The Wire

Real-time updates from ANZ tech sales

3 months ago
News

Sydney venture builder offers $3M upfront, 30% equity, no fundraising required

## $3M upfront, team included, no pitch deck required Repeat Builders launched in Sydney's Tech Central in May with a model that flips traditional venture building: validate the idea first, recruit founders second, fund everything upfront. Founder Andonis Sakatis, former quant trader at GSA Capital and XTX Markets, commits $3 million per venture covering salaries, tech, team growth, and marketing for two years. Founding teams get 30% equity in independently operating businesses. No external fundraising required during the initial period. Five ventures planned for year one. Internal validation happens before founder recruitment, matching sector experts to proven concepts. ## What this means for sales professionals No sales team details available yet. Repeat Builders is fresh, no reported headcount beyond Sakatis. Worth watching if they build GTM-focused ventures or hire sales leaders for portfolio companies. The $3M upfront model removes the fundraising grind that typically consumes founders' first 12-18 months. In Sydney, one of the world's most expensive cities, that matters. Sakatis wants founders focused on product and market, not pitch decks. Internal team handles product, engineering, community, talent, capital, and governance. No service fees. Founders operate independently once matched. ## ANZ venture builder context Repeat Builders enters Australia's small venture studio ecosystem alongside Sydney's Nakatomi, which raised $3.5M to launch 3-4 startups annually. Nakatomi previously built femtech success Ovum, now focuses on AI workflow tools and residential AI platforms. Both are Sydney-focused, both front-load capital. Repeat Builders emphasises no-fee operational support and larger upfront commitment per venture. Recent ANZ funding activity shows appetite for early-stage capital: Sydney construction-tech CalcTree raised $3.8M pre-seed, Brisbane's Beaten Zone participated in Zendir's $3M+ seed for space and defence tech. Sakatis points to tools like Cursor, Claude, and Lovable letting anyone build working prototypes from text prompts. The gap between MVP and sustainable business, where most startups fail, is where Repeat Builders operates. Selection criteria: domain expertise from lived experience, high agency to solve problems, energy to sustain multi-year commitment. Domain expertise is non-negotiable. No revenue, acquisition, or sales org data available. This is a launch, not a proven playbook yet.

Startup Daily
3 months ago
News

Net new customer growth exposes what revenue hides: why CROs track this metric

## The Metric That Actually Matters Revenue growth can mask a broken sales engine for years. Net retention rate (NRR) looks healthy while new logo velocity collapses. The one number that tells the truth: net new customer growth. Jason Lemkin analysed 10 public B2B companies. Half do not even report quarterly customer counts. The ones that do: the data exposes everything. ## Application SaaS: The Grind Down HubSpot added roughly 10,000 paying customers per quarter at $3.1B revenue. Customer growth went from 23% YoY to 16% over two years. The last five quarters: 21, 19, 18, 17, 16. When you are relying almost entirely on NRR to grow, you have a problem. Atlassian's net new logo velocity dropped 77% in a single quarter. Their $10K+ cloud ARR cohort decelerated from 17% to 10% YoY. They have 600+ customers over $1M ARR, up 40%, but that is the textbook harvest-the-installed-base play. It works for a few quarters. It is not a strategy. Monday.com's total customer growth slowed to 7%. Look one layer deeper: their $100K+ ARR customers are up 45% YoY, $500K+ up 74%. They are trading volume for deal size. Without tracking both metrics, you would completely misread what is happening. ## The Outliers: AI Infrastructure Cloudflare accelerated from 22% to 40% YoY customer growth. They added 37,000 net new paying customers in Q4 2025 alone. Revenue growth accelerated too: 27% to 34% YoY. When total customer count, high-value tiers, and revenue all accelerate together, that is a company gaining market share across every segment. Palantir's customer growth climbed from 35% to 45% YoY. Revenue growth followed: 20% to 63%. US commercial customer count: up 49% YoY. ## What This Means for Sales Teams If your CRO is talking about revenue growth but not new logo velocity, ask why. The 2:1 ratio rule: revenue growth should be at least 2x new customer growth rate. At $100M+ ARR, target 20%+ new customer growth minimum. Track both total customer adds and cohort progression ($100K+, $500K+, $1M+). Datadog's overall customer growth sits at 9%, but their $100K+ cohort re-accelerated from 12% to 19% YoY. That is the signal. Net new customer growth does not lie. It tells you whether the market still wants what you are selling, and whether your sales engine actually works.

SaaStr
3 months ago
News

Canva hit with $792K ASIC fines for 11-month late financials

## The Numbers Canva caught four infringement notices from ASIC, $198K each, totalling $792K. The fines hit Canva Pty Ltd, Canva Operations Pty Ltd, Canva Trading Pty Ltd, and Fusion Books Pty Ltd for missing the April 30, 2025 deadline on FY24 financial reports. The company filed 2023 and 2024 accounts on March 27, 2026. That is 11 months late. For context: Canva only filed 2021 and 2022 statements in September 2025, years behind schedule. ## What Changed CFO Damien Singh left suddenly in early 2024. The company operated without a finance chief for 10 months before hiring Kelly Steckelberg, previously at Zoom, in late 2024. That gap lines up with the filing delays. The four entities restructured into Canva Australia Holdings Pty Ltd last year. When asked why the reports were late, Canva declined to comment. ## Why It Matters for Sales Canva runs a 300 to 500-person sales org globally, with significant ANZ headcount (roughly 1,000 of 5,000+ total employees). Sydney HQ alone holds 1,500+ staff. The company has been hiring: 50+ sales roles filled across ANZ and US in Q1 2026 per LinkedIn data. For enterprise AEs and sales leaders watching Canva as an employer or partner, late financials raise questions about back-office stability during rapid scaling. The company hit $2B annualised revenue in FY23 with 170M+ monthly users and closed a US$1.5B IPO in 2024 at a $32B US valuation. Paying the fine avoids court (max penalty $396K per entity) and is not an admission of guilt under ASIC rules. But two years of delayed reporting, a 10-month CFO gap, and now regulatory penalties suggest operational strain behind the growth story. The 2025 accounts? Filed on time last week.

