the sales org. Contract management. Invoicing. Collections. Campaign execution. The work that typically requires 3-4 ops and marketing people per AE. Worth noting: SaaStr's business model is events and media, not enterprise software sales. The agents work because the workflows are repeatable and the consequences of mistakes are containable. Your mileage will vary if you are running a $50k ACV sales cycle with custom terms.

SaaStr
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