Latest updates for ANZ sales professionals
Melbourne seed VC Skalata Ventures is now Tall Order Ventures after CEO Rohan Workman and COO Maxine Lee bought out founder Paul Little in August. The firm paused new investments for five months to rebuild its deal flow with AI. Portfolio sits at 85 companies across three funds, roughly $50 million in latest fund size.
Draft legislation drops Monday: non-compete clauses banned for workers earning below $190,100. That covers most SDRs, BDRs, and mid-market AEs. Employers have until 2027 to rework contracts and retention strategy. High earners keep the clauses.
Public SaaS is back to January levels after an $2 trillion AI panic. The index recovered, but returns inside it split 117 points. CrowdStrike and monday.com both grew revenue over 20% and finished a hundred points apart. What sorted winners from losers: consumption pricing and whether AI workloads land on your platform.
Starting January 1, 2027, California applies sales tax to all SaaS and prewritten software. That is 7.25% to 10.75% depending on location, hitting both vendor pricing and buyer budgets. Custom software stays exempt, but if you built it once and sold it many times, it is taxable.
Nvidia guided to 70% revenue growth for fiscal 2028, crushing street expectations of 44%. Clay raised at a $7B valuation, cementing its position as the AI sales stack breakout. Meanwhile, hundreds of AI agents ran undetected inside OpenAI for weeks, exposing platform security gaps.
Xero pulled a sponsored Instagram post where an influencer claimed she saved $1,500 per month by replacing her accountant with Claude AI connected to Xero. The NZ$2.75 billion accounting software vendor apologised after accountants flagged the content as undermining the channel partners who actually sell its product.
Anthropic dropped an open-source guide for building Claude AI agents that handle customer service, payments, and back-office tasks in retail and travel. The $380 billion AI company runs on 18 quota-carrying reps globally, which tells you everything about where this is headed. Worth noting: you still need engineering resources to build it.
Salesforce Q2 FY27 earnings showed bookings re-acceleration with cRPO up 14%, revenue $11.3B (up 11%), and organic growth around 6%. Stock jumped 23%, lifting B2B software sentiment. The earnings beat came partly from a $2.53 EPS gain on their Anthropic stake, plus a $25B buyback. For sales teams at scale, the key metric: contracted future bookings grew 3 points faster than recognised revenue.
Sydney startups dominated this week's funding, with Gridsight pulling $36 million Series B for AI grid management, Pearler and Apate.AI securing capital, and Auckland's Drumbeat joining the round. Total: $67.2 million across 15 companies. Here is what that means for sales hiring and expansion budgets.
Melbourne-founded Airwallex pulled $970 million of Australia's $1.73 billion in fintech funding last financial year. The headline boom masks a reality: deal count hit a seven-year low at 53 rounds. One company's Series H skewed the entire market.
Drumbeat, an Auckland-founded AI PR platform, raised NZ$2 million seed led by Icehouse Ventures. The company has 50+ customers across NZ, AU, UK, and US with an 8-person team. Capital targets expansion into Australia and the United States, signalling sales-led growth beyond the home market.
Sydney talent marketplace Expert360 is selling to SwipeJobs for $16 million. Founder Bridget Loudon and early-stage investors will receive zero payout. The deal favours late-stage preference shareholders while wiping out seed and Series A backers who put in roughly $30 million since 2013.