The Wire

Real-time updates from ANZ tech sales

3 months ago
News

Vercel cut SDR team from 10 to 1, costs $5k yearly

## The Numbers Vercel reduced its SDR function from 10 people to 1.25 full-time equivalents using an AI agent that costs $5,000 annually to run. The agent handles lead qualification across all time zones. One person manages US coverage, 0.25 FTE covers Europe and APAC. Engineering maintenance requires 20% of a single engineer. COO Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, who ran go-to-market at Google and Stripe before joining Vercel, calculates this as a 32x ROI. Nine salaries eliminated, replaced with compute that runs 24/7 at 90th percentile performance. The displaced team moved into higher-value sales roles. SDR quotas increased 30% the quarter after deployment. ## How They Built It A GTM engineer shadowed Vercel's top-performing SDR for days, documenting every browser tab, every qualification step, every data source she touched. LinkedIn, BuiltWith, CRM, Slack history. Each action became a workflow step before any AI entered the process. The agent ran in shadow mode for six weeks. The best SDR reviewed every output, fed corrections back until she could not improve it anymore. Production deployment followed. The same framework then scaled across 30 different SDR workflows: event follow-up, product-qualified accounts, time-based campaigns. First prototype took one engineer a weekend. Six weeks to production. ## What This Means for Sales Teams Vercel also automated 93% of technical support cases and 96% of content updates. This is not a demo: production scale, with costs included. The pattern repeats across functions. The architecture matters for anyone selling into companies building agents. If your product lacks accessible APIs, composable webhooks, or developer-friendly integration points, you are invisible to agentic workflows. Vercel would rip out tools that could not support this automation. For sales professionals: the deterministic parts of the job are moving to agents. Vercel's approach moved humans up the stack, not out the door. The question for your org is whether leadership frames this as headcount reduction or role evolution. Worth noting: Vercel hit $200 million ARR in 2025, up 80% year over year. They closed a $300 million Series F at a $9.3 billion valuation. This automation happened during hypergrowth, not contraction.

SaaStr
3 months ago
News

Drift co-founder calls $1.2B exit his biggest failure, builds Agency around customer obsession

## Drift co-founder calls $1.2B exit his biggest failure, builds Agency around customer obsession Elias Torres sold Drift for $1.2 billion. The product got shut down. The team was let go. He calls it his biggest failure. The Drift co-founder joined GTMnow to explain why the headline number felt hollow, and what he is building next: Agency, an AI company that runs customer operations end-to-end. The pitch is bold: $1B in revenue with fewer than 100 employees, where 80-90% of the team are engineers and everyone talks to customers. Torres is clear about what went wrong at Drift: losing control meant the mission died. "Success isn't the headline number," he said. "It's building something enduring that keeps delivering value to customers." The exit taught him that money changes nothing about identity, and that letting down customers and team is the real failure worth learning from. ### The Agency thesis: constraint as strategy Agency is backed by Sequoia's Pat Grady and HubSpot's Brian Halligan. Torres runs the entire company on Agency itself, no CRM. The constraint is deliberate: headcount cap at 100 forces efficiency. "Necessity forces creativity," Torres said. "Abundance breeds bloat." He points to coding agents advancing fast enough that even 25 engineers may be more than needed. The customer obsession piece is non-negotiable: every hire talks to customers, regardless of role. ### What this means for sales teams Torres believes sales will be the last role AI eliminates, but the function is changing. Distribution is harder than product in the AI era. Customer obsession is the only sustainable moat. His advice for sales leaders: constraint protects clarity, bloat kills speed, and the title matters less than the work. Agency is bootstrapped in approach despite backing, focused on North American market, with no confirmed ANZ presence. Torres has spent 20+ years building with David Cancel (Performable, HubSpot, Drift), and the partnership endures through this next build. The pitch is ambitious. The track record is proven. The lessons from the $1.2B exit are specific: enduring value beats exit headlines, customer obsession beats feature velocity, and constraint beats scale.

Sales Hacker
3 months ago
News

LaunchVic shuts down, merged into Innovation Victoria after 8 years

LaunchVic shut down after eight years, merged into Breakthrough Victoria to create Innovation Victoria. The consolidation is part of broader cost cuts as Victoria faces $194 billion state debt. **What happened:** LaunchVic, Victoria's startup support agency since 2017, completed 190+ investments across hundreds of startups before being dissolved. Its equity investment functions moved to Breakthrough Victoria (a $2 billion government fund focused on later-stage deals), while grant programs shifted to Invest Victoria. **Leadership changes:** Former LaunchVic CEO Dr Kate Cornick left for Tech Council of Australia. Breakthrough Victoria CEO Rod Bristow now leads Innovation Victoria. Former LaunchVic chair Leigh Jasper exited, with board director Geoff Tarrant (Payapps cofounder, acquired by Autodesk in 2024) stepping up as chair. **The numbers:** LaunchVic helped push women-led ventures from 20% to 33% of Victorian startups between 2020 and now. Victoria pulled $2.2 billion in VC funding in 2025 (2.9x increase from 2024), claiming top ANZ spot. **What it means:** Victoria is consolidating startup support under fewer agencies. Innovation Victoria positions itself as a "single front door" for founders, researchers, and investors. Translation: one agency instead of multiple touchpoints, ostensibly simpler for startups navigating government programs. **Worth noting:** The merger comes as Victorian Labor trails in polls ahead of the November 28 state election. The government is selling this as streamlining, but it is also cost-cutting during a budget crisis. Whether that improves or damages Victoria's startup ecosystem depends on execution, not the rebrand. For founders and sales teams at Victorian startups: your government contact just changed. The programs might look different. The money is still there (Breakthrough Victoria has $2 billion), but the early-stage focus LaunchVic championed is now under a bigger tent with later-stage priorities.

