Know What's Happening in SaaS
Apollo.io acquires Pocus to build an AI‑native GTM operating system
Apollo.io announced the acquisition of revenue‑intelligence startup Pocus, aiming to embed an AI‑native signal layer into its sales platform. The move adds behavioural‑driven scoring capabilities as Apollo, approaching $200 million in ARR and serving over 600,000 companies, expands its go‑to‑market stack.
Also developing:
By the numbers: Beautiful.ai secures $45M non‑dilutive capital
Box CEO Aaron Levie told TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 that AI agents will not replace enterprise SaaS but will operate alongside it, creating a hybrid model where deterministic SaaS handles core workflows and non‑deterministic agents augment decision‑making and automation. He warned that mission‑critical processes require a clear separation between the two to avoid risks such as data leaks or unintended production actions. Levie projected that agents could outnumber human users by 100‑to‑1,000‑to‑1, rendering traditional per‑seat pricing obsolete and pushing vendors toward consumption‑ or volume‑based pricing. He highlighted a window of opportunity for startups to build agent‑first solutions that simplify change‑management for enterprises and urged entrepreneurs to capitalize on the platform shift.
Revenue per employee is the most valuable AI SaaS metric in 2025. This chart shows it. Here’s what it means👇
Yesterday we did a livestream. TL;DR: We have set internal goals of having an automated AI research intern by September of 2026 running on hundreds of thousands of GPUs, and a true automated AI researcher by March of 2028. We may...
Adobe and Google announced an expanded partnership at Adobe Max 2025, embedding Google’s Gemini, Veo and Imagen AI models into Adobe’s creative suite—including Firefly, Photoshop, Express, Premiere and GenStudio. Enterprise users can fine‑tune these models with their own brand data...
We've been working hard on nailing the transitions and feel of open and closing columns. Feeling really good about where we've likely landed. Little burst of color at the top when a column opens to reiterate that's the column that changed....
Thrilled to welcome @HappyFoxApp as a Super Gold Sponsor at SaaStr AI Summit AND SaaStr AI London! 🚀 HappyFox is transforming support with AI-powered solutions that actually work—cutting ticket volumes by 50%, boosting agent productivity 10x, and bringing AI assistance directly...
The UK is entering its first AI‑driven tax season, with a Taxfix survey showing 59% of self‑assessment filers intend to use AI tools to meet the Jan 31 deadline. Respondents cite speed (39%), convenience (36%) and lower cost (33%) as primary...
Confluent unveiled a real‑time context engine that couples Apache Kafka event streaming with Apache Flink stream processing, and released an open‑source Flink Agents framework to give enterprise AI agents continuous, low‑latency data context. The platform creates materialized views from live...
SaaStr founder Jason Lemkin warns that a newly hired CRO, CCO or CPO must meet with customers in their first week, or the company should apologize for the mis‑hire and let them go. He says skipping direct customer interaction signals...
Tanay Tandon (@tanay_tandon) is the co-founder and CEO of Athelas/Commure, the AI operating system for healthcare. Commure powers 20M+ appointments annually and processes $25B+ in claims volume, helping clinicians and health systems work faster, smarter, and spend more time on...
MongoDB reported $2.4 billion in ARR, with revenue growth rebounding to 24% and its stock up about 45% year‑to‑date. Seventy percent of Atlas ARR now comes from customers that use at least one additional platform capability, and those multi‑product users generate...
Surveying 195 software GTM leaders, the inaugural 2025 State of B2B GTM report finds companies juggling heavy channel experimentