Latest updates for ANZ sales professionals
Three ANZ startups closed $21.5 million this week: hospitality marketplace First Table landed $10m for Australian expansion, AI workflow startup Metacognition AI raised an undisclosed amount, and Dela secured $1m in early-stage capital. Worth noting: none have publicly disclosed GTM headcount or enterprise sales motion.
Kiwi restaurant booking platform First Table closed $10M led by Altered Capital. The company is targeting double-digit growth in Australia over 12 months, which likely means hiring AEs and SDRs to chase 1,500+ restaurant venues across Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth. Worth watching for restaurant tech sales roles.
Xero issued back-to-back apologies after sending automated analytics emails directly to SMB clients instead of their accountants, days after a sponsored Instagram post suggested businesses could cut accounting fees using AI. The missteps highlight channel partner tension as the NZ$2.75bn platform expands into payments and North American markets.
Snowflake just posted its best sequential revenue quarter ever: $158M net new in Q2, up from $68M two quarters ago. The company is deliberately cutting gross margin from 76% to 74% to subsidise AI inference costs, betting that AI products will pull through enough core consumption to cover the hit. For sales teams, this matters: product revenue is re-accelerating at massive scale, 60% of accounts are touching the AI agent, and the CRO seat has turned over twice in 14 months.
AI voice platform ElevenLabs scaled from zero to $600M ARR in under four years. The GTM call: when their AI agent closes a deal, the human account owner still gets paid commission. First VP Revenue Carles Reina also ran 20x quota on base salary, uncapped comp, and paid zero on POCs regardless of size.
Adelaide-based Metacognition AI closed $10 million from Main Sequence to build a voice-controlled operating system for industrial robots. The eight-person team is hiring AI researchers and pitching open-cut mines and grid operators on verbal task training. No enterprise sales team yet, no disclosed ANZ customer pipeline.
Jason Lemkin's SaaS media company cut its sales org to near zero and replaced the work with AI agents. Real operational roles, real systems, real failures. Here is what each agent does, what they refuse to do, and where they have broken.
Sydney payments startup Dela closed $1M from a private investor to tackle C2C marketplace scams. The platform holds payments in escrow until buyers confirm delivery, charges $5 plus 3.5% per transaction, and sits between sellers on Facebook Marketplace or Gumtree and payment processors like Stripe. No sales team disclosed yet.
SaaStr founder Jason Lemkin argues the VP of Sales candidate everyone loves is often the wrong hire. If your entire sales team, management, and board all agree, you are probably looking at someone who will not change enough to drive faster growth. The unpopular choice with strong opinions usually wins.
AI adoption hitting 50% by 2035 is driving $60 billion in data centre investment across Australia. NEXTDC, CDC, and AirTrunk are expanding capacity. For sales professionals, that means new accounts, greenfield territory, and roles selling into hyperscale infrastructure.
Daniel Dines lasted four months away from UiPath before returning as CEO. Aneel Bhusri came back to Workday after two years. Eoghan McCabe renamed Intercom after its AI agent, then sold for $3.6B. The pattern: founders are returning to companies big enough to survive but too slow to adapt to AI-driven buying patterns.
Melbourne seed VC Skalata Ventures is now Tall Order Ventures after CEO Rohan Workman and COO Maxine Lee bought out founder Paul Little in August. The firm paused new investments for five months to rebuild its deal flow with AI. Portfolio sits at 85 companies across three funds, roughly $50 million in latest fund size.