Latest updates for ANZ sales professionals
The B2B media company rebuilt its entire go-to-market stack around AI agents in six months. Two humans and a dog now manage sponsor sales, event production, and customer success through specialized agents that book meetings, revive dead leads, and push daily marketing ideas. Owner.com and Klaviyo shared similar AI agent buildouts at SaaStr AI Annual 2026.
Australia's largest startup community changed hands this week. ASX-listed Scalare Partners bought Fishburners from voluntary administrators and is moving the operation to Tank Stream Labs. CEO Majella Campbell is stepping down after 15 months trying to stabilise the business.
Nitrosend closed $700k seed led by Eastend Ventures. Founders Edward and George Hartley previously built and sold SmartrMail to Relay Commerce in 2022. The AI email platform landed 190 users since April launch, targeting SMB market with agent-based workflow automation.
The budget math is changing. Companies are starting to choose between hiring another engineer at $300k or spending that money on AI tokens. Early data: Uber caps engineers at $1,500/month token spend, some startups now spend more on tokens than salaries. That shift will hit sales and CS teams next.
Three hypergrowth AI companies are rewriting customer success: Harvey runs old-school on-site for law firms at $190M ARR, AssemblyAI renamed CSMs to forward deployed engineers after technical buyers shut down, and Lovable stopped saying 'AI-powered' entirely. The shift: adoption metrics mean nothing if customers are not changing how they work.
Seven ANZ startups closed funding this week, totalling $17 million. South Australian quantum sensing startup QuantX Labs led with a $7 million seed round from Serendipity Capital. Two startups are headed to Y Combinator in San Francisco.
Maleka Momand, CEO of policy management startup Esper, broke down the reality of selling to government: expect three-year sales cycles, win trust before business, and treat professional services as competitive advantage, not cost center. The company has raised $10.7M and is expanding into Kansas and NYC.
Jason Lemkin's SaaStr AI team replaced most of their go-to-market function with AI agents. The stack handles outbound, inbound, and RevOps across 2.25M sessions. Here is what worked, what broke, and the actual numbers behind each agent.
Agentic AI usage just overtook human chat in real production data from OpenRouter, which routes 28 trillion tokens weekly. The problem: one agent task burns more tokens than 100 human chats, and most sales teams budgeted for chat, not agents. If your AI spend forecast still models people typing into boxes, you are about to blow your annual budget early.
Sydney hotel-tech vendor SiteMinder (ASX:SDR) is pushing AI-enabled distribution channels after getting caught in the 2026 software selloff. The company serves 41,000+ hotels across 150 countries with channel management and booking software. Share price jumped recently, but the path to profitability remains unclear despite consistent revenue growth.
SaaStr updated its classic VP of Sales hiring guide for 2026. The new questions screen for AI agent deployment, hybrid team management, and whether candidates can run modern GTM motions. The shift: title inflation is worse, capital is tighter, and VPs who can't speak fluently about Clay, Artisan, or Qualified are now filtered out at interview stage.
Meta fixed a security flaw that let attackers manipulate its AI support bot to take over Instagram accounts, including high-profile business profiles. The exploit worked by social-engineering the chatbot into sending password-reset codes to attacker-controlled emails. Meta did not disclose how many accounts were affected.