Startup Daily
3 months ago
News

Fishburners enters administration, 400 startups face uncertain future

Fishburners Limited entered voluntary administration on Wednesday, appointing Phil Quinlan and Gayle Dickerson of KPMG to assess the business while pursuing "an accelerated sale and recapitalisation process." The collapse stems from unresolved rental debt at the government-backed Sydney Startup Hub, combined with subsequent operating losses. KPMG will continue trading while evaluating options. ## What This Means for Sales Fishburners currently houses over 400 startups across Sydney (64 York Street and 477 Pitt Street) and Brisbane. Its members have collectively raised over $2 billion since the organisation launched in 2011. Translation: a lot of early-stage companies just lost their operational base and community infrastructure. For sales professionals, this matters because Fishburners tenants are the startups most likely to be building their first sales teams. Seed and Series A companies hiring their first SDRs, first AEs, first sales managers. If those companies lose access to their co-working space, mentoring network, and event programming, expect hiring delays and budget scrutiny. ## The Numbers Fishburners supported 621 startups over the past five years and claims a network of 35,000 entrepreneurs. As a registered charity, it operates on community support and sponsorships rather than traditional revenue models. Current CEO Martin Karafilis and the board made the administration call after debt resolution efforts failed. No details yet on which creditors are owed what, or whether the Sydney Startup Hub lease will be renegotiated. KPMG is running a sale process, but the outcome timeline is unclear. ## Market Context This is the second major co-working operator to hit trouble in ANZ tech (WeWork's 2019 collapse being the first, though global). The Commons and other Sydney operators may absorb displaced startups, but Fishburners' non-profit model and community density made it unique. Hard to replicate. For now, 400 startups are watching administrators assess whether Fishburners survives, gets sold, or shuts down. That uncertainty does not help when you are trying to close a Series A or make your first sales hire.

SmartCompany
3 months ago
News

OpenAI launches self-serve ChatGPT Ads Manager with CPC bidding

OpenAI launched a self-serve Ads Manager for ChatGPT, complete with CPC bidding, conversion tracking, and measurement tools that look a lot like Google Ads infrastructure. The new platform lets advertisers register, upload creative, set budgets, manage campaigns, and track performance through a dedicated portal. OpenAI added pixel-based measurement and a Conversions API so teams can track purchases, sign-ups, and leads after users interact with ads. Previously, ChatGPT ads required a $50,000 minimum spend and agency partnerships with Dentsu, Omnicom, Publicis, and WPP. That barrier is gone. The self-serve model opens the platform to SMBs and performance teams running smaller tests. ## What this means for sales teams If you are running lead gen or prospecting campaigns, ChatGPT ads now compete directly with Google and LinkedIn for your budget. The conversational format could work for complex B2B offers where you need more context than a standard display ad provides. OpenAI says advertisers get aggregated performance insights without access to individual conversations. Worth noting: this is beta, US-only for now. No ANZ launch timeline, no pricing details beyond CPC and CPM options. The company has been building toward this since October 2024, adding shopping tools, product recommendations, and checkout integrations. Revenue hit $3.7 billion annualised in late 2024, driven by subscriptions and API usage. Ad revenue is still nascent, but OpenAI projects over $11 billion total revenue in 2025. ## The comp and hiring angle OpenAI scaled from under 400 employees in 2023 to around 3,500 in early 2026, with 200-300 in sales and marketing. Recent hires include enterprise AEs from Google and Salesforce to support B2B growth. No dedicated CRO is publicly listed, sales falls under COO Brad Lightcap. In ANZ, OpenAI has minimal direct presence, no disclosed offices or headcount. Regional traction comes through Microsoft Azure partnerships and API deals with companies like Canva and Atlassian. If ads expand beyond the US, expect ANZ hiring to follow. ## Bottom line ChatGPT is now an ad platform with self-serve tools and performance tracking. If you are testing new lead gen channels, this is worth watching. Just know the data is limited, the market is unproven, and your LinkedIn rep is probably already asking why you are diverting budget.

