The Wire

Real-time updates from ANZ tech sales

about 2 months ago
News

Why your next CRO hire will probably fail: the AI-era red flags

# Why your next CRO hire will probably fail: the AI-era red flags Jason Lemkin is sounding the alarm again on what he calls "Mediocre Recycled" executives, and this time the problem is accelerating, not fading. The pattern: hot B2B AI startups scale fast, need experienced commercial leaders quickly, and keep hiring from the same small pool of executives who have the right logos on LinkedIn and interview well. But they never actually built the thing. They just worked somewhere it happened. The original red flags still apply. No CEO reference. Too many short VP stints (under a year). No strong operators willing to follow them. Joining from a direct competitor at the same growth stage. Zero homework during interviews. ## The AI-era tells Lemkin now adds three new disqualifiers: **They cannot actually use AI.** Not "do you believe in AI" answers. What tools do they use daily? What workflows have they automated? What have they shipped with AI? A CRO who has never used an AI SDR tool will run your revenue org like it is 2021. **They talk AI in abstractions, never specifics.** "We need to be AI-first" is a platitude anyone can recycle from LinkedIn. Push them: what specific AI tool changed how they worked last quarter? What broke? If every answer is vague, they added "AI" to their vocabulary, not their skillset. **They want to hire big teams before doing anything.** The best AI-era operators are doing more with less, using agents to handle what used to require 3 to 5 headcount. The Mediocre Recycled still want 20 people in 90 days because that is the only way they know how to operate. ## What actually works Lemkin's fix: have the best operator you know in that function interview your candidate. The best CRO you know should interview your VP Sales candidate. Get CEO-level references. Ask who they would bring with them, then verify those claims directly. Network portability matters in high-growth B2B environments. The pace at AI-native companies is 3 to 5 times faster than traditional SaaS. The product changes weekly. Executives who cannot use the tools, cannot demo the product, and run 2019 playbooks do not just underperform. They actively slow you down, hire the wrong people (also Mediocre Recycled), burn 6 to 9 months, then leverage that "VP at hot AI startup" line into another VP role somewhere else. Strong operators get fired. That is not the flag. The flag is someone who never gets anything done anywhere, despite lots of seemingly impressive roles. For ANZ markets where senior GTM talent pools are smaller and leadership teams often include regionally mobile operators, this recycling loop matters even more. Fewer options makes pattern-matching on LinkedIn logos more tempting. The stakes are higher.

SaaStr
about 2 months ago
News

Australian delivery workers get $34/hour minimum from August 17

## The Numbers From August 17, Australian food delivery workers on Uber Eats and DoorDash get a minimum rate of $33.67/hour plus superannuation. That is Australia's first gig-economy pay floor, covering roughly 250,000 workers. The Fair Work Commission ruling comes after two years of negotiations between the Transport Workers' Union and the platforms. It sets the benchmark for separate proceedings covering rideshare and parcel delivery. ## The Context This mirrors regulatory shifts in other markets. New York City implemented restaurant delivery minimums starting at $17.96/hour in 2023, reaching $21.44/hour by April 2025 and $22.13/hour in April 2026 after inflation adjustments. NYC later extended those rules to grocery delivery, hitting Instacart and Shipt. The pattern is going global. Australia is now the second major market to set delivery platform wage floors, suggesting this is the new regulatory baseline rather than an outlier. ## What It Means for Sales Delivery platforms do not run traditional quota-carrying sales teams. Their go-to-market is merchant acquisition and account management: signing restaurants and retailers onto the marketplace. Minimum pay rules change the unit economics of those partnerships. Higher labour costs mean platforms either absorb margin, pass costs to merchants, or charge consumers more. All three options affect merchant acquisition velocity and retention. DoorDash and Uber Eats initially pushed back on these rules. The platforms settled because fighting city-by-city or country-by-country is not scalable. Worth noting: neither company has disclosed how minimum pay rules in NYC affected merchant count or order volume. ## The Broader Play This is a marketplace supply problem dressed up as labour policy. Platforms need workers to deliver orders. Workers now have a price floor. That floor affects how many merchants the platform can profitably serve and at what fee structure. For context, DoorDash dominates the US market, Uber is the most diversified globally, and Grubhub trails both in scale. None have published ANZ headcount or local executive details, but Australia's 250,000-worker figure suggests meaningful operating scale in the region. Rideshare and parcel delivery rulings are next. If those follow the food delivery model, platform economics shift again.

SmartCompany
about 2 months ago
News

Pest2Kill closes second Sydney acquisition in 12 months, expands to 34 staff

## Pest2Kill closes second Sydney acquisition in 12 months, expands to 34 staff Sydney pest control operator Pest2Kill acquired South Sydney Pest Control on 3 August, marking its second acquisition in nine months. The company bought Impact Pest Control in November 2025. South Sydney Pest Control will continue operating under its existing brand. All administrative and field staff joined Pest2Kill's team, bringing headcount to 34. Pest2Kill was founded in 2015 by Phil Taylor and Julian Bracewell. The company is tracking $6 million revenue for FY26 and services more than 22,000 residential and commercial clients across Greater Sydney. The business ranked 34th in the 2025 Smart50 Awards and was a finalist in Marketing, Community Hero and People Power categories. ### Market context: consolidation in a fragmented sector Australia's pest control market is highly fragmented, with roughly 2,320 operators as of January 2025. Most are small, owner-operated businesses. Large players like Rentokil Terminix and Flick Anticimex have built scale through repeated acquisitions. Rentokil became a global pest control leader after acquiring Terminix in 2022. Anticimex strengthened its ANZ footprint by acquiring parts of ISS Pest Control. Pest2Kill's strategy mirrors this playbook: acquire established local operators, integrate their customer base and field teams, retain the brand, and build route density across Greater Sydney. ### What this means for sales teams Pest2Kill operates in services, not SaaS, but the acquisition pattern is instructive for anyone selling into consolidating markets: - **Bolt-on acquisitions** typically mean admin consolidation but field team retention. South Sydney's staff joined Pest2Kill, suggesting continuity for existing customer relationships. - **Revenue scale matters.** At $6 million run rate with 22,000 clients, Pest2Kill's average customer value sits around $270 annually. That is recurring revenue with route density economics. - **Fragmentation creates M&A opportunity.** When you have 2,300 competitors, the winning strategy is often buy-and-build, not organic growth alone. No comp details or hiring announcements were disclosed. Revenue and headcount figures are based on company statements as of August 2026.

