Latest updates for ANZ sales professionals
Over half of women leave tech before age 35, retention 45% lower than men. With women at 30% of the workforce versus 44% across professional roles, Australia cannot hit its 2030 target of 1.2 million tech workers without fixing systemic retention issues: pay gaps, harassment, and blocked advancement.
Victoria's startup agency LaunchVic is gone, folded into Breakthrough Victoria to form Innovation Victoria. The move comes as the state government cuts $4 billion from public spending. LaunchVic completed over 190 investments since 2017, focusing on early-stage and women-led startups.
Toast posted $6.5B ARR growing 22% while turning GAAP profitable for the first time. The restaurant POS company crossed 171,000 locations, added 7,000 net new in Q1, and has 40,000 using its AI agent platform weekly. Software margins hit 80%. Not slowing down.
Open USD launches 2026, backed by 140+ firms including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Google, and Shopify. Unlike Circle or Tether, reserve yields flow to partners, not a single issuer. Zero-cost minting targets payment companies and fintechs tired of high transaction fees.
Vercel automated lead qualification with an AI agent that costs $5,000 a year to run. The company reduced its SDR team from 10 people to 1.25, redeploying the rest into higher-value roles. COO Jeanne DeWitt Grosser says it is a 32x ROI, and SDR quotas went up 30% that quarter.
Coinbase slashed AI costs in half while usage grew, shifting to open-source models. The move exposes what sales leaders are quietly facing: token spend quintupled in H1 2026, but nobody can show the revenue lift. Even top B2B companies are now questioning whether their AI investment justifies the cost.
Elias Torres walked away from Drift's $1.2B acquisition calling it a failure. The product got shut down, the team was let go, and the mission died. Now he is building Agency, an AI company targeting $1B revenue with fewer than 100 employees, 80% engineers, and no traditional sales org.
Four Australian tech startups closed $80 million this week, led by aerospace company MAKO with $28 million Series A and Southern Launch with $25 million. This sits within Australia's $5.48 billion funding year, up 31% from 2024. Worth noting: hiring details were not disclosed in any of the rounds.
Government considering splitting audit and consulting arms at KPMG, EY, Deloitte, PwC after KPMG withdrawn AI report contained fabricated case studies. Caps on partner numbers also on table. Combined $219B revenue firms could face structural changes affecting thousands of ANZ consulting and sales roles.
A US government order blocked Australian access to Anthropic's top models in June. Days later, OpenAI delayed its GPT-5.6 launch, limiting rollout to 20 White House-approved partners. The moves highlight how little control ANZ has over AI infrastructure sales teams increasingly rely on for prospecting, research, and customer engagement.
Brisbane robotics startup Emesent closed $25m: $10m venture debt from NRFC (its first deal), $15m SAFE note from Main Sequence and others. Fourth raise since 2018 CSIRO spinout. They map mines with drones, sell to Rio Tinto and BHP. Funding goes to product dev and manufacturing scale at Wacol facility.
Jason Lemkin's SaaStr is consolidating AI agents instead of multiplying them. Their AI VP of Finance recovered six figures in overdue receivables and now runs inside their existing marketing agent. The pitch: fewer agents going deeper, not 100 specialized tools.