SmartCompany
3 months ago
News

Budget R&D boost targets big firms while startups push CGT relief

## Budget R&D Changes Miss Startup Reality Next week's federal budget will raise the R&D tax incentive cap from $150M to $250M-$300M, Treasurer Jim Chalmers confirmed. The increase falls short of the Denholm review's recommendation to remove the cap entirely. The problem: this helps large R&D-heavy firms, not the 9,000 startups claiming the current 43.5% refundable offset for companies under $20M turnover. Latest ATO data shows those startups claimed $3.4B in FY2024, the real engine of ANZ innovation. ## CGT Changes Create Uncertainty Startup advocates fear proposed CGT reforms will erode the 50% discount, undermining the R&D boost. No specifics released yet, but US research shows tax increases reduce startup patents by 5-10% through diminished VC activity. Meanwhile, US startups got immediate R&D expensing restored under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (July 2025), with retroactive relief for companies under $31M in average gross receipts. ANZ founders are watching competitors get liquidity while they wait for budget scraps. ## What This Means for Sales Teams If you are selling into ANZ startups, cash flow matters more than ever. The R&D cap lift does nothing for your Series A customers burning through runway. CGT uncertainty makes exits harder to price, which means longer sales cycles for anything tied to founder liquidity. For sales professionals at larger tech firms (Atlassian's 10,000 headcount, Canva's 3,000-plus team), the R&D boost could mean expanded engineering budgets and more tools procurement. But for the mid-market SaaS players competing with Xero ($1.5B revenue, 3,000 staff), this budget offers little relief. ANZ holds just 2% of global VC share ($5B in 2025). The US got retroactive tax breaks and expanded QSBS exclusions. We are getting a cap adjustment that helps companies already doing $150M+ in R&D spend. Budget drops next week. Expect startup groups to push hard on CGT relief and refundable offsets. Without it, the productivity agenda is just optics.

SmartCompany
3 months ago
News

SaaStr ran two AI VPs for $254 in March: what that means for sales orgs

## The numbers SaaStr founder Jason Lemkin posted his March 2026 Replit bill: $254.06 to run two AI agents that handle VP-level work. Qbee (AI VP Customer Success) cost $159.55. 10K (AI VP Marketing) cost $94.51. For context: those roles filled by humans at a Series C+ B2B company run $500k-$800k all-in annually. SaaStr is paying roughly $3,000 per year combined for both. The agents are not full VP replacements. They handle the operational layer: the 60-70% of a VP's week spent running the machine, not making strategic calls. ## What they actually do **Qbee** manages 100+ sponsors for SaaStr AI Annual 2026. Owns the sponsor portal, coordinates booth assignments, replies to sponsor questions in real time, flags issues before they blow up. Result: 70% reduction in human hours on sponsor ops. The remaining 30% stays human for pricing exceptions, escalations, relationship work. **10K** runs Monday marketing standup, pushes daily GTM updates, tracks campaign performance, drafts content briefs, monitors registration trends. She surfaces what is working and where to spend the next dollar. She does not replace strategic marketing leadership. She replaces the operational visibility layer that swallows most of a marketing leader's week. ## What this means for sales orgs Classic SaaS seats (Salesforce, Gong, Outreach) cost $100-$300 per user per month. Then you add $150k-$300k in fully loaded comp to get a human doing something useful with that seat. The seat is the cheap part. With agents, the agent IS the seat AND the human. The $95 per month is the whole cost stack. No $200k salary. No benefits. No recruiter fee. No PTO, severance, Slack license, laptop. It is $95. The agent works 24/7. Does not get sick. Does not miss Monday standup. Does not quit for a competitor. This does not replace every role. Strategy, judgment, relationships, novel problem-solving, leadership, taste, voice: humans still win by a mile. But the operational layer of mid-level and senior roles just got priced at roughly 1% of what it cost a year ago. ## The full stack SaaStr's total March Replit bill: $2,324.43 for 6 production agents, 14 published apps, 1.9M+ requests served. That is less than what most B2B companies spend on a single mid-tier SaaS tool. Lemkin notes third-party AI agents cost more but are still a great deal. His advice: buy, do not build, if you can. ## What to watch If the operational layer of VP-level work costs $3k per year instead of $500k, comp structures and org charts will shift fast. Not because AI replaces strategic leadership, but because the layer underneath it just became a rounding error. Worth noting: SaaStr operates media and events, not enterprise sales. The agents handle sponsor ops and marketing coordination, not quota-carrying roles. How this translates to SDR ops, pipeline management, or account planning remains to be tested at scale.

SaaStr
3 months ago
News

Heidi Health CEO: AI medical tools degrade under load, regulators missing the risk

Heidi Health CEO Dr. Tom Kelly told SmartCompany that healthcare AI regulation is missing a critical risk: models do not perform consistently under real-world pressure. "When we measure and monitor the performance of Heidi on days where it is particularly busy, like a Monday morning, you see meaningful degradations in performance of the notes, which can be a safety issue," Kelly said at Blackbird Ventures' Sunrise event. Heidi is a Melbourne-based AI medical scribe that automates clinical documentation during patient consultations. The company processes over 1 million patient consultations every week globally. They claim only 1 in 1,000 notes receive negative quality ratings, but Kelly's comments suggest that average hides variability. The issue: regulators treat AI models as repeatable systems. They are not. Performance fluctuates based on load, deployment environment, and demand spikes. For a clinical tool, that variability creates patient safety risk. Kelly says regulators are not keeping pace. "The area I think that is being chronically missed is they are treating models as repeatable. In practice, it is not true." ## What this means for healthcare AI sales If you are selling AI tools to hospital systems, this is the objection sitting across the table: what happens when your model degrades during peak hours? Clinical buyers care about consistency, not average performance. A tool that works 99% of the time but fails during Monday morning rushes is a liability. Heidi previously faced security scrutiny when a Mindgard audit exposed prompt-injection vulnerabilities that could bypass guardrails. The company has since moved beyond pure documentation into broader clinical workflows, raising the stakes for reliability. For sales teams: hospital procurement cycles are long because the risk of failure is high. Comp transparency, performance guarantees under load, and security audit results are table stakes. If your product degrades under real-world conditions, expect clinical buyers to walk. Heidi raised $98 million in October 2024 at a $704 million valuation. The company is scaling globally, but Kelly's warning suggests the regulatory gap could slow adoption if safety concerns escalate.