SmartCompany
about 2 months ago
News

Fabulate raises $4.5m, hiring across 10 APAC markets

## Fabulate raises $4.5m, hiring across 10 APAC markets Sydney-based influencer marketing platform Fabulate closed a $4.5 million round at an $84.5 million post-money valuation. The round was oversubscribed, with roughly 90% coming from existing shareholders including Centerstone Capital and Nightingale Partners. The company is profitable. That matters because most marketing tech burns cash to scale. Fabulate operates across 10 APAC markets: Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, and Japan. The company has over 100 employees and is adding commercial coverage regionally. ### What this means for sales teams Recent hires signal expansion. Jon Kee joined as Commercial Director for Southeast Asia, Japan, and South Korea. Gabrielle Lawton leads New Zealand. That structure suggests territory-based ownership rather than a centralised sales org. No public CRO or VP Sales listed, which is typical for product-led companies at this stage. The commercial team likely reports directly to CEO Toby Kennett, who co-founded the company in 2017 with Nathan Powell. Fabulate sells to brands and agencies running creator campaigns. Its SparQ AI product handles discovery, campaign management, and measurement. The platform competes in crowded influencer marketing tech, where workflow automation and multi-market execution drive differentiation. ### Market context This is a follow-on round. PitchBook shows Fabulate raised $2.88 million in October 2023 from the same investors. Two years, 10 markets, profitable: that pace matters for B2B sales professionals tracking APAC expansion plays. The company won Best Influencer Marketing Technology Service at the AiMCO Awards, which signals local market recognition in Australia's creator marketing ecosystem. ### Worth noting Influencer marketing platforms sit adjacent to traditional sales prospecting tools like Outreach and Salesloft, but serve a different buyer. Where Outreach targets SDRs and AEs for B2B prospecting, Fabulate targets marketing teams managing creator relationships at scale. The overlap: both are selling workflow automation to teams that live in spreadsheets without it. For sales professionals considering roles in marketing tech, Fabulate's regional expansion and profitability make it worth tracking. Commercial Director roles in APAC growth markets typically carry strong comp and territory ownership.

Startup Daily
about 2 months ago
News

Sydney defence startup Millibeam ships drone jammer, $4.6m in grants

**Sydney semiconductor startup Millibeam shipped a prototype handheld drone jammer after securing $4.6 million in federal grants and $3 million from Breakthrough Victoria.** The device, called Rakurai, targets multiple drone frequencies simultaneously using custom-designed mmWave chips and antennas. Worth noting: it is a prototype, not battlefield-ready kit. Millibeam is a fabless semiconductor company founded around 2020-2021, focused on mmWave chipsets for 5G/6G, SATCOM, sensing and defence. The Rakurai jammer is built on the same underlying RF silicon work. CEO and founder Venkata Gutta positioned it as sovereign Australian capability, designed and manufactured locally. Funding to date: roughly $7.6m in grants (federal plus state) and a $4.65m Series A in July 2024, plus an earlier $750k seed from Main Sequence, CSIRO's venture arm. PitchBook says total raised is around $5.2m USD, though grant figures push that higher. No public revenue data. The company emphasises engineering and product capabilities over commercial sales team size, and I could not find a listed CRO or VP Sales. **For sales professionals tracking defence opportunities:** Millibeam sits in the dual-use deeptech category, competing in mmWave silicon and counter-UAS/electronic warfare. The ADF is interested. This is not a traditional B2B SaaS sales motion, it is government contracts and defence procurement, where cycles are long, relationships matter, and sovereign capability is a wedge. Defence sales roles in this space typically skew toward business development with government agencies rather than quota-carrying AE work. Comp data for defence BD roles is scarce, but federal contractor sales positions generally sit at $100k-$140k base with performance incentives tied to contract wins, not recurring revenue. Entry-level defence BD roles start around $70k-$90k base. Millibeam's vertical integration story, chip to fielded system, is the competitive angle. If you are tracking DoD funding opportunities or defence AI startups in ANZ, this one is on the radar. Prototype stage means hiring is likely engineering-heavy for now, not sales expansion.

