Latest updates for ANZ sales professionals
Sam Kroonenburg's adtech startup Cuttable closed a $5.7M raise at a $100M valuation, double its August round. The Melbourne company is opening a New York office as US demand hits 50% of inbound. Total raised: $16M since mid-2024.
Tech Council of Australia reports the sector now contributes $248.5 billion to the economy, making it Australia's third-largest industry. Worth noting: nearly half that value comes from indirect tech adoption, not the tech industry itself. Job growth is lagging the council's 2030 targets.
Jason Lemkin's media company ditched human SDRs entirely, now runs Agentforce, Monaco, Artisan, Qualified, and others 24/7. The budget shift: AI agents are no longer plug-ins, they are replacing the headcount. CRM spend is flat, agent spend is climbing.
Jason Lemkin's B2B SaaS community replaced nearly its entire sales team with AI agents after the last salesperson quit. The new structure: 4 AI SDRs, Salesforce Agent Force, Qualified AI BDR, plus support and research agents. Lemkin now says the only hiring question that matters is what AI tool you deployed in the last 30 days.
Jason Lemkin's advice for AI B2B founders: deployment bottlenecks kill retention faster than lack of check-ins. Most scale sales without implementation support, then wonder why churn is brutal. The fix: sequence your post-sales hires, starting with field deployment engineers.
Advanced Navigation pulled $158 million Series C led by Airtree, with $50 million from NRFC. MiAI Law and Deftbiotech raised undisclosed amounts. Worth noting: this fits Q3 2025's pattern where top 10 deals captured 70% of ANZ's $1 billion in venture funding, concentrated in AI and deep tech.
Meta's reported 20% workforce reduction is not about AI replacing jobs. It is about capex priorities: when you spend tens of billions on Nvidia infrastructure, the depreciation eats operating cash flow. Meta cannot afford both the compute and the headcount. Meanwhile, NVIDIA's $1 trillion revenue forecast landed with a shrug because the market already priced it in.
Jason Lemkin's B2B media company hit 140% of Q1 2025 revenue with a skeleton GTM crew: 1.25 humans and 5 AI agents doing SDR, BDR, and RevOps work. The agents closed deals, including a $70k sponsorship with zero human involvement. But Lemkin is clear: the results were not all AI magic.
Google says it's building controls to let sites opt out of AI features in search. Publishers aren't buying it. The proposed opt-out still ties traditional search visibility to AI inclusion, and there's no detail on how it actually works or what penalty you'll pay for using it.
ServiceNow reported 603 customers spending over $5M annually, averaging $14.7M each. The company closed 244 deals over $1M in net-new ACV in Q4 alone, up 40% YoY. Paul Fipps, President of Global Customer Operations, detailed how they built the GTM engine behind $10B+ revenue and five years of 20%+ growth.
New Carta data shows two-thirds of Australian startups are running on fumes, with 86% reporting higher burn rates over the past year. Translation for sales: fewer AE roles, longer ramp periods, and bridge rounds instead of growth hires. Victorian startups are hurting worst at 71% sub-12-month runway.
NSW Premier's Department is directing agencies to sell flexible work arrangements before bumping comp for hard-to-fill roles. The directive comes despite the same government mandating 50% office presence across agencies. Skills shortage allowances can add up to $20k, but agencies now need to exhaust flexibility options first.