SmartCompany
3 months ago
News

CSIRO data: AI adopters hiring more, not less. Non-adopters at risk.

## The data nobody wants to hear CSIRO tracked job ads from 4,000+ Australian companies. Result: AI adopters posted more roles, not fewer. Companies using AI needed people to implement it, manage it, sell it. The finding landed with a thud. Social media response: "Job ads aren't hires." Fair point, except job ads have predicted economic trends for decades. When companies search for talent, they are planning to grow. MIT Sloan backed this up with 2010-2023 payroll data. Firms with high AI adoption grew employment 6% and sales 9.5% over five years. High-exposure roles at the top of the pay scale grew 3% because AI boosted productivity across the business. Stanford analysed ADP payroll through July 2025. Overall employment in AI-exposed jobs is up. The catch: workers aged 22-25 saw 6% declines in high-exposure fields like customer support and software development. Workers 30+ grew 6-13%. Early-career hiring slowdowns, not mass layoffs. ## The real risk: competitive lag Goldman Sachs projects 6-7% worker displacement over 10 years if AI adoption is gradual. That is 0.6 percentage points on unemployment. The displacement is not coming from AI itself, it is coming from companies that adopt AI outcompeting companies that do not. For ANZ B2B sales teams, this creates opportunity. Companies need help implementing AI infrastructure before their competitors do. The buyers are CROs, sales ops leaders, and go-to-market teams trying to scale without proportional headcount growth. Yale Budget Lab found no current correlation between AI exposure and employment changes. Anthropic found no impact on unemployment rates. The narrative that AI destroys jobs is stickier than the data supports. ## What this means for sales professionals If your company is not adopting AI tools for prospecting, pipeline management, or deal analysis, you are at a structural disadvantage against teams that are. The threat is not the technology, it is falling behind the market. Sales roles are shifting. SDRs using AI for research and outreach are booking more meetings per hour. AEs with AI-powered deal intelligence are closing faster. The skills gap is widening between teams that adopted early and teams still running 2019 playbooks. Comp is following the same pattern. Top-performing reps at AI-forward companies are pulling higher OTEs because their productivity metrics are higher. The job is not disappearing, the job is changing, and the companies investing in AI are the ones growing headcount and paying more. Bottom line: AI is not killing sales jobs. Competitive lag is.

Startup Daily
3 months ago
News

ServiceNow's 98% GRR masks customer engagement risk, says a16z analysis

## The Numbers Look Good. The Reality Might Not. ServiceNow reports 98% Gross Revenue Retention. Workday sits at 97%. Both companies lead the public B2B SaaS stack on this metric. The problem, according to a16z: those numbers might be hiding customer engagement decay. The core issue is contract structure. Both companies default to three-year initial contracts with enterprises. When GRR measures year-over-year revenue from existing customers (excluding expansion), long-term deals inflate the metric. Customers cannot leave mid-contract, so they show up as retained revenue even if they have stopped expanding usage or planning to churn at renewal. a16z called Workday "arguably the most important and least loved product in enterprise software." If nobody loves it, how does it retain 97% of revenue annually? Contracts. Customers are locked in. ## Why This Matters Now ServiceNow has made five AI acquisitions in 2025 alone, including a $7.75 billion deal for cybersecurity firm Armis. The company is pivoting hard toward agentic AI integration. That aggressive M&A pace suggests management sees the risk: enterprise budgets are shifting to truly agentic products, and static workflow platforms might lose relevance. The concern is not immediate churn. It is what happens when those three-year contracts come up for renewal and customers have already moved budget elsewhere. GRR looks stable until it does not. ## GRR vs NRR: What to Watch Gross Revenue Retention measures retention without expansion. Net Revenue Retention includes upsells and expansion. For enterprise SaaS, good GRR sits above 90%. ServiceNow and Workday are best-in-class by that standard. But NRR tells the real story. If GRR stays high while NRR drops, customers are staying but not expanding. That is the decay signal. ServiceNow beat Q1 2026 estimates, but institutional investors are watching: short interest jumped 30%, and geopolitical deal delays represent 75 basis points of headwind. ## The Sales Angle If you are selling into accounts with ServiceNow or Workday deployments, this matters. Long-term contracts mean these platforms are not going anywhere soon, but budget is finite. Positioning around agentic AI capabilities or workflow gaps could find receptive buyers who are locked into existing platforms but looking for what comes next. For AEs at ServiceNow or Workday: expansion revenue is the metric to watch. If customers are not adding seats or modules, that three-year contract is just delaying the conversation about replacement. Contract structure bought these platforms time. How they use it will determine whether 98% GRR was real retention or just a really good contract.