Startup Daily
about 2 months ago
News

ABGF doubles max cheque to $30m, opens door to majority stakes

The Australian Business Growth Fund doubled its maximum initial cheque size to $30 million, up from $15 million. Total investment per company can now hit $50 million including follow-on rounds. The bigger shift: ABGF will now take majority stakes if founders want to reduce their shareholding. Previously, the fund capped ownership at minority positions. That opens ABGF to businesses where the founder is ready to step back but wants a partner focused on growth, not a traditional buyout. ## What ABGF Actually Is ABGF is a private-sector-owned growth fund backed by the Commonwealth and major banks, launched in 2019 with $540 million. Target: established SMEs doing $2 million to $100 million in revenue. They take stakes between 10% and 49%, typically investing $5 million to $30 million for minority positions. This is patient equity, not debt. No forced exit timeline. The pitch: expansion capital without losing control. First deal was 3ME Technology, a battery systems company for heavy industry. ## Who This Affects If you are selling into mid-market companies, this matters. ABGF-backed businesses are typically expanding: new markets, new products, bigger teams. That means hiring. Sales teams scale when capital comes in. CEO Anthony Healy says the fund previously turned away businesses looking for larger cheques or different ownership structures. The expanded mandate means more deals, more capital deployed, more growth-stage companies entering ABGF's portfolio. ## The Context ABGF sits between venture growth funds and traditional PE. Too large for early-stage VC, too growth-focused for buyout firms. Offices in Melbourne and Sydney. The fund does not operate like a SaaS vendor with a sales org, it is an investment vehicle. No publicly listed CRO or VP Sales, because that is not the model. For sellers: if your prospect just closed ABGF funding, expect expansion plans. Ask about headcount growth, territory expansion, and budget increases. Growth capital means growth mandates. The latest investment: Griffin Industrial Group, a defence supplier. ABGF's expanded mandate coincides with that deal, which signals the kind of established, revenue-generating businesses the fund backs.

SmartCompany
about 2 months ago
News

Intuit paid $12B for Mailchimp, now strips it from growth figures

## The Numbers Tell It Intuit paid roughly $12 billion for Mailchimp in 2021. The business was doing $800 million in revenue, growing about 20% annually, with 13 million users and 1,500 employees. Five years later, Intuit publishes its growth rate twice on earnings calls: once with Mailchimp, once without. The gap tells you everything. Q3 FY26: Global Business Solutions grew 15%. Ex-Mailchimp, 17%. Online Ecosystem grew 19%. Ex-Mailchimp, 22%. Management confirmed Mailchimp revenue declined year over year and cut 17% of the workforce, roughly 3,100 roles, with restructuring charges of about $300 million landing in Q4. Mailchimp hit $1.06 billion annualised revenue in Q4 FY22, the one quarter Intuit broke out the number. They have not disclosed a Mailchimp revenue figure since. ## What Went Wrong Mailchimp won for nearly two decades by being the best way for a small business to send email. Simple product, clear job to be done, strong word of mouth. Post-acquisition, the roadmap widened. CRM features, website builders, social ad tools. The CFO told Reuters that small businesses, the core customer base, found it "a bit harder to use." That hurt retention and expansion. Meanwhile, Klaviyo grew 28% in Q1 2026 with 110% net revenue retention in the same small business segment. Same market, same buyer, opposite philosophy: Klaviyo does one job (customer data and messaging for commerce) deeply enough that customers expand spend rather than churn. EmailToolTester data from January 2026 shows every major competitor adding double-digit customer growth over 18 months. Mailchimp added zero. The 11 million user count includes mostly free accounts. When your biggest metric is a denominator you do not monetise, it stops mattering. ## What It Means for Sales Teams If you sell MarTech or work at a SaaS company eyeing platform expansion, this is the cautionary tale. Mailchimp is not dead, it shipped real updates in 2026, including native conversational analytics and deeper e-commerce integrations. The people building it are doing serious work. But the market moved. Email provisioning for new apps increasingly happens via API call, not a marketer signing up for a UI. Mailchimp is losing the customers it has and missing the room where new ones get created. Competitors: Klaviyo, HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, Brevo, Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor, Customer.io. If your comp plan ties to a Mailchimp partnership or integration, worth noting the parent company is now optimising for profitability, not growth. For ANZ sales professionals at Intuit or using Mailchimp in their stack: no public data on local headcount impact from the 17% cut, but restructuring at this scale typically hits all regions. If you are carrying quota tied to Mailchimp upsell or cross-sell into QuickBooks customers, the revenue decline and strategic shift matter for your number.

SaaStr
about 2 months ago
News

Spender: CGT startup carve-out caps could kill founder reinvestment

## The Issue Treasury is consulting on a startup carve-out from Labor's CGT overhaul. The plan: preserve the existing 50% CGT discount for early-stage equity, but cap it at $10 million in lifetime gains per person. Independent MP Allegra Spender says that cap will backfire. Her submission to Treasury argues it will stop proven founders and early investors from recycling capital into new startups. ## What Changed From 1 July 2027, Labor's budget replaces the 50% CGT discount with cost base indexation plus a 30% minimum tax. After pushback from the startup sector, Treasury is now designing an exemption for shares in companies that are: - Unlisted and independent - Under 10 years old (longer for biotech/medtech) - Under $50 million turnover - Held for at least five years The discount stays, but only up to $10 million in eligible gains per individual. ## Spender's Argument "Australia's startup ecosystem owes a great deal of its success to recycled capital and talent on behalf of a small handful of successful company founders, investors and employees," Spender wrote. The cap hits hardest at the people most likely to fund the next round of startups: founders who exit, early employees with equity stakes, and angels who got in early. Hit the cap once, and your incentive to back risky local ventures drops. ## Why It Matters ANZ startup comp already lags US benchmarks. Early-stage equity makes up the gap, especially for founding teams and first hires. If the carve-out discourages repeat founders and experienced operators from staying in the ecosystem, recruitment gets harder. Spender is acting as a bridge between the tech sector and Treasury. She has been meeting with founders and investors on the design of the exemption. The $10 million cap was meant to limit cost to revenue, but it may limit participation instead. Consultation closes soon. The startup sector is pushing for either a higher cap or no cap at all for qualifying investments.