Startup Daily
3 months ago
News

SaaStr runs sales with 3 humans, 20 AI agents, collapses finance into marketing AI

## SaaStr runs sales with 3 humans, 20 AI agents, collapses finance into marketing AI SaaStr is running its entire operation with 3 humans and more than 20 AI agents in production. Their latest move: an AI VP of Finance that does not exist as a standalone tool. It runs inside 10K, their AI VP of Marketing built on Replit. The setup flips the prevailing narrative. Most vendors are selling you 100 specialized agents, one per function, each with its own login. SaaStr is going the opposite direction: fewer agents, each going deeper, all pulling from shared context about the business. The trigger was collections falling six figures behind. When you are lean, late payments are not rounding errors. They are the difference between paying commissions on time or not. Their part-time finance team fell behind, someone went on vacation, the backlog never recovered. Collections is work people avoid because it is awkward. Asking a real company to pay $45k to $400k for a sponsorship 60 days after the event slips to the bottom of the list. It stays there until you write it off. So they built an AI VP of Finance. Not because it sounded cool. Because they had a high-pain use case worth solving. ### What this means for sales ops SaaStr connected four finance systems to 10K: bill.com (under 10 minutes), Mercury (straightforward), Stripe (easy), and QuickBooks (the painful one). The agent sits on top of the APIs and sees the whole picture. The architectural choice matters. One consolidated agent with deep context versus a dozen narrow agents that cannot talk to each other. It is closer to a monorepo than an app store. Customer success is already seeing this. QBee, their AI VP of Customer Success, cut human hours by 70%. Not 70% faster. 70% fewer human hours required. ### The outbound reality check Sam Blond, founder of Monaco (one of the 20 agents SaaStr runs), joined their podcast. His take: outbound is not dead, but the bar is higher. AI SDRs can handle volume, but the strategy still requires humans who understand the market. SaaStr is not running a traditional sales team. They are proving you can automate go-to-market functions without replacing strategic thinking. The AI handles execution. Humans handle strategy and oversight. Amelia Lerutte, Chief AI Officer at SaaStr, built 10K and QBee. She now has a human marketing exec reporting to 10K. That reporting structure is the story: AI leads execution, humans manage the agent. ### The takeaway for ANZ sales teams This is not vapourware. SaaStr is a real business running real revenue operations with this stack. They are based in San Francisco with no reported ANZ operations, but the model is relevant everywhere. If you are evaluating AI SDR tools or sales automation, the question is not whether to use agents. It is whether you want 100 disconnected tools or a few that actually know your business. Collections going on autopilot is table stakes. The real shift is agents collapsing into each other, not multiplying. Fewer logins, deeper context, less overhead. That is what agentic selling looks like when you strip out the vendor pitch decks.

SaaStr
3 months ago
News

Visa, Stripe back Open USD stablecoin: zero-fee B2B payments launch 2026

## What it is Open USD (OUSD) is a new US dollar stablecoin governed by Open Standard, an independent consortium launched June 2026. 140+ backers include Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Coinbase, Google, Shopify, BlackRock, and Ripple. Launch expected later in 2026. Key difference: zero-fee minting and redemption with no volume caps. Most stablecoins charge fees and limit supply. OUSD scales on demand. ## Why it matters for B2B Target market is businesses, payment processors, banks, and fintechs needing efficient cross-border settlement. The pitch: lower costs than traditional payment rails, faster settlement than wire transfers, more transparent economics than existing stablecoins. Reserve income gets shared across ecosystem partners instead of captured entirely by an issuer. This is the consortium governance model: no single entity controls the network. ## Who is running it Zach Abrams, founding CEO of Open Standard, previously co-founded Bridge (stablecoin infrastructure, acquired by Stripe late 2024). Stripe integration likely matters for ANZ adoption. Worth noting: Open Standard itself has no public ANZ headcount or local sales team. But founding partners Visa, Stripe, and Mastercard have significant ANZ operations. Stripe employs hundreds across Australia and New Zealand in sales, engineering, and customer success. ## Market position Not positioned as a competitor to USDC (Circle) or USDT (Tether), but as shared network infrastructure. The model: collaborative asset versus issuer-led token. Tether and Circle are notably absent from the backer list. Early coverage frames this as a challenge to their yield-driven economics. ## Enterprise stablecoin adoption context Stablecoin transaction volume hit record levels in 2024. B2B fintech adoption is accelerating, particularly for cross-border payments where traditional methods remain slow and expensive. Visa Direct already supports stablecoin settlement in select markets. Open USD extends this infrastructure play: making digital dollars work like native internet money for business payments. ## What to watch Launch timing (later 2026), initial adoption metrics, and whether the zero-fee model actually scales. Also: how ANZ businesses access it given no local Open Standard team. Likely route is through existing Stripe, Visa, or Mastercard relationships. The bigger question: does consortium governance work at scale, or do decisions bog down when 140 partners have input? Enterprise payment infrastructure needs to ship fast and stay reliable.

