Latest updates for ANZ sales professionals
Eight ANZ startups closed $102 million in funding over two weeks, led by automotive software company Partly's $71.5 million raise from DST Global and Blackbird. The NZ company now valued at $715 million is building an Australian team. The cohort spans deep tech, AI, and agtech, with most still in early scaling phases.
Almost half of Australian organisations already have a Chief AI Officer, with that number expected to hit 64% by 2027. Enterprise CAIO roles pay $350k–$500k+, Head of AI positions sit at $230k–$350k. Big four banks all have executive AI leaders. The hires signal AI is moving from experiment to C-suite function, but only 40% of companies actually have an AI strategy.
SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin says Adobe Marketo went down for a day and a half, broke unsubscribe links for two weeks, and missed a 450,000-subscriber send. Then Adobe asked for a 20% renewal increase. Lemkin runs SaaStr with 20+ AI agents and says the company has stopped hiring human SDRs and AEs: legacy SaaS cannot be operated by agents, so it gets replaced.
Jason Lemkin's team moved 10 years of data off Marketo after their AI agent kept hitting API rate limits. The agent recommended the switch. The migration cost $14 in agent time. This is what procurement looks like now.
Australian fintech Thriday warned customers Tuesday that a phishing email sent from its official address contains a fraudulent link requesting banking credentials. The timing matters: it hit during tax season, when small business owners are most vulnerable to credential harvesting attempts.
Melbourne sports tech startup Superstat closed a $3.5 million pre-seed led by Blackbird and is moving operations to Austin. The AI video analysis platform has 5,000 active users and is hiring a computer vision engineer and GTM partnerships lead. Worth noting: they are calling this pre-seed at $3.5M, which would be Series A territory in most ANZ markets.
New ATO taxation data shows who got real pay rises during the cost-of-living squeeze. Some roles saw income jump 15-20% while most treaded water. Here's what the numbers say about which patches are worth targeting.
Anthropic rebuilt their enterprise motion around AI and now closes 54% of new logos without a rep. Owner.com is running reps at $2M ARR each, 20x their OTE. PayPal pointed agents at 8,000 leads per month no human would touch. The war stories from SaaStr AI 2026 show what happens when sales teams actually ship AI, not just talk about it.
Jason Lemkin's team trained an AI agent to flip deals to Closed Won, generate invoices, chase payment, and calculate commission. Took 4 real deals to get it right. Now runs end to end with human on the loop, not in it.
ICONIQ data shows three-year contracts fell from 28% to 23% of new logos between 2023 and 2026, while sub-one-year deals jumped from 4% to 13%. The shift is driven by AI replacement cycles compressing to 18 months. Translation for AEs: stop forcing long commits, focus on fast ROI and NRR instead.
Eleanor Dorfman, leading Anthropic's commercial and industries team, shared the company's enterprise sales approach at SaaStr AI 2026. The playbook: layer AI workflows into existing stacks rather than force migration to chat-only interfaces. Three execs from different companies landed on the same primitive: skills-based orchestration beats binary implementation choices.
Jason Lemkin runs an eight-figure B2B business with 3 humans and 21 AI agents. They peaked at 30 agents a month ago, could not manage more, and consolidated back to 20. Output went up roughly 4x. Here is what agent consolidation actually looks like when you are running revenue operations, not a demo.