SmartCompany
about 2 months ago
News

SafetyCulture rebrands to Mitti, pushes AI and insurance play

## SafetyCulture rebrands to Mitti, pushes AI and insurance play Brisbane-founded SafetyCulture is now Mitti. The rebrand went live August 11, 2026, unifying the company's workplace safety platform with its insurance venture under one name. The $2.5B unicorn, originally known for its iAuditor inspection app, is positioning the rebrand around new AI capabilities: purpose-built assistants, site benchmarking tools, and agents designed to turn workplace data into proactive action. The company says the shift reflects customer use cases beyond safety checklists, into quality, compliance, training, and day-to-day operations. ### Insurance angle matters more than the name Mitti was SafetyCulture's insurance JV with QBE, launched in 2020 to use workplace risk data to reduce SME claims and premiums. SafetyCulture bought out QBE's 50% stake in 2023, keeping the Mitti brand dormant until now. The rebrand signals the company is doubling down on insurance as a revenue stream, not just compliance software. For sales teams selling into workplace safety, compliance, or operations software, this matters. SafetyCulture, now Mitti, is moving upmarket from checklists into broader operations platforms. That puts it in competition with QMS, EHS, and workflow tools, not just safety audit apps. ### What this means for the ANZ market SafetyCulture has a large ANZ footprint. The original Mitti insurance operation was based in Sydney's Surry Hills. The company continues to hire across Australia and New Zealand, though specific sales org headcount was not disclosed in the announcement. CEO Luke Anear founded the company in Townsville 22 years ago. Current leadership includes James Whyte as CEO in some materials, though the public-facing structure is unclear. If you are tracking SafetyCulture (now Mitti) for comp benchmarks or role openings, check LinkedIn. The company has not published recent sales team expansion numbers. ### The AI play The AI launch is the substance behind the rebrand. Mitti says it is shipping AI assistants, specialised agents, and site benchmarking tools to help frontline teams act on captured data. That is a move away from passive compliance recording toward active workflow automation. For vendors competing in workplace safety or operations software, this is a signal. The market is consolidating around platforms that do more than collect data. If your product stops at reporting, Mitti is now selling the next step. ### Bottom line SafetyCulture is now Mitti. The rebrand ties together workplace data, AI tools, and insurance offerings. The company is valued at $2.5B, operates globally, and has a strong ANZ presence. If you sell into frontline operations, compliance, or safety software, this is a competitor worth tracking.

SmartCompany
about 2 months ago
News

Demo conversion benchmarks: 10% to 20% is good, below 8% burns out teams

## The Benchmark Jason Lemkin pegs good SaaS demo-to-paid conversion at **10% to 20%**. Below 8% to 10%, inside sales teams start to break. The math: reps typically need **10 to 15 closed deals a month** to hit quota. If conversion sits at 8%, that is 125 to 188 demos monthly per rep. At 50 demos a month, reps are already stretched thin if they are preparing properly. ## The Context Third-party benchmarks vary. Optifai reports **25%** demo-to-close across B2B and **30%** for SaaS. RevenueHero tracks earlier in the funnel: **50% to 60%** demo-request-to-meeting conversion. Another SaaS benchmark pegs demo conversion at **10% to 30%**, depending on ACV and motion. The spread reflects definition gaps. Demo-request-to-meeting is different from demo-to-close. Enterprise deals convert differently than SMB. Lower ACV, high-volume teams need stronger throughput than enterprise reps working three deals a quarter. ## The Trap Lemkin flags the trick question: bigger top-of-funnel means lower conversion rates. Early-stage teams often celebrate high conversion because their funnel is small and hyper-qualified. Hire a real demand gen VP, scale marketing, attract general traffic, and conversion metrics fall. That is not failure, that is growth. The implication for sales teams: do not obsess over absolute funnel metrics between lead and close. Track them, usually drive them up, but understand that a falling conversion rate can signal a growing brand, not a broken process. ## What It Means for Reps If your demo conversion sits below 10%, ask whether the problem is lead quality, sales execution, or product-market fit. If you are running 50-plus demos a month and closing 8%, the issue is not effort. It is funnel efficiency or qualification upstream. For hiring managers: realistic demo conversion assumptions matter when setting quotas. If historical conversion is 12% and you model at 20%, your reps will miss. If you assume 30% because a benchmark report said so, they will miss harder.