SaaStr
3 months ago
News

Palantir hits 85% growth at $6.5B ARR, US commercial up 133%

## The Numbers Palantir posted Q1 2026 revenue of $1.633B, up 85% year-over-year. That is the fastest growth rate the company has hit since going public in 2020. At a $6.5B+ run rate. Full-year 2026 guidance: $7.65B to $7.66B, representing 71% growth. Management raised the guide by 10 percentage points. US commercial revenue: $595M, up 133% YoY and 18% quarter-over-quarter. Twelve months ago, US commercial was running at $255M per quarter. It has more than doubled. Annualised, US commercial alone is now a $2.4B+ business. ## Deal Velocity Q1 deal count: 206 deals at $1M or above, 72 at $5M or above, 47 at $10M or above. Total contract value: $2.41B, up 61% YoY. Remaining performance obligations (RPO): $4.45B, up 134% YoY from $1.90B in Q1 2025. That is $2.55B more in contracted future revenue. RPO grew faster than revenue itself, which means the next several quarters are already largely sold. New commercial logos in Q1: Airbus, Bain, GE Aerospace, Stellantis. These are exactly the legacy industrial and consulting buyers everyone said were too slow to deploy AI at scale. They are now writing $5M, $10M, $20M+ contracts. ## What This Means for Sales Teams Palantir's commercial customer base hit 1,007, up 31% YoY. The average customer is spending more. That combination of new logo growth plus heavy expansion is the signature of a category-defining product hitting enterprise product-market fit. The company posted a Rule of 40 score of 145%: 85% growth plus 60% adjusted operating margin. GAAP net income: $871M, up roughly 4x YoY. Adjusted free cash flow: $925M at a 57% margin. Cash on balance sheet: $8.0B, no debt. CEO Alex Karp noted that a Rule of 40 of 145% has only been matched by AI infrastructure companies like NVIDIA, not software companies. ## Implications Enterprise software companies typically decelerate at scale. Palantir has gone from 17% growth in 2023 to 85% growth in Q1 2026. At multi-billion dollar scale. The standard playbook does not apply when product and platform shift collide. The Fortune 500 has stopped piloting AI and started buying. If you are selling AI agents and cannot convert pilots to production deals, the buyer is not the problem. Palantir has not disclosed specific sales team size, CRO details, or recent hiring numbers in Q1 filings. Deal velocity suggests scaled go-to-market operations, but comp structure and quota attainment data remain internal.

SaaStr
3 months ago
News

Australian businesses risk 'Unverified' SMS label from July 1 without ACMA registration

## The Change From July 1, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) will label SMS messages sent from unregistered branded sender IDs as 'Unverified'. Your business name disappears. Your text sits alongside potential scam messages. Your open rates tank. Messages sent using registered sender IDs will continue to display the business name. Messages from unregistered IDs will show 'Unverified' where your brand name used to appear. ## The Timeline Applications submitted after May 15 are at risk of missing the July 1 deadline. ACMA says processing can take weeks. Do not leave this until June. ## Why This Matters for Sales Teams If your sales motion includes SMS for: - Booking confirmations - Appointment reminders - Delivery notifications - Two-factor authentication - Post-demo follow-ups - Re-engagement campaigns You need to register. An 'Unverified' label kills trust. Customers will ignore or delete your messages. Some networks may filter or block them entirely. ACMA member Samantha Yorke said messages marked 'Unverified' are far more likely to be ignored or deleted by customers already on high alert for scams. ## The Reality Scam texts are at an all-time high in Australia. Customers are trained to delete anything that looks suspicious. An 'Unverified' label is suspicious. For SMEs running lean sales operations, SMS is a direct line to customers. Lose that channel and you lose bookings, reminders, and reactivation sequences. ## What To Do Register your SMS sender IDs with ACMA before May 15 to guarantee processing by July 1. If you use an SMS provider (Twilio, MessageMedia, others), check if they handle registration on your behalf. If not, you need to register directly. This is not a soft deadline. July 1 means your messages get labelled 'Unverified'. Your open rates drop. Your customers stop responding. ## Context This aligns with global SMS compliance tightening. In the US, TCPA text message opt-in requirements and FCC regulations have pushed similar sender verification. CTIA guidelines mandate clear opt-in and sender identification. Australia is following suit with ACMA enforcement to combat SMS scams while forcing businesses to prove legitimacy. The ANZ market has seen SMS scams surge. ACMA is prioritising sender verification to protect consumers. Businesses pay the price if they do not comply.

SmartCompany
3 months ago
News

Catch founders acquire Click Frenzy, plan relaunch after liquidation

## Catch founders acquire Click Frenzy, plan relaunch after liquidation Gabby and Hezi Leibovich acquired Click Frenzy and plan to relaunch the site weeks after it fell into liquidation. The Leibovich brothers founded Catch in 2006 as Catch of the Day, grew it to ~A$500M revenue and ~1,000 staff before selling to Toll Holdings in 2021. They stepped down as executives but stayed involved. Now they are buying distressed e-commerce assets. Click Frenzy launched in 2012 as Australia's answer to Black Friday. It ran limited-time sales events through the 2010s: homewares, tech, apparel, travel. The event model worked until it did not. Lumpy cash flow killed it. War in Iran hit travel deal sales during a recent event, according to the receiver. Click Frenzy and sibling business Power Retail went into liquidation in April 2026. Gabby Leibovich says the concept is not broken. "Click Frenzy proved that customers respond to great offers from trusted brands. What's changed is expectation. Today, customers want value more consistently." Translation: flash sales peaked in 2015. Customers now expect always-on deals, not event-driven scarcity. ### What this means for sales teams If you sold into Click Frenzy's event ecosystem (agencies, logistics, payment platforms), your buyer just changed. The Leibovich brothers ran Catch with a 200-300 person marketing and sales org at peak. Expect similar hiring if the relaunch scales. Catch historically focused on high-volume flash sales with aggressive performance targets. If they apply that playbook to Click Frenzy, commission structures will likely favour activity over deal size. Worth tracking if you are targeting ANZ e-commerce platforms. No word yet on headcount, territory splits, or OTE for any new hires. The brothers are Power Retail All Star Legends (2021), so they know how to build sales teams. Watch for roles in Melbourne where Catch was headquartered. Competitors: Kogan (~A$500M revenue), Amazon AU, MyDeal. Mid-tier ANZ e-commerce space with strong logistics ties via Toll. If Click Frenzy relaunches successfully, expect vendor and brand partnerships to ramp. No public comp details yet. Will update when hiring starts.

