Latest updates for ANZ sales professionals
Queensland skincare brand Frasé Skin closed $1.2 million in equity crowdfunding from 535 investors to fund US expansion. The tradie-focused e-commerce company hit $3 million ARR and 40,000 customers in three years, now launching on Amazon Prime with retail partnerships including Coles.
Auckland-based Hyades closed a $910k pre-seed to build spatial AI for enterprise teams. The startup turns satellite, drone, and radar data into AI-ready models for insurance, agriculture, and climate risk. Early stage, lean team, worth tracking as enterprise geospatial tooling heats up.
Apple filed a lawsuit alleging OpenAI stole proprietary hardware designs through former employees, including Chief Hardware Officer Tang Tan. The suit claims OpenAI coached candidates on dodging scrutiny while sharing confidential product data. This marks a sharp turn from their ChatGPT partnership.
Canberra agtech startup Goterra has entered liquidation after administrators found no viable buyers. The insect farming company raised $36.5M over a decade, burned through its runway scaling autonomous waste processing tech, and recorded $1.43M revenue against ongoing losses. No details on what happens to the team.
The vertical SaaS leader posted $268.8M quarterly revenue with 110% NRR and 15.2% operating margin. Fintech now represents 22% of platform revenue and is outpacing core subscriptions. Trading at 6x-7x ARR despite strong fundamentals.
First federal AI employment report shows slower hiring in AI-exposed roles, not mass layoffs. Software dev jobs up 25% since ChatGPT launch. Youth employment holding steady. For sales teams: watch clerical and admin roles, but the pipeline is not collapsing yet.
AI presentation startup Gamma crossed $100M ARR profitably with 50 employees and no sales team, relying entirely on word-of-mouth growth. CEO Grant Lee now admits he should have added sales earlier despite the numbers. Here is what that scaling path looks like and why the typical 200-person playbook did not apply.
SaaStr founder Jason Lemkin says most VC pressure to increase burn rate and hire fast is wrong, especially from large funds. Founders already know their spending velocity by $6M ARR. The push often serves investor interests, not startup survival.
Vanessa Larco and Mercedes Bent are launching Premise, a consumer-focused early-stage fund. Worth noting: they are running it with startup discipline, formal investment memos, KPIs, and internal R&D. The thesis? Back technical founding teams building category-defining companies OpenAI will not kill.
Brian Le scaled Notion's sales compensation from 80 to 400+ commissionable employees, building the comp infrastructure that enables top AEs to earn over $1 million in a single quarter. He moved comp from broken spreadsheets to automated systems, treating it as go-to-market infrastructure, not an HR derivative.
A founding customer churned after nearly two decades because Adobe Marketo raised pricing instead of offering a retention discount. The case highlights a common trap: legacy vendors protect NRR metrics by letting at-risk customers walk, rather than discounting to buy time for product improvement. For account managers, the lesson is clear: renewal discounts work when migration friction is high, and losing a logo costs more than the NRR hit.
A major Telstra network outage disrupted businesses across Australia on Wednesday morning, affecting mobile calls, data, and payment processing. Sales teams relying on Telstra's network for CRM access and customer communication were cut off, with some businesses reporting they could not process card payments. The outage started before 5am AEST and affected Telstra customers plus resellers including Boost, Belong, and Aldi Mobile.