SaaStr
about 2 months ago
News

Atlassian kills Loom free viewer seats, converts them to paid at $15-24 each

Atlassian eliminated Loom's Creator Lite role, effective on each workspace's integration date. Every person who used to watch and comment for free inside a paid workspace now counts as a paid Creator seat at $15 to $24. A workspace with 10 recorders and 90 watchers used to pay for 10 seats. Now it pays for 100. Admins get a grace period until their next billing date to deactivate users. Miss it and they are on the invoice. Worth being precise: Loom's free Starter plan still exists at $0, with 25 recordings and a 5-minute cap. What got deleted is the free seat inside a paying account. That is the population that mattered, because those people were never going to sign up for their own separate account to keep watching their coworker's videos. ## The free seats were the distribution Loom's loop was simple. One person records something, twenty people watch it, three of them decide that was easier than a meeting and start recording. The watchers were free because the watchers were the top of the funnel. Loom reached 25 million users on that loop, recording close to 5 million videos a month. Atlassian paid $975 million for it in October 2023, roughly 35% below Loom's 2021 Series C valuation of $1.53 billion. Charging for the watchers converts a growth loop into a collections problem. The rational admin response is not to pay for 90 seats. It is to deactivate 85 of them. Those 85 people do not stop needing to send video. They go find something that does not bill for watching. ## Sales impact: the alternatives conversation just started Figma restructured its seat model in March 2025 and made the opposite call. Prices went up on Full seats, but viewers got a free View seat with view and comment access. New users automatically join with a free seat. If they need a paid one, an admin has to approve the charge. Atlassian's default: an existing free person becomes a paid seat automatically. If you do not want the charge, an admin has to find them and remove them before the invoice. Same problem, same year, opposite default. Figma understands that the stakeholder who comments on a design file is how the design file spreads through the company. Atlassian looked at the same population and priced them at $15 to $24 a head. For sales teams using Loom for video prospecting, the math changed overnight. Vidyard, Sendspark, and other tools that do not charge per viewer are now in play. LinkedIn threads on the change are full of people asking what to switch to. Loom is not Atlassian's core product. The business rationale appears to be platform integration with Jira and Confluence, not preserving Loom's original free-user growth model. That might be the explanation. It does not change the billing.

SaaStr
about 2 months ago
News

OpenAI signs South Australia MoU, part of broader ANZ enterprise push

## OpenAI signs South Australia MoU, part of broader ANZ enterprise push South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas signed a memorandum of understanding with OpenAI during a trade mission to San Francisco. The deal was inked with OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman at the company's headquarters. The agreement covers AI skills development, research acceleration, investment attraction, and government service productivity. It is believed to be the first MoU between an Australian state or territory government and a major AI company. ### Part of a larger ANZ motion The South Australian deal sits within OpenAI's broader Australia strategy. The company recently launched OpenAI for Australia, its first "for Countries" program in Asia-Pacific. That initiative includes an MoU with NEXTDC for an AI campus and GPU supercluster in Sydney, plus training programs with CommBank, Coles, and Wesfarmers, and startup backing with Blackbird, Square Peg, and AirTree. OpenAI is positioning itself as an ecosystem partner in Australia, not just a product vendor. The company faces competition from Anthropic, which signed its own MoU with the federal government in April 2026. ### What this means for sales teams For sales professionals, OpenAI's Australia expansion signals growing enterprise demand for AI tools. The company's partnerships with major employers suggest ChatGPT Enterprise and Business tiers are gaining traction in ANZ. ChatGPT Enterprise offers unlimited high-speed GPT-4 access, admin controls, and security features. Pricing is not publicly disclosed but typically requires direct sales engagement for organisations above 150 seats. ChatGPT Business starts at USD $25 per user per month for smaller teams. AI SDR tools and sales prospecting platforms increasingly rely on OpenAI's API infrastructure. The company's local partnerships could mean improved latency and support for ANZ sales teams using AI for lead generation, qualification, and outreach. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese plans to convene state leaders in August to discuss data centre standards. Six states have agreed to the framework. Queensland and the Northern Territory are holding out. OpenAI has not disclosed ANZ headcount, sales team size, or local commercial leadership. The public face remains tied to core executives like Brockman.

Startup Daily
about 2 months ago
News

Backstory retiered 141 accounts in 3 days with AI signals, down from a quarter

## The Exercise Backstory retiered its entire customer base in three to four days. Same project used to take Haya Kamola's team plus four others a full quarter. The scope: 141 accounts. Define what good customers look like, measure everyone against that definition, produce a tiering framework the exec team can act on. Board request, short turnaround. Kamola leads customer success at Backstory, a revenue intelligence startup. She presented the workflow at SaaStr AI Day, and the before-and-after is the part worth noting. ## What Changed The old version: cross-functional data pull across product, BI, finance, and several other teams. Manual collection of TAM, health scores, renewal risk, feature requests, and adoption metrics for every account. Quarter-long exercise. The new version: four connectors replaced the data pull. Amplitude for usage data. Atlassian and Jira for feature requests. Backstory's own conversation history tool. Slack, because the company runs an internal channel per customer and that is where account strategy and risk get flagged first. Only manual step: CSV export from Salesforce with account name, health score, renewal date, and ACV. ## The Signals That Mattered Kamola started by asking account teams to describe what made one or two customers different. Not largest contract, not longest tenured. What they landed on: customers who treated Backstory as core infrastructure, built systems around it, planned five years out with it at the center, and kept finding new use cases. That definition produced the signals they measured. AI maturity: a five-level framework covering culture, investment, tech stack, talent, and willingness to engage on hard problems. Previously required account teams to categorize by hand. Now runs as a systematic prompt against CRM fields, public company data, and full conversation history. Output is a maturity level per account plus reasoning. Tech stack mix got the same treatment. Pre-sales scorecards from two years ago were stale. Current picture was sitting in unread conversations. Deployment velocity: did they land small and expand fast across the stack. Executive visibility: was Backstory data being used by execs to make decisions. White space: TAM within the account and what remained. ## What This Means for Sales Orgs The Slack connector is the replicable piece. Most account teams run internal channels or threads per customer. That dialogue is usually the earliest read on account health, expansion opportunity, and risk. It almost never makes it into structured systems. The broader pattern: account tiering and segmentation exercises typically bottleneck on data collection, not analysis. If the signals that matter are conversation history, feature requests, usage patterns, and internal account team dialogue, those are all capturable without asking four teams to pull reports. Backstory is not disclosing headcount, ARR, or ANZ presence. The company sits in the revenue intelligence category alongside People.ai, Clari, Gong, and 6sense. Kamola's background is sales and sales leadership before moving to customer success. Worth noting: she ran four iterations to narrow eight signals down to four scoring buckets. One signal was scoring backwards and had to be flipped. The definition came before the data, which is the part that prevents you from scoring accounts against whatever fields happen to be populated in your CRM.