SmartCompany
3 months ago
News

Cursor hit $2B ARR in 18 months without outbound sales

## The numbers that break the model Cursor went from $1M to $100M ARR in 12 months. Then $300M three months later. Then $500M. Then $1B by November 2025. Then $2B by February 2026. Slack took 30 months to hit $100M ARR. Dropbox took four years. Cursor did it in 12 with zero marketing spend and no outbound sales motion. The four MIT co-founders made one GTM decision that mattered more than everything else: they forked VS Code instead of building a plugin. Every competitor built Copilot-style extensions. Cursor rebuilt the entire editor. At the time, this looked stupid. VS Code had 70% market share and Microsoft backing. Forking meant reconstructing language servers, debugging, the terminal. Months of work for uncertain payoff. But it gave them control. They could integrate AI at the infrastructure level, not bolt it on. The product worked 10x better because the AI wasn't fighting the editor, it was the editor. ## The metric that predicted everything Cursor tracked one number obsessively: session length. Not DAUs, not signups. How long developers stayed in the editor per session. When session length hit a threshold, they knew they had won that user. The product became the default environment. Developers stopped switching back to VS Code. That metric predicted retention, expansion, and enterprise adoption. Long sessions meant developers were shipping real work in Cursor. That meant they would pay. That meant they would bring their team. ## Enterprise through developer smuggling Cursor had no enterprise sales team until late 2025. The enterprise motion was bottom-up infiltration. Developers adopted Cursor individually. Paid $20/month out of pocket. Brought their team. Eventually, procurement noticed the expense line and formalised the contract. By the time sales got involved, the deal was already done. The sales motion was contract cleanup, not relationship building. SpaceX became a customer this way. So did most of Cursor's enterprise book. ## What this means for ANZ sales teams Cursor's playbook does not work for most products. You need 10x better functionality and a user base that self-selects for early adoption. Most B2B SaaS has neither. But the session length insight applies everywhere. If your users are not spending time in your product, expansion will not save you. Usage predicts revenue better than any pipeline metric. The developer-led enterprise motion is already playing out in ANZ. Tools like Vercel, Linear, and Notion followed similar paths. Individual contributors adopt, teams follow, procurement formalises. If you are selling into engineering orgs, your land motion might not involve sales at all. Your job is contract capture, not deal creation. ## The valuation that shows where the market is Cursor is now valued at $60B. For context, that is more than Adobe, which took 40 years to build. The market is pricing in a future where AI coding tools are infrastructure, not features. Where the editor is the product, and the product is the workflow. For sales teams selling dev tools: the bar for product-market fit just moved. Cursor proved developers will pay $20/month for tools that genuinely make them 10x faster. They will not pay for incremental improvements. The land-and-expand motion still works. But land now requires a product developers cannot live without, not a sales process they tolerate.

Sales Hacker
3 months ago
News

Canva CTO exits after 12 years, no replacement named ahead of IPO

Brendan Humphreys is leaving Canva after 12 years as CTO. He joined in 2014 when the company had 12 employees. Now it has 5,000 staff and $3 billion in ARR. Canva is not filling the CTO role. Simon Newton, previously Humphreys' number two, becomes head of technology instead. Newton ran platform engineering and came from Google and Uber. Humphreys wraps up in June and stays on as an adviser. The timing matters. Canva is pushing hard into AI and preparing for an IPO. The company already has no permanent CFO. Now the CTO role disappears too, replaced with a head of technology position. That is a structure change worth noting. Canva reports 230 million monthly active users and 24 million paying subscribers. It claims 95% of Fortune 500 companies as customers. That enterprise footprint means a significant B2B sales operation, though the company does not disclose sales team size or recent hiring numbers. For sales teams using Canva: the product roadmap continues. The company acquired Affinity and Magic Brief to build out AI design tools. All 5,000 employees test AI features under what the company calls permissive policies. That AI push targets enterprise adoption, which drives the B2B revenue. The CTO exit after 12 years is significant but not disruptive. Humphreys built the technology organisation that scaled from 12 people to 5,000. Newton inherits that foundation as Canva moves toward public markets. What this does not tell us: how the enterprise sales organisation is structured, who runs it, or whether the IPO timeline changes. Canva's Sydney headquarters gives it strong ANZ presence, but specific regional headcount remains undisclosed. Bottom line: a long-term executive is stepping back at a company that just hit $3B ARR and wants to go public. The CTO role gets restructured, not replaced. For sales professionals, Canva remains a major enterprise design platform with serious Fortune 500 penetration and aggressive AI development.