SmartCompany
3 months ago
News

Australian Medical Angels raising $40m fund, hires ex-Startmate CEO as venture partner

## The Move Australian Medical Angels, a Sydney angel syndicate run by doctors, is raising a $40 million fund and hired Michael Batko as venture partner. Batko ran Startmate for eight years, backed 220 companies, and built a portfolio worth $3.5 billion. He stepped down in early 2026 and joined Medical Angels in March to handle the raise, investor relations, and operations. The fund hit $4 million in commitments in 10 weeks. It is structured as an Early Stage Venture Capital Limited Partnership (ESVCLP), targeting digital health, MedTech, healthcare SaaS, and low-risk medical devices. ## What It Means for Sales More funded health tech startups means more med device and health tech sales roles in ANZ. Medical Angels has backed 30 companies since 2017, all still operating, including Smileyscope (VR-based pain management) and Coviu (telehealth platform running 300,000 monthly consultations). If you are tracking med device sales opportunities, watch Medical Angels portfolio companies. They focus on rural health and healthcare equity, which means selling into underserved markets, not just metro hospitals. ## The Comp Context VC-backed med device startups typically hire sales reps during or after seed rounds. Entry-level med device sales reps in Australia earn $60k to $80k base, with OTE around $100k to $120k. Senior sales directors at established med device companies pull $180k to $250k OTE. Early-stage health tech companies often sit below these benchmarks but offer equity upside. Operating partners at VC firms, Batko's new role, typically earn $150k to $300k base depending on fund size and scope. Medical Angels is smaller than funds like Medtronic Ventures or SV Health Investors, but Batko's part-time arrangement and startup equity (he co-founded Hourglass AI) suggests comp is structured around carried interest and portfolio performance. ## Why This Matters Australian Medical Angels is doctor-led, which means clinical validation before investment. That matters for sales teams pitching to hospitals: portfolio companies have built-in clinical credibility. The $40 million fund is small compared to US players like Versant Ventures, but in ANZ early-stage health tech, it is a meaningful capital source. Batko's network from Startmate adds distribution. If you are hiring or job hunting in ANZ health tech sales, track this fund's portfolio announcements.

Startup Daily
3 months ago
News

Emesent raises $25M debt, no sales hiring details disclosed

## The Round Emesent, a Milton-based drone autonomy startup, closed $25M: $10M venture debt from National Reconstruction Fund Corporation (NRFC's first debt deal), plus $15M in SAFE notes from Main Sequence Ventures, QIC, NGS Super, Hostplus, and Orion Resource Partners. Total raised to date: $60M across seed (2018), $32M Series A (2022), and this debt round. ## What They Actually Do Emesent makes Hovermap, a LiDAR mapping system for GPS-denied environments like underground mines. The tech maps spaces where traditional surveying fails: collapsed tunnels, active stopes, hazardous industrial sites. Customer list includes Rio Tinto, BHP, Glencore. They claim 200+ mine sites globally, which suggests decent enterprise traction in a sector notorious for long sales cycles. ## The Sales Angle Here is what we do not know: sales team size, hiring plans, territory structure, or comp. The funding announcement mentions expanding manufacturing in Wacol, Queensland and developing their Cortex AI platform. No mention of adding AEs, building out enterprise sales, or scaling go-to-market. For a company serving 200+ mine sites with $60M raised, that is notable silence on the commercial side. ## Market Context Mining tech sales typically means: - 12-18 month enterprise cycles - Technical sales requiring domain expertise - Territory covering multiple countries (ANZ mines operate globally) - Comp structured around long-term deals, not transactional velocity Competitors in autonomous mapping include Autodesk Map3D, Waypoint, HighGround. Emesent's CSIRO heritage gives them tech credibility, but commercial execution is what scales revenue. ## What This Means Venture debt usually signals one of two things: extending runway without dilution, or bridging to a larger equity round. At $60M total raised, Emesent is beyond early-stage but has not disclosed ARR or revenue metrics. For sales professionals eyeing mining tech or autonomous systems roles: Emesent is cashed up and serving blue-chip customers, but they are not publicly hiring sales. Worth monitoring for future expansion, particularly if they open North American or European offices to support those 200+ mine sites. The NRFC investment adds government backing, which can help with enterprise credibility in regulated sectors like mining. That matters when your buyer is a multinational pulling resources from sensitive locations. ## Bottom Line Funded, enterprise customers, no disclosed sales hiring. If you are selling into mining or industrial automation, Emesent is a competitor to watch. If you are looking for mining tech sales roles, this capital raise did not come with job postings.

SmartCompany
3 months ago
News

Big 4 consulting firms face forced splits, caps after KPMG, EY scandals

## Regulatory Hammer Coming for Big 4 Australian regulators are weighing forced splits of the Big 4 consulting firms after KPMG misused confidential audit documents and mishandled a whistleblower who flagged the problem. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese: "The behaviour of some of these big accounting firms has been completely unacceptable, and they need to be held to account." Assistant Treasurer Daniel Mulino confirmed the government is looking at separating consulting from audit functions and reducing partner counts at Deloitte, PwC, EY, and KPMG. ## What Actually Happened KPMG's audit team accessed confidential client documents without authorisation. When the firm's former COO raised concerns internally in 2024, KPMG bungled the response. ASIC opened a formal investigation. This follows EY's audit failures in the Thomas Cook collapse and the 1MDB scandal, which touched three of the Big 4. Worth noting: the Big 4 collectively generated $219 billion in revenue in 2025. They dominate global auditing, tax, and consulting. That scale is now the problem. When your audit division reviews companies your consulting division advises, regulators see conflicts of interest. ## What This Means for Sales Teams If forced splits happen, expect structural chaos at these firms. Consulting divisions would spin out as separate entities. That means new org charts, new comp structures, potentially new territories. For sellers at the Big 4: your book of business might get carved up. For sellers targeting the Big 4: budget cycles will be a mess during restructuring. The firms are also facing hiring scrutiny. Government contracts are under review. Enterprise buyers are asking harder questions about conflicts of interest. ## ANZ Context ASIC is leading the regulatory push. ANZ operations are central to the investigation, though specific local headcount changes have not been reported yet. Industry peers reportedly view KPMG as a "joke" after repeated scandals. That reputation damage shows up in deal cycles. Enterprise buyers remember. Regulators want audit independence. The Big 4 built empires on cross-selling audit and consulting. That model is now under threat. The comp plans, territories, and quota structures built on that model are about to get rewritten.

