Latest updates for ANZ sales professionals
Matt Wright sold his Brisbane used-car marketplace to Toyota Tsusho for $120 million after six years. Now he is writing three $1 million cheques to founders in Australia, UK, and US through his Founder Finds Future initiative. The company hit $500 million in revenue before the exit.
Oli closed a $6.5 million Series A3 to commercialise wearable birth-monitoring tech. The Sydney startup has now raised $13 million private capital plus $9.5 million in grants since 2018. Worth watching: they are moving from development into hospital sales, which means clinical sales hires are likely coming.
CBA is testing an AI agent that handles business loan applications end-to-end, including income verification. The tool lives in the mobile app and uses customer data to answer questions and progress applications without human involvement. This is not a chatbot upgrade, it is agentic AI that takes action.
Sydney hospitality wholesale platform Ordermentum closed $55 million from Five V Capital at a $150m valuation. The round funds AI development and acquisitions. The company connects 50,000 venues with suppliers through digital ordering and payments.
SaaStr is running two AI agents that handle marketing ops, sponsor management, and personalized outreach for $257 combined monthly cost. The work previously required multiple full-time staff. LLM costs dropped 95% in 12 months, making agent economics viable for lean GTM teams.
FDE job postings jumped 12x in one year as AI vendors race to close deployment gaps. The catch: most Customer Success Managers lack the technical depth to make the switch. Here is what the role actually requires, what it pays, and how post-sale orgs are restructuring around it.
ANZ is removing 3,500 employees and 1,000 contractors by September 2026 while rolling out Agentforce CRM to business bankers. The bank is automating account summaries, lead prioritization, and task routing, aiming to save each banker one working month per year. This is not a hiring story. This is a replacement story.
Jon Addison reorganised Okta's sales org around product specialisation and partner-led deals. The result: 95% of top 100 deals now partner-led, new products driving 40% higher ACV, and the company's first year of operating profit. Here's the playbook.
Google's AI Mode and AI Overviews are changing how buyers find vendors. Early data shows users less likely to click through AI-generated summaries, compressing the top-of-funnel discovery that feeds B2B pipelines. For sales teams relying on inbound leads from organic search, this is a structural shift.
Three ANZ startups pulled in $81 million this week. Sydney hospitality platform Ordermentum led with $55M from Five V Capital, serving 45,000 venues. Melbourne defence tech Arkeus closed a Series A, while NZ music platform Lume secured backing from Lorde ahead of launch.
New research shows Australia's government-funded innovation programs mandate tools empirically linked to failure. Tech Readiness Levels, Lean methodology, and Business Model Canvas dominate contracts despite evidence they don't work. The country ranks 22nd globally on innovation output, with only 46% of businesses actively innovating in 2023.
After Claude Opus 4.6 demand spiked in December 2025, Anthropic's Head of Industries Eleanor Dorfman rebuilt the entire sales org in January 2026. Four months later, 54% of new enterprise logos came through self-serve, on real enterprise terms with real ACV. Here is how they threaded Claude through their existing stack instead of hiring their way out of the problem.