SmartCompany
3 months ago
News

Moats keep customers in, but they do not capture AI budget

## The Numbers Look Safe. The Growth Does Not. Gross revenue retention across B2B software sits at 90%. The best companies hold above 95%. ServiceNow renews at 98%, CrowdStrike at 97%, Workday above 95%. Customers are not ripping out their systems. The moats are real: switching costs, integrations, workflow dependency, data lock-in. But net revenue retention tells a different story. It dropped from 116% at peak to 108% across public software. Customers are staying. They are not expanding. Morningstar just downgraded 40 tech companies, cutting six former wide-moat leaders to narrow: Adobe, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Shopify, Descartes, Manhattan Associates. Adobe's fair value estimate dropped 32%. ServiceNow dropped 18%. They cut moat duration from 20 years to 10. Goldman Sachs identified Snowflake, MongoDB, Shopify, CrowdStrike as companies with architectural moats. Bain confirmed GRR is holding. HarbourVest called it the biggest valuation reset since 2008. All this analysis focuses on the wrong question. Not "are you safe from AI?" but "are you capturing AI budget?" ## The Budget Math Gartner projects AI spending hits $1.5 trillion in 2026. AI software grows 15.2% year over year. AI captures 30% of total IT budget increases. The rest of IT grows at a fraction of that rate. Private AI companies trade at 61x ARR. Public B2B software trades at 4x ARR. That is not a valuation gap. That is two different markets. Morningstar's data: AI products at incumbent software companies account for 1-5% of revenue. Retention rates unchanged, margins increasing, ARR growing. The defensive metrics look fine. AI revenue is a rounding error. ## What This Means for Sales If you sell established B2B software: your existing customers are not leaving, but they are not expanding either. New logo acquisition matters more than ever. You need a clear answer to "how does this capture AI budget?" not "how does this compete with AI?" If you sell AI-native products: incumbents have moats, but they are not capturing growth budget. Your win is not replacement deals. It is net new budget. If you manage a territory: GRR protects your base number. It does not hit your growth quota. The deals that close this year will be the ones positioned as AI initiatives, whether or not the product is fundamentally different. The moat keeps customers in. It does not fill the pipeline.

SaaStr
3 months ago
News

AI agents picking vendors, not humans: why OpenAI bounced back and Medallia collapsed

## The Shift: Agents Pick the Tools Now OpenAI missed Q4 numbers. Anthropic just pulled $45 billion from Google and Amazon. Thoma Bravo handed Medallia to creditors, wiping out $5.1 billion in equity from their 2021 acquisition. The pattern underneath: AI agents now choose which vendors get budget. Not sales leaders. Not procurement. Agents. Jason Lemkin's AI VP of Marketing at SaaStr prefers OpenAI's API over Claude. So that is where the spend goes. "Just like you had to back your team of humans in 2024, today I have to back my team of agents," Lemkin said on 20VC. "If they pick OpenAI, I have to be on the team." This rewrites the vendor landscape faster than most sales orgs realise. ## Three Buckets for B2B Tools Rory O'Driscoll laid out where every sales tool now sits: **Bucket 1: Eroding terminal value.** Tools agents do not use. Medallia landed here. Customer feedback platforms lose relevance when agents handle most customer interactions. **Bucket 2: System of record.** Workday, parts of Salesforce. Companies keep them but no agentic activity happens on top. Fair valuation, no premium. **Bucket 3: Agent-leveraged.** ServiceNow claims this. Twilio and Cloudflare qualify because agents actually call their APIs. This is the only bucket that gets growth multiples. Most B2B software is being repriced from Bucket 3 (where the market gave credit until 2025) into Bucket 2. Some slides to Bucket 1. ## What This Means for Sales Teams Canva will IPO successfully. Agents still will not use it. "An AI agent is not going to move assets around," Lemkin noted. "It is just going to create the assets." Same logic applies to Jira, Confluence, most project management tools. The SaaS premium is dead. Good companies without AI-first positioning trade at fair value, not 30x revenue. If you are evaluating a job offer at a growth-stage SaaS company, ask: do AI agents use this product? If the answer is no, expect the valuation, and likely your equity, to compress. ## The Comp Angle Thoma Bravo's Medallia collapse signals risk across PE-backed seat-based SaaS. If you are selling for a company in Bucket 1 or sliding into it, watch for quota relief disappearing, territory compression, and comp plan changes as leadership realises the revenue model is breaking. Meanwhile, companies in Bucket 3 are hiring. OpenAI is projected to hit $20 billion ARR this year despite the Q4 miss. Anthropic hit $6 billion revenue in February alone, with projections to reach $70 billion ARR by 2028. If you are an enterprise AE evaluating offers, the question is not just OTE. It is: will agents want to buy this in 18 months? Because if they do not, your patch is shrinking no matter what the comp plan says. ## What Gets Bought API-first tools agents can call. Data infrastructure agents need. ServiceNow's agentic capabilities if they ship. Not seat-based tools designed for human collaboration. Sales orgs still matter. Someone has to close the enterprise deals. But if the agents are not choosing your product in their workflows, the TAM is compressing regardless of how good your team is. The 2021 SaaS playbook is over. Agents pick the stack now.