SmartCompany
3 months ago
News

US export controls cut Australian access to Anthropic, OpenAI top models

## US pulls the plug on AI access On a Friday in June, Anthropic received an order to suspend foreign access to its most powerful models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5. Australian users lost access within hours. Days later, OpenAI announced GPT-5.6 but limited the release to about 20 "trusted partners" pre-approved by the Trump administration. The pattern is clear: when US export policy shifts, Australian businesses find out after the fact. ## What this means for sales teams If your sales stack runs on frontier AI models (think: prospecting tools, email generation, call analysis), you are exposed to US export controls. That is not a hypothetical risk anymore. Anthropic's suspension hit users mid-workflow. No advance notice. No local alternative ready. OpenAI's controlled release means the newest capabilities will reach approved US partners first, then maybe ANZ later. For sales leaders evaluating AI tools: ask your vendors about jurisdiction risk. Where are the models hosted? What happens if export rules change? Do they have fallback options? ## The sovereign AI question Australia talks about sovereign AI capability but does not control access to the models most companies actually use. That gap showed up clearly in June. Neural Concept, a Swiss engineering AI platform, just closed $100 million Series C led by Goldman Sachs. They are not hiring in ANZ. The AI tooling market is concentrating in the US and Europe, with ANZ as a downstream customer. That is fine until export policy shifts and your sales team loses access to the tools they rely on. Then it is a business continuity problem. ## Worth noting OpenAI said it does not want government pre-approval to become the default. But it is accepting the process for GPT-5.6. That sets a precedent. For ANZ sales teams: build contingency plans. When the next export control drops, you will find out on a Friday afternoon, mid-quarter.

SmartCompany
3 months ago
News

Southern Launch raises $25m, hiring for Australia's only approved spaceports

Southern Launch closed a $25 million Series A in June 2026. Lead investor: Brindabella & Company, a national security-focused firm. The National Reconstruction Fund kicked in $10 million. Former Macquarie Group execs Nicholas Moore and Alex Harvey joined the round. The company operates two spaceports in South Australia: Koonibba Test Range near Ceduna and Whalers Way Orbital Launch Complex near Port Lincoln. These are Australia's only rocket facilities approved by the Australian Space Agency for orbital and sub-orbital launches. That regulatory moat matters: competitors must use overseas facilities. The funds go toward hiring and expanding launch services. Southern Launch offers end-to-end mission services: regulatory approval, logistics, range management, and recovery operations. Customer base spans commercial satellite operators, defence agencies, and research institutions. This follows a $12 million Series A in May 2022 from the Australian Space Agency and a $987,000 grant in March 2025. Total raised to date sits north of $38 million. **What this means for sales professionals:** The ANZ space economy is building infrastructure, and infrastructure needs commercial teams. Southern Launch sells launch services, which means technical sales roles, business development, and account management for defence and commercial clients. Comp data is not public yet, but expect technical sales cycles, government procurement experience valued, and likely defence clearance requirements for some roles. The company maintains its entire operation in South Australia. No offshore headcount reported. This is a regional play with global customers, which creates interesting territory dynamics for any future sales hiring. Competitors include Rocket Lab (Australian-founded, operates from New Zealand and US), SpaceX, and Blue Origin. Southern Launch's edge: Southern Hemisphere location and exclusive Australian regulatory approval. For commercial teams, that translates to a differentiated pitch in a crowded launch services market. Headcount expansion timeline and specific role counts have not been disclosed. The company has not publicly named a CRO or VP Sales.