SaaStr
about 2 months ago
News

Firmus hits $15B valuation, raises $2.85B for Australian AI data centres

## Firmus raises $2.85B at $15B valuation Firmus, the AI data centre startup building GPU-dense infrastructure across Australia, closed a $2.85 billion equity round at a $15 billion valuation. Coatue and Nvidia returned as investors. Blackstone Tactical Opportunities led new money in, with Jane Street also participating. The company has now raised over $4 billion in equity in 12 months. That total does not include a separate $10 billion debt package Blackstone is arranging. ## Valuation trajectory Firmus was worth $1.85 billion in September 2025 when Nvidia first invested $330 million. By November 2025, it hit $6 billion. April 2026 brought a $725 million raise at $8 billion. Now it sits at $15 billion, eight months later. For context: that is faster valuation growth than most ANZ tech companies achieve in a decade. The speed reflects investor appetite for AI compute infrastructure and Firmus's land and power positions in Australia. ## Project Southgate rollout Firmus is deploying capital into Project Southgate, its plan to build AI data centres across Australian capital cities. The company operates from Singapore but holds development sites in Tasmania and South Australia. Three facilities are now under construction in Tasmania alone. The business started in 2019, initially focused on bitcoin mining infrastructure before pivoting to AI compute. Co-founders Oliver Curtis and Tim Rosenfield lead the company. ## What this means for sales teams Firmus is hiring to support this buildout, though the company has not disclosed team size or recent sales leadership appointments publicly. For enterprise AEs selling into AI infrastructure buyers, this is a signal: budgets for GPU compute and co-location are real, large, and moving fast in ANZ. Data centre sales roles typically pay $120k to $180k OTE for mid-market, $180k to $300k+ for enterprise. Expect Firmus to compete for talent in that range as it scales. The company is reportedly preparing for an ASX float. When infrastructure startups go public, sales teams usually double in the 12 months before and after the listing. Watch for hiring announcements tied to that timeline. ## Market context Firmus competes with other neocloud and AI infrastructure providers across Asia-Pacific. The funding environment for AI data centres remains strong: investors are backing companies that can secure power, land, and GPU supply at scale. Firmus has all three in Australia, which explains the valuation momentum. For sales professionals tracking the AI infrastructure space, this round confirms that enterprise compute budgets are expanding, not contracting. If your territory includes mid-market or enterprise accounts evaluating AI workloads, expect more inbound interest and faster deal cycles in 2026.

Startup Daily
about 2 months ago
News

Brisbane AI sales startup Enrola raises $2.1M seed after edtech pivot

## The Deal Brisbane-based Enrola closed a $2.1 million seed round led by Purpose Ventures, with participation from Antler, AfterWork Ventures, and Skalata Ventures. The company previously raised $800,000 in late 2024 for an education comparison platform before pivoting to AI sales automation. ## What They Actually Do Enrola builds AI SMS sales agents that qualify leads, handle objections, and either close deals or hand off warmer prospects to human sales teams. The platform targets high-consideration B2C services: telecommunications, insurance, broadband, financial services, education, and healthcare. Founded in late 2023 by CEO Jo Thomas and CTO Yvette Quinby, the company initially launched as an education marketplace. They built an AI agent to convert their own leads, realised the agent was the actual product, and pivoted in September 2025. Since the pivot: 28 customers signed, 250,000 leads processed. New head of growth David Johnson joined from UpGuard, where he ran GTM automation. ## Market Context Enrola is late to a crowded space. AI SDR and BDR tools have been raising serious capital: competitors like Actively AI, Rox AI, and Attention are building similar automation across B2B and B2C. The difference here is focus: Enrola targets B2C sales teams dealing with high-value, long-consideration purchases where buyers research independently before engaging. The pitch is familiar: meet buyers where they research, automate qualification, free up human sellers for closing. The question is execution and unit economics. Can an AI SMS agent actually convert at rates that justify the stack cost versus hiring another BDR? ## What It Means For Sales Teams If you are selling high-touch B2C services (think: insurance, education programs, finance products), this is the automation wave coming for outbound and inbound qualification work. The implication: fewer junior sales roles doing initial engagement, more focus on late-stage conversion and account management. Worth noting: Enrola is still early-stage, Brisbane-based, and up against well-funded competitors. The seed capital suggests traction, but we have not seen public revenue or retention numbers yet.