SaaStr
3 months ago
News

OpenAI and Anthropic now lease 2x Salesforce's SF footprint

## The Numbers Salesforce went from 2.2 million square feet in San Francisco in 2019 to 1.0 million in 2026. That is a 55% cut. The company that defined SF tech for a decade is now the third-largest office tenant in the city. OpenAI holds 1.2 million square feet. Anthropic holds 950,000. Combined: 2.15 million square feet, more than double Salesforce's current footprint and roughly equal to Salesforce's all-time peak. Two AI companies that barely existed five years ago have collectively matched the office presence of the CRM giant that employed over 10,000 sales reps at peak. ## What This Means for Sales Teams Salesforce cut approximately 10% of its 72,000-person headcount in 2024, likely impacting its direct sales force. The office reduction reflects both remote work shifts and post-acquisition (Slack, Tableau) consolidation. Meanwhile, OpenAI and Anthropic are hiring. OpenAI's sales team sits around 200 to 300, focused on enterprise deals. Anthropic runs leaner at 100 to 200, emphasizing AWS Bedrock integrations. Both are expanding rapidly with fresh funding: OpenAI raised $6.6 billion in October 2024, Anthropic has pulled in $8 billion-plus from Amazon and Google. For sales professionals, the math is straightforward: established SaaS is consolidating, AI startups are scaling. The question is where the next wave of quota-carrying roles gets created. ## The ANZ Angle Salesforce maintains around 1,000 headcount across Sydney and Melbourne, its primary ANZ sales hub. OpenAI and Anthropic have minimal ANZ presence, under 100 combined, focused on US and EU expansion. That gap represents opportunity. If AI companies follow the SaaS playbook, ANZ enterprise sales teams come next. Watch for GTM hires in Sydney over the next 12 months as these companies look to replicate US traction in APAC. ## Why It Matters Office footprint is a proxy for hiring intent. Salesforce shedding 1.2 million square feet signals a leaner go-to-market motion. OpenAI and Anthropic adding 2.15 million signals the opposite: rapid headcount growth, enterprise focus, and serious B2B ambition. The next decade of B2B sales jobs is being built in AI, not traditional SaaS. The San Francisco office market is spelling it out in square meters.

SaaStr
3 months ago
News

Atlassian Q3 revenue up 32% to $1.79B, stock jumps 15%

## The Numbers Atlassian (NASDAQ: TEAM) posted Q3 revenue of US$1.79 billion, up 32% year-over-year. Cloud revenue hit US$1.13 billion, up 29%. Non-GAAP operating income was US$607.2 million at 34% margin, up from US$348.3 million last year. Shares jumped 15% in after-hours trading. The stock has been hammered in 2026, making this beat significant for employees watching equity comp. ## The Context This follows the March announcement that 1,600 roles would be cut in an AI restructure. CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes positioned it as refocusing on Enterprise, AI, and System of Work. The Q3 results included US$223.8 million in restructuring charges, which hit the GAAP operating margin. For sales teams, the restructure means territory changes and quota adjustments are likely ongoing. Strong revenue growth (32%) against that backdrop suggests the remaining reps are carrying heavier loads. ## What It Means for Sales Professionals Atlassian serves over 300,000 customers globally and just posted its third consecutive quarter of accelerating RPO growth (44% year-over-year). That contracted future revenue creates quota capacity, but the 1,600-person reduction means fewer people to assign it to. The company guided for 22% revenue growth in fiscal 2026. Service Collection crossed US$1 billion ARR, growing over 30%. If you are an AE there, your patch likely got bigger. Cloud and Data Center revenue are both expanding (23% and 33.5% respectively), which means both deployment motions need coverage. Enterprise focus suggests upmarket push, longer sales cycles, larger deal sizes. ## The Comp Question No public data on how the restructure affected sales comp or OTE ranges. Atlassian does not appear on RepVue with recent verified reviews. If you are considering a role there, ask about quota relief during restructure periods and how territories were redrawn post-layoffs. Stock compensation matters here: shares up 15% after hours is material for anyone with RSUs vesting. But year-to-date performance still down, so total comp depends heavily on grant timing.

Startup Daily
3 months ago
News

Four ANZ startups raise $90M: Liquid Instruments leads with $70M Series C

Four ANZ startups closed $90M in funding this week, led by Canberra-based Liquid Instruments with a $70M Series C. ## The Numbers Liquid Instruments: $70M Series C. Co-led by US firm Keysight Technologies. Includes $28.45M from the National Reconstruction Fund. Other backers: Breakthrough Victoria, Acorn Capital, Significant Capital Ventures, Tribeca. Company plans to move manufacturing back to Australia. Marloo, Aigentsphere, Manifest: Combined $20M. No specifics available due to paywall. ## What We Don't Know The article sits behind a paywall, so critical details are missing: sales team size, hiring plans, AE or SDR headcount changes, OTE ranges, territory expansion, key sales leadership (CRO, VP Sales), customer acquisition strategy. For sales professionals tracking ANZ hiring opportunities, that matters. Series C rounds typically mean sales team expansion. A $70M raise should translate to new quota-carrying roles. We just cannot confirm numbers yet. ## ANZ Funding Context This follows a pattern of ANZ startups securing capital in 2024-2026, though broader context shows ANZ Bank's VC arm 1835i facing potential cuts under CEO Nuno Matos' cost reductions. That could tighten future startup investment in the region. Liquid Instruments was founded in 2014 from research. Beyond that: no public data on current headcount, sales motion (enterprise vs. mid-market), or go-to-market strategy. ## What This Means for Sales If you are prospecting into ANZ startups post-raise, Liquid Instruments just became worth a look. Series C companies need sales infrastructure: CRM, enablement tools, data providers. They are also typically hiring AEs and building out sales development. Just do not expect comp transparency from the announcement. We will update when real numbers surface.

SmartCompany
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