SmartCompany
3 months ago
News

Databricks at $5.4B run rate: Every software monopoly falls in 24 months

## The Numbers Databricks is running at $5.4B revenue, up 65% year over year. AI products alone hit a $1.4B run rate. Net dollar retention sits above 140%, meaning existing customers are expanding fast. The company just closed a $7B financing round at a $134B valuation, with talks of another round that could value it at $165B to $175B. For context: that is faster growth than Snowflake at the same stage. The company is now in direct competition with AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Snowflake. Co-founder Arsalan Tavakoli-Shiraji is making a bold claim: every software monopoly today will not have one in 12 to 24 months. ## What That Means for Sales Teams When a company grows this fast, sales org structure changes constantly. Territory assignments get redrawn. Quotas shift. New layers of management appear. If you are at Databricks or competing against them, expect: - **Territory reshuffles.** High-growth companies carve up patches to add headcount. Your book of business might look different in six months. - **Comp structure changes.** Consumption-based SaaS means variable commission. Your OTE depends on customer usage patterns, not just closed deals. - **Hiring waves.** Databricks has been adding sales headcount. That means new AEs, new SDRs, and new leadership. More reps means smaller territories and tighter quotas. ## The Enterprise AI Reality Tavakoli's take: enterprises are spending heavily on AI tokens, but most do not know the ROI. CEOs told their teams to use AI, so token spend is climbing. Nobody is measuring output. For sales teams, that is the opening. The pitch is not "we have AI." It is "we tie AI spend to a measurable outcome." Enterprises are tired of dashboards nobody looks at. They want answers in 30 seconds, not a week-long turnaround from a data analyst. ## The Monopoly Claim Tavakoli says three forces are breaking pricing power: build costs dropping, low-end competition, and easier migrations. Databricks spent 13 years building a moat in data and AI. Now they are betting that moat protects them while everyone else's crumbles. Whether that happens in 24 months is debatable. What is not debatable: Databricks is growing fast, hiring aggressively, and reshaping the data platform market. If you are in enterprise sales, you are either selling this or competing against it. ## Worth Noting Databricks operates on a consumption model. Customers pay for compute, storage, and data processing usage. That means your commission depends on customer usage after the close, not just the contract value. Ramp periods matter. Churn matters. Expansion matters. This is not a close-and-move-on sale.

SaaStr
3 months ago
News

Sydney aerospace startup Mako raises $28M Series A, no sales team yet

## Sydney aerospace startup Mako raises $28M Series A, no sales team yet Mako, the Sydney startup building shark skin-inspired film to reduce aircraft drag, closed a $28 million Series A led by Virescent Ventures. The round brings total funding to $37 million after a $5.6 million seed in 2022 and a $3 million government grant in March 2026. The product, Flightfilm, cuts fuel consumption by around 4% per aircraft. Testing on a US Air Force C-130J validated the numbers. Commercial pilots include Delta Air Lines and IAG subsidiary Vueling, with more Asia Pacific carriers in the pipeline. Funding goes toward regulatory approval in Australia, Europe, and the US, plus manufacturing capacity for pre-orders from commercial and defence clients. ### What this means for sales professionals Mako is 11 years old (founded 2015) but operating with typical early-stage opacity. No public headcount. No CRO listed. No sales team size disclosed. That will change as they scale toward commercial delivery. Aerospace sales at startups typically splits into two tracks: technical sales engineers working directly with airlines and defence primes, and business development reps chasing partnerships. Entry level aerospace startup sales roles in the US range from $60k-$80k base for junior BDRs to $120k-$150k OTE for sales engineers with technical backgrounds. ANZ comp typically sits 20-30% below US rates. Private jet brokers (different category, consumer-facing) earn $50k-$80k base with uncapped commission, though that is not relevant here. Mako is B2B enterprise and government. Series A aerospace startups like Mako rarely grant significant equity to sales hires outside leadership. Typical equity at Series A for a senior sales hire: 0.1-0.5%, vesting over four years. Individual contributor AEs might see 0.01-0.05% if they join early enough. If Mako follows the standard playbook, expect hiring announcements in the next 6-12 months as they move from pilots to commercial contracts. Watch for a VP Sales or Head of Commercial role first, then AEs targeting airlines and defence. ### Context: aerospace startup funding Aerospace startups raised significant capital in 2024-2025, though most focus on electric propulsion or urban air mobility rather than efficiency tech. Firefly Aerospace (orbital launch) and Heart Aerospace (electric regional aircraft) both closed large rounds. Mako's drag-reduction angle is less capital-intensive than building engines or airframes, but harder to scale without airline adoption. The $28 million signals investor confidence, but aerospace sales cycles are brutal: 18-36 months from pilot to contract, heavy regulatory approval requirements, and risk-averse buyers. Sales teams at aerospace startups need technical fluency and patience. No ANZ presence beyond Sydney HQ. If they expand into Asia Pacific airline markets, expect Melbourne or Singapore sales roles eventually.

Startup Daily
3 months ago
News

myID expands to private sector, businesses pay from Jan 2027

## What's Happening From December 1, 2026, accredited private sector businesses can apply to join the Australian Government Digital ID System (AGDIS) and verify customer identities using myID credentials. Businesses using the system will start paying cost-recovery fees from January 1, 2027. This is Phase 3 of Australia's national Digital ID rollout. The system is voluntary, operated by the Department of Finance, and designed to replace physical documents for online transactions. Finance Minister Katy Gallagher confirmed 264 government services now support Digital ID: 155 Commonwealth, 109 state and territory. ## Why It Matters for Sales Teams If you sell to financial services, property platforms, or any business handling sensitive customer data, this changes the compliance and onboarding conversation. Banks and insurers will be evaluating Digital ID integration to streamline KYC processes and reduce fraud. The cost-recovery model means businesses pay fees for authentication and verification, not individuals. That creates budget lines and procurement conversations. If your product touches identity verification, customer onboarding, or compliance workflows, you need to understand how myID integration affects your buyer's roadmap. Accredited private Digital ID providers can also offer competing services through the government framework and charge commercially. That means new vendors entering the market and existing players adjusting positioning. ## The Numbers The government has not published fee structures yet. Basic identity services remain free for individuals. Business fees are described as "minimised and transparent," but no specific pricing has been released. Australia's system sits alongside the EU Digital Identity Wallet (expected end-2026), Singpass (Singapore), and UAE Pass. The expansion to private sector is expected to drive adoption and reduce identity fraud across sectors. ## What's Next December 2026 is the application window. If your patch includes financial services, insurance, or property tech, expect procurement cycles to include Digital ID compliance requirements. Worth asking: does your product integrate with AGDIS? If not, why not?

