Latest updates for ANZ sales professionals
Mako Aerospace closed a $28 million Series A led by Virescent Ventures. The Sydney-based drag reduction startup previously raised $700k in pre-seed (May 2022), meaning this round represents a 40x jump. Worth noting: Mako rebranded from MicroTau and has manufacturing partnerships in Australia, but headcount and sales team details remain undisclosed.
From July 1, Australian employers must pay superannuation within 7 business days of payday, down from 91 days. National minimum wage rises 4.75% to $26.44/hour. Parental leave extends to 26 weeks. Here's what changes for your comp budget and payroll admin.
Jason Lemkin's three-person team replaced contact forms with an AI agent that handled 402,000 interactions across 2.25 million sessions. The agent booked 614 qualified meetings at $85k average ticket size for a single event. No BDRs, almost zero complaints, and it runs campaigns and discount routing autonomously.
Noam Shazeer and John Jumper left Google for Anthropic within 48 hours, wiping $225 billion off Alphabet's market cap. The departures signal a talent retention crisis as Google holds #3 in AI behind OpenAI and Anthropic. Wall Street is questioning whether the company can compete when pre-IPO rivals offer equity upside that a public giant cannot match.
Melbourne-founded fintech closes $460M Series H at $16B valuation, doubling from $8B eight months ago. Revenue hit $1.3B ARR (up 74% YoY) as the company pushes AI-driven finance tools. Worth noting: AUSTRAC is still investigating AML/CTF compliance.
Australian businesses sending branded SMS (like 'YourCompany' instead of a phone number) have days to register their Sender ID with ACMA or face 'Unverified' labels on every text from July 1, 2026. That includes appointment reminders, booking confirmations, and sales outreach. Your customers will see it grouped with suspected scams.
Chetan Puttagunta breaks down Benchmark's AI investment thesis and what changed in GTM. The firm's seeing legal AI startups hit $100M ARR in 18 months while taking longer to find product-market fit. Direct sales is back, PLG is not the default, and the moat moved from code to distribution.
DeepMind alumni Adam Liska and Devang Agrawal closed $20M Series A for Airspeed, their AI sales execution platform. DN Capital led the round. The company hit 200 customers across 20 countries two years post-launch, automating CRM updates, follow-ups, and risk flagging for GTM teams.
PayPal deployed Salesforce Agentforce across 200 reps, targeting leads no human would touch. The AI SDR runs 10-nudge cadences on 8,000 dropped merchants monthly. Meeting conversions are up 50% in 14 weeks.
Adobe walked away from planned Creative Cloud price increases worth $500m ARR in H2 FY2026. The company that raised prices every year for the past decade just blinked. Enterprise renewals still getting the full increase, but consumer and SMB tier pricing power is gone. Canva at $4b ARR, Figma at $1.2b, and free Affinity changed the math.
Former NASA deputy administrator and Space Shuttle commander Pam Melroy joins Gilmour Space's board. The Queensland rocket builder hit unicorn status in January after a $217M Series E led by government fund NRFC and Hostplus. Worth noting: this is governance hire, not go-to-market.
Jason Lemkin's team strangled their pitch deck grader by adding too many rules. The lesson: over-guardrailing kills agents as fast as under-guardrailing. Meanwhile, their AI VP of Finance found an 8-year-old settings mistake and an agent now negotiates vendor contracts.