Startup Daily
about 2 months ago
News

Firmus raises $2.85B, three other ANZ startups add $950M this week

## The Numbers Firmus Technologies closed $2.85 billion (US$2 billion) this week, valuing the AI data centre infrastructure startup at $15 billion. Existing backers Coatue and Nvidia led the round, with new equity from Blackstone Tactical Opportunities and quant trading firm Jane Street. Three other Australian startups raised approximately $950 million in the same period across medtech, hospitality tech, and climate sectors. Combined total: $3.8 billion in one week. ## What This Means Firmus has now raised over $4.25 billion (US$3 billion) in 12 months. The Singapore-based company, founded by Australians Tim Rosenfield and Oliver Curtis, is rolling out Project Southgate: a $73 billion plan to build green-powered AI data centres in four Australian capitals. They were touting an ASX IPO at $12 billion earlier this year. That valuation just jumped 25%. For context: Airwallex closed a $460 million round at $16 billion in June 2026, cementing its position as Australia's fintech infrastructure leader. Firmus is now playing in the same valuation league. The broader market is still capitalised. Australian startups raised $5.48 billion across 390 deals in 2025, per Cut Through Venture data. Weekly totals fluctuate, but the ecosystem remains active for growth and venture rounds. ## Sales Context Firmus operates infrastructure, not commercial sales software, but the raise signals continued investor appetite for ANZ tech at scale. When a local startup closes a $2.85 billion round, it creates downstream hiring activity: project managers, enterprise account teams, vendor partnerships. The three other startups in this week's roundup span sectors that typically hire commercial teams: hospitality tech, digital health, maternal care, and climate solutions. No headcount or hiring specifics were disclosed in available coverage. Worth noting: Airwallex continues to set the benchmark for ANZ enterprise sales at scale. Any payments, treasury, or cross-border commerce startup in the region is measured against its trajectory. ## The Market Reality One week, $3.8 billion across four companies. That is not a typical cadence, even in a strong funding environment. It is also not evenly distributed: Firmus accounts for 75% of the total. The mix matters more than the headline figure. Large growth rounds like Firmus signal infrastructure investment. Smaller venture rounds in the same week suggest early-stage activity remains funded. Both are necessary for a functioning ecosystem. No comp details, territory expansions, or executive hires were disclosed for the four startups. When those details surface, they will indicate commercial traction beyond capital raised.

SmartCompany
about 2 months ago
News

SaaStr bought 30 APIs this year: only one vendor checked product usage

## The Setup Jason Lemkin's team at SaaStr signed up for 30+ APIs this year: search, enrichment, email infrastructure, inference, storage. They are building SaaStr AI Connect and running 21 agents in production, which means a lot of vendor trials. One company checked in on usage. One. The rest ran sequences, pitched features, or went silent. Nobody else asked if the product actually worked for what SaaStr was doing with it. ## What Exa Did Four days after Lemkin ran his first real batch, Alina from Exa's product team sent this: "Hi Jason, I'm on the product team here at Exa. I noticed you signed up and tested Exa. If you have a one-liner on how we did (or what could have been done better), that would be greatly appreciated (and I'm happy to drop $50 of credits in your account). Thanks a mil, Alina." Four sentences. Fifty dollars in credits. A named PM who could actually act on feedback. Lemkin wrote back 33 minutes later with 400 words: production feedback, a benchmark, feature requests, pricing constraints. Alina replied in under three hours with specific endpoint configurations and an honest "we don't support that yet" on one ask. ## Why It Worked **Small ask, big response.** "One-liner" is answerable in 15 seconds. "30-minute call" is a calendar negotiation with someone who does not know if you are worth it yet. The small ask produced the detailed spec. **Usage trigger, not signup trigger.** Most drips fire on day 0, day 1, day 3 regardless of what happened in the account. Exa triggered after actual API calls: after a real test, before a decision. That is the one window where feedback matters. **Product person, not SDR.** Someone who works on the product, using their own name, who can answer product questions and influence roadmap. Automated outreach is infinite now. Human attention from someone with product context is scarce. **Credits, not gift cards.** Fifty dollars of API credits costs Exa almost nothing and pays developers in more usage of the thing you want them using. A gift card buys an answer. Credits buy an answer plus more production traffic. **Reply showed product depth.** Alina came back with specific configurations by endpoint and parameter, a second approach Lemkin did not know about, and a direct "we don't expose that yet" with a note that it is worth looking at. Most CS sends "Thanks, I have passed this to product" and teaches you never to bother again. ## What This Means for Sales If you sell APIs, infra, or any product-led tool: your sequences are not working. Your upgrade pitches are not working. Checking in on usage, from someone who knows the product, with a tiny friction ask, works. Worth noting: Coresignal did reach out after Lemkin upgraded tiers. The rep was smart and had done homework. But he was there to upsell, not to check in. The trigger was billing, not usage. That is a good sales motion. It is not the same thing. One vendor out of 30 asked how the trial went. Copy them.

SaaStr
about 2 months ago
News

Canva cuts revenue forecast 30% to 20%, AI costs hit margins

## Canva cuts revenue forecast 30% to 20%, AI costs hit margins Canva dropped its 2026 revenue growth forecast from 30% to 20% after AI inference costs blew out harder than expected. The Sydney-based design platform, valued at US$42 billion, slowed product rollout to fix unit economics before scaling broadly. Quarterly revenue still grew 25% to US$921.9 million. But co-founder Melanie Perkins told investors the company was "relying too heavily on frontier models" when it launched Canva AI 2.0 four months ago. Translation: they were paying OpenAI and similar providers per API call, and at 265 million monthly active users, that adds up fast. Canva has since cut the cost of a single AI task by nearly 90% by building first-party models and rebuilding architecture. That is the right move long term, but it meant pulling back distribution in the short term. The growth slowdown is the result. ### What this means for go-to-market Canva is shifting from selling features to monetising AI usage and credits. That changes enterprise packaging, customer acquisition economics, and likely how sales teams position the product. If you are selling into design or productivity buyers, watch how Canva prices AI: it will set the benchmark for what customers expect from SaaS tools with embedded GenAI. The broader pattern: SaaS companies are learning that adding AI without fixing unit economics first tanks margins. Atlassian just capped employee AI spending for the same reason. CFOs are now asking VPs of Sales to justify AI tool costs with actual ROI data, not vibes. Canva sits at about US$4 billion in ARR as of end of 2025, up from US$2.8 billion a year earlier. The company competes directly with Adobe and Figma while defending a freemium-led growth model. Co-founder and COO Cliff Obrecht said at Blackbird's Sunrise in April that building proprietary models was the plan all along to cut the AI bill. ### The takeaway If you are in sales leadership and your company is adding AI features: ask about unit economics before quota gets built around adoption metrics. Canva just showed what happens when inference costs outrun pricing strategy. They fixed it, but growth took the hit.