SmartCompany
3 months ago
News

Funds SA drops $5m into Adelaide VC Eastend Ventures' debut fund

Funds SA, South Australia's $50 billion government investment corporation, committed $5 million to Eastend Ventures Fund 1. The institutional backing brings the Adelaide VC's total raise to $25 million, targeting a $50 million final close. The commitment is notable because institutions rarely back first-time funds. Eastend Ventures launched in 2024, founded by JD Sheard and Josh Garratt to invest in early-stage B2B tech across South Australia, Western Australia, and Queensland. "Their team spent a great deal of time getting to know our business, our processes and our portfolio," Sheard said. "Coming through that level of scrutiny is a strong signal to every investor in the fund." Eastend holds ESVCLP registration, South Australia's first and only unconditionally registered Early Stage Venture Capital Limited Partnership. That structure offers investors capital gains tax-free returns and up to 10% tax offsets. Minimum LP commitment sits at $250,000. The firm's thesis: regional founders build differently. "Because capital is harder to come by in a smaller market like Adelaide, founders here tend to be revenue-focused rather than reliant on endless funding rounds," Garratt said. "That's a feature, not a bug." Eastend targets B2B technology companies at angel, early, and growth stages. Portfolio includes JackApp, Priori Analytica, and Nitrosend. The fund aims to deploy across up to 30 early-stage businesses. **What this means for sales teams:** More regional capital means more B2B startups building outside Sydney and Melbourne. Those companies tend to hire earlier for revenue roles because they cannot rely on endless funding rounds. Watch for AE and SDR openings in Adelaide, Perth, and Gold Coast as portfolio companies scale. Funds SA's new CIO Con Michalakis joined in early 2025 with prior VC deployment experience, bringing institutional rigour to regional tech investing. The firm is pitching internationally in Singapore, Canada, and the US to close the remaining $25 million.

Startup Daily
3 months ago
News

SaaStr booked 614 meetings with AI agent, zero BDRs. Here is the build.

## The Numbers SaaStr deployed an AI agent called Amelia for inbound qualification. One event, 614 meetings booked, $85k average ticket size. The agent handled 402,000 interactions across 2.25 million sessions. Zero complaints about the booking process. The entire go-to-market team: three people. No BDR stack, no reps quitting every quarter, no leads going cold while waiting for round-robin assignment. ## What Died The old flow: prospect fills contact form, waits. Someone round-robins the lead to an AE. AE picks it up on delay. Follow-up happens two to three days later. By then, the lead has talked to three competitors or lost urgency. Every handoff is a leak. Every delay kills conversion. The only way to scale that model is hiring more BDRs, who churn out every few months. ## Why It Works Amelia runs on Qualified (now Salesforce-owned). She is the most-trained agent in SaaStr's stack, with one of the biggest knowledge bases. She handles two completely different buyer types: self-serve ticket buyers and enterprise sponsors. She switches between seller, support, and marketer depending on context. She crawls saastr.com and the event site daily, auto-updates from other agent releases, and pulls live backend data. When someone asks where a session moved, she already knows, because she updated this morning. Separate contexts for main event, London event, and in-person attendees. Deliberately compacted memory for in-person so she is not dragging all of saastr.com into a room-location question. Result: faster, more accurate answers. ## Beyond Chat She routes leads, runs discount campaigns, books meetings, and qualifies on the spot. No human touches inbound until it is already qualified and scheduled. The operational leverage is not answering questions faster. It is removing the entire BDR layer while handling 100x the volume. SaaStr is bootstrapped, $8M ARR, growing 90% annually. Jason Lemkin (CEO) hosts *The Agents* podcast on AI deployment. The company deliberately stays lean: maximum capital efficiency, no VC backing, no BDR bloat. ## What This Means If you are still running a contact form with human follow-up, you are bleeding deals. Inbound lead response time matters: speed-to-lead statistics show contact within five minutes increases conversion 9x versus 30 minutes. Most teams cannot staff that. An AI agent can. Lead qualification automation is not about replacing reps. It is about removing the delay that kills urgency. Inbound sales methodology shifts when the qualification layer runs instantly, 24/7, with zero staffing cost. SaaStr's build is replicable. Qualified is available. The training is the hard part: nuance, real-time crawling, context separation. But the result is a contact form that actually converts instead of collecting names for a rep to chase three days later. Worth noting: this works because SaaStr has high-intent inbound. If your traffic is cold, an AI agent will not fix that. But if people are landing on your site ready to talk and you are making them wait, you are leaving pipeline on the table.

SaaStr
3 months ago
News

Google loses two AI scientists to Anthropic in 48 hours, stock drops 5%

## The Talent Bleed Google DeepMind lost two generational scientists in 48 hours. Noam Shazeer (co-lead of Gemini, co-author of the seminal Transformer paper) and John Jumper (Nobel Prize winner, AlphaFold leader) both joined Anthropic. Wall Street responded immediately: Alphabet stock dropped 5%, its worst day in over a year. The context makes this worse. Google paid over $2 billion to acqui-hire Shazeer back from Character.ai in 2024. That investment lasted less than two years. This was not a compensation issue: it was a shipping issue. Google had a ChatGPT competitor before OpenAI shipped, but bureaucracy killed momentum while rivals took the lead. ## Why Number Three Is Fatal Being third in AI is not like being third in cloud. The market is consolidating faster. Multi-model routing means customers use number one for premium work, number two for scale, and number three competes on price against subsidised Chinese open-source models. That is not a sustainable position. Google has raised $141 billion in debt and equity since October 2025 to prove its AI framework can generate returns. But you do not wake up and try the new Google coding tool. You try Claude. You try OpenAI. Momentum compounds: winners attract talent, funding, and customer attention. Losers fight for all three. ## What This Means for ANZ Tech Sales If you are selling into enterprise accounts using AI, watch how buyers route workloads. Multi-model strategies are becoming standard, which means your champion's vendor lock-in is weakening. Google's talent crisis signals a broader market question: who actually pays for the $725 billion in AI infrastructure spend? For sales professionals evaluating roles at AI companies: momentum matters more than brand. DeepMind's reputation was that no top researcher ever left. That reputation died in 48 hours. Ask about shipping velocity, not just comp and brand cache.

SaaStr
3 months ago
News

Navan stock up 30% in 2026: Transaction pricing survived AI seat-collapse

# Navan stock up 30% in 2026: Transaction pricing survived AI seat-collapse Navan hit a 52-week high of $24.50 on 11 June after reporting Q1 FY2027 results. The stock was at $8.11 in late 2025, down 68% from its October IPO price of $25. While the iShares software ETF dropped 15% year-to-date and public SaaS multiples fell below the S&P 500 for the first time, Navan went the other direction. ## The numbers that moved the stock Q1 FY2027 (ended 30 April 2026): - Revenue $220M, up 40% YoY. Street expected $205M. - Non-GAAP operating margin 11%, up 900 basis points YoY. - Non-GAAP EPS $0.08. Consensus had modeled a $0.01 loss. - Gross booking volume $3.1B, up 50%. - Full-year guidance raised to $907M–$913M, about 30% growth. Prior guidance was 24%. Morgan Stanley called it one of the strongest Q1 prints across its entire software coverage. 13 of 15 analysts now rate it Strong Buy. ## Why transaction pricing matters for sales orgs Navan does not charge per seat. It charges on booking volume and payment volume. When an AI agent books the flight instead of a human, Navan still gets paid. The transaction is the unit, not the login. That is why the market thesis crushing per-seat SaaS in 2026 skipped Navan. The fear: AI agents replace headcount, per-seat revenue does not slow, it reverses. Atlassian, Workday, HubSpot got cut in half on that thesis. Navan's pricing model was never exposed. 38% of Q1 customer wins came from the American Express Global Business Travel cohort. RFP volume up 200% YoY. Fortune 500 customers grew to 45 from 28 a year earlier. ## What this means for ANZ sales teams Navan operates globally with significant Asia-Pacific presence (processed over $100B in spend volume by January 2025). If you are selling into enterprise accounts using legacy travel systems, this is the replacement cycle to watch. Competitor consolidation is creating displaced demand. For sales professionals evaluating roles: Navan's model scales with customer activity, not customer headcount. That matters when quota attainment depends on accounts expanding, not just adding seats. Transaction-based pricing survives the agent transition. Per-seat licensing is now a risk factor. The company raised $2.2B in total funding at a $9.2B valuation (October 2022). It rebranded from TripActions in February 2023. CEO Ariel Cohen has led since founding in 2015. Usage of Navan's AI model jumped from 20% to 30% in recent weeks, driving the 900bps margin expansion. For comp context: Navan has been actively hiring across sales roles (SDR, AE, Associate Account Manager positions) with competitive OTE structures, though specific ANZ comp data is not publicly disclosed. Revenue projected to hit $866–$874M in 2027, indicating continued commercial team scaling.

SaaStr
3 months ago
News

Airwallex hits $16B valuation, $460M Series H while AUSTRAC investigates

## The Numbers Airwallex closed a $460 million Series H led by Addition, valuing the Melbourne-founded fintech at $16 billion. That is a 37% jump from its $8 billion valuation in December 2025. Revenue sits at $1.3 billion ARR, up 74% from last year. The company processed over $130 billion in transactions across 150,000 customers including TikTok, Canva, and Deel. More than 90% of revenue now comes from customers using multiple Airwallex products. ## The AUSTRAC Problem The raise lands while AUSTRAC investigates Airwallex for potential failures to comply with anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing laws. AUSTRAC appointed an external auditor in late 2025 to review the company's compliance programme. Airwallex has not publicly disclosed the investigation's impact on sales operations or enterprise deal cycles. Worth noting: regulatory scrutiny typically extends sales cycles for financial infrastructure deals, particularly in banking and government sectors. ## What This Means for Sales Teams Airwallex has raised $1.2 billion total across 14 rounds. The company employs approximately 2,000 people globally across Singapore (HQ), San Francisco (co-HQ), Melbourne, and other markets. Specific sales team size and ANZ headcount are not publicly disclosed. The company emphasises enterprise sales in ANZ, North America, and Europe but has not announced hiring targets tied to this round. For sales professionals evaluating fintech roles: Airwallex competes with Wise, Stripe, PayPal, and Revolut. The company positions itself as API-driven financial infrastructure for businesses, not consumer payments. Customer base skews enterprise and mid-market, which typically means longer sales cycles but higher ACV. ## The AI Play Funding goes toward AI-based product development and expanding into new markets. CEO Jack Zhang is betting on autonomous finance and agentic commerce products. Addition's Lee Fixel said the winners in AI-driven finance will be companies building on real infrastructure, not around it. Airwallex holds banking licences via acquisitions and positions itself as a borderless financial platform. The valuation reflects strong retention and product diversification beyond cross-border payments into treasury, corporate cards, and embedded finance. ## Market Context Airwallex is Australia's third tech unicorn. The company went from $5.5 billion (October 2022) to $16 billion in under four years. Backers include Sequoia Capital China, Square Peg Capital, Mastercard, ANZ Bank, Tencent, and Salesforce Ventures. No IPO timeline has been disclosed. At $16 billion, the company sits well above typical IPO valuation thresholds, but regulatory scrutiny and market conditions will dictate timing.