Startup Daily
about 2 months ago
News

Airtable sells for $2.25B at 2.7x ARR after $11.7B valuation

## The Numbers Bending Spoons is buying Airtable for $1.285B enterprise value, or about $2.25B equity value after net cash. That is 2.7x the company's $480M ARR as of June 2026. Airtable raised $1.4B total. Its peak valuation was $11.7B in late 2021 at 75x ARR. The current deal prices it 81% below that mark. The business: $480M ARR growing 20% YoY, 90% gross margins, cash flow positive since late 2024 generating $100M+ annually, 500,000+ organisations including 80% of the Fortune 100. ## What Changed Founded in 2012, Airtable built a relational database with a spreadsheet interface and sold it bottoms-up into enterprise. By 2021 it was doing $156M ARR and raised at a 75x multiple. Then growth slowed. Two rounds of layoffs totaling 491 people. The company cut to profitability, kept half its capital on the balance sheet, stabilised enterprise retention. In 2025-2026, founder-CEO Howie Liu declared a full AI refound: launched conversational app builder Omni, acquired DeepSky, hired OpenAI's former head of ChatGPT business products as CTO, shipped Superagent and Hyperagent. The result was 20% growth, not re-acceleration. ## Why It Sold No forcing function. No debt, $700M in the bank, profitable. But no path back to $11.7B either. At 20% growth you get priced as a cash flow asset, not a compounder. Filing an S-1 means going public well below the last private round, permanently. Secondary markets had been repricing Airtable for three years. The final price landed 44% below the January 2026 secondary mark and about 25% below where desks were pricing it three weeks ago. Competitive pressure matters too. The no-code app building position Airtable owned is being commoditised by faster, cheaper tools. ## The Hyperagent Carve-Out Pre-signing, Airtable transferred assets relating to Hyperagent, its autonomous AI worker platform announced February 2026, into a separate entity. The SEC filing confirms the reorganisation happened before the deal. Hyperagent was contributing roughly nothing to the $480M ARR, so the 2.7x multiple holds either way. But it tells you where Liu is going next and that the agent bet survived the sale. ## What It Means for Sales Bending Spoons is the Milan-based serial acquirer that IPO'd on Nasdaq in July 2026 and closed up 40% on day one. Its portfolio includes Evernote, Vimeo, Eventbrite, WeTransfer. Airtable is its first deal since listing. For sales professionals watching SaaS valuations in 2026: this is the clearing price for a well-known B2B brand doing half a billion in ARR at 20% growth with strong margins and profitability. The 2021 multiples are not coming back. The market pays for growth or profitability, rarely both at premium prices unless you are re-accelerating. Airtable's comp structure and sales org headcount are not publicly disclosed, but the scale suggests a meaningful enterprise motion alongside product-led growth. What happens to that team under new ownership is the next question.

SaaStr
about 2 months ago
News

YC-backed startup offered job interviews for tattoos, founder apologizes

## The Stunt LemonLime, a Y Combinator-backed AI automation startup, hosted what founder Jordan Zietz called the "most unhinged" YC Startup School afterparty in San Francisco last week. The hook: get a tattoo, get an interview. Seven people took the deal. They are still in the interview process for AI and engineering roles. Zietz, a 24-year-old Stanford graduate, posted about it on LinkedIn (since deleted): "We brought an actual tattoo artist to our party and offered an instant interview to anyone who got a LemonLime tattoo. We are bold, we take risks, and we do things that haven't been done before." ## The Backlash The post got torn apart. "The job market cannot be this cooked that kids have to get permanent tattoos to get interviews," one user wrote. Another: "Imagine getting branded with the LemonLime logo for a job interview, then getting rejected." Zietz apologized days later: "What I thought would be a fun, memorable way to meet people was, in reality, reckless and instead came across as tying a permanent tattoo to a job opportunity, which showed poor judgement. I should have understood the pressure and power dynamic created by connecting tattoos to hiring." The company is covering tattoo removal costs for anyone with regrets. ## What This Actually Is This is a founder-stage recruiting stunt at a company with no disclosed headcount, no named sales leader, and no public revenue. LemonLime is early YC, not scaled venture. The fact that they are running tattoo parlours instead of structured hiring processes tells you where they are in the growth curve. For context: this is the same market where AI hiring tools are facing lawsuits over algorithmic bias (Workday settled a discrimination case last year), where recruitment scandals damage employer brands for years, and where experienced sales professionals are asking for comp transparency, not gimmicks. Worth noting: none of the seven people have been offered roles yet. They got tattoos for a shot at an interview at a startup most people had not heard of until this story broke. ## The Sales Angle If you are hiring sales talent in ANZ or anywhere else, this is a case study in what not to do. Desperation hiring signals scare off strong candidates. Power dynamics in recruiting are real. And viral stunts that make your company look unserious do not help when you are trying to close enterprise deals or attract experienced AEs. Real talk: if your recruiting strategy involves permanent body modification, your employer brand is not the problem. Your judgment is.

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