Startup Daily
3 months ago
News

Benchmark GP: First $1M now harder than next $99M in AI sales

## The Inversion Benchmark Capital GP Chetan Puttagunta laid out a counterintuitive reality for AI sales: scaling from $1M to $100M ARR has never been faster, but reaching that first million now takes longer than it did in the cloud era. The firm, which limits itself to 10 investments per year from a $4.8 billion fund, is seeing portfolio companies compress traditional 180-day enterprise sales cycles into 30 days. One legal AI company, Legora, went from $1M to $100M ARR in 18 months. Another, Manus, hit $100M in eight months. But those wins required longer upfront work. Legora spent over a year embedded inside a law firm before they had anything to sell. ## What Changed Puttagunta's thesis: when code becomes cheap, the moat moves to everything that is not code. Customer research, trust building, and last-mile implementation work now define defensibility. The product itself is table stakes. This shifts the sales motion. Product-led growth, the darling of the 2020s, is giving way to direct sales and forward-deployed engineers. AI companies are hiring sales teams earlier and bigger than their SaaS predecessors. The math: legal services represent a $1 trillion market. Legal software is $40 billion. AI companies are selling into the services budget, not the software line. That requires different conversations, longer pilots, and more handholding. It also means bigger deal sizes and faster expansion once you land the account. ## The Playbook Benchmark-backed companies are collapsing sales cycles through tightly scoped pilots and what Puttagunta calls "magical demos." Show immediate value, prove it in production, then expand. One AI app purchase triggers enterprise buyers to evaluate 100 more. The firm is looking for founders with technical insight that creates demand pull. Not just a better mousetrap, but a solution to a problem the market did not know it could solve. For sales teams at AI startups: expect to hire earlier, staff heavier, and spend more time on implementation than you did in SaaS. The first deal takes forever. The next 99 happen fast. ## What This Means If you are building or selling at an AI startup, the old SaaS ramp timelines do not apply. Quota relief periods might stretch longer early on, but attainment curves get steeper once product-market fit hits. Comp structures need to account for this: lower quotas in year one, aggressive acceleration once the motion proves out. Benchmark launched its first growth fund ($2 billion) to follow winners past Series B. That capital is chasing companies with proven sales motions, not just impressive demos. The window for AI-native startups to build dominant positions is open, but it is not infinite. Incumbents are moving fast. For sales professionals evaluating AI startup offers: ask how long the company spent with customers before launching, what the pilot-to-paid conversion rate looks like, and whether forward-deployed roles exist. Those signals matter more than the tech stack.

Sales Hacker
3 months ago
News

Airspeed raises $20M Series A, 200 customers, no CRO yet

## The Numbers Airspeed closed a $20M Series A led by DN Capital, with participation from Vi Partners, Framework Venture Partners, and Atlassian Ventures. Total funding now sits above $25M. The company serves 200 customers across 20 countries. ## What They Built CEO Adam Liska and co-founder Devang Chong left DeepMind's Gemini team in 2022 to build what they call a sales execution layer: AI agents that update CRM records, flag deal risks, and generate follow-ups without waiting for humans to trigger them. The platform pulls from calls, emails, tickets, and CRM systems to act in real time. Their thesis: the gap between knowing what to do in a deal and actually doing it is where most pipeline dies. They call it the execution gap. "I'll follow up on that" is how deals go quiet, forecasts stay inflated, and quota gets missed. ## The Team Liska and Chong co-founded with Ken Chong and Matt Sawchuk, who scaled Uber Eats from $0 to $6B GMV. That is strong GTM experience at the founding level. What is missing: public disclosure of a CRO or VP Sales. The sales org is early. First hires, first funding rounds under the original name (Glyphic), then a rebrand to Airspeed on May 20, 2026, five weeks before the Series A announcement. ## The Market Position Airspeed competes indirectly with CRM automation and GTM platforms like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Gong, but positions as proactive rather than reactive. Instead of waiting for reps to log activity or managers to review calls, the AI acts autonomously. It is a sales execution platform, not a sales enablement platform. Execution means it does the work. Enablement means it gives reps tools to do the work. For sales ops teams evaluating alternatives to Salesforce or looking at execution layer software, Airspeed is positioning as the agent-native option. The market is crowded with sales operations software, but most tools still require human triggers. Airspeed's bet is that autonomous agents change the workflow entirely. ## What This Means Series A with 200 customers and no disclosed sales leadership suggests strong product-led or founder-led growth. The next 12 months will show whether they can scale with a formal sales org or if they stay lean and agent-native in their own go-to-market motion. Either way, $20M buys time to figure it out. For AEs and SDRs: this is another signal that execution layer tools are a real category now. If your CRM feels like data entry instead of a system that acts on your behalf, that gap is what these platforms are solving for. Whether Airspeed or a competitor wins, the shift from manual to autonomous is already happening.

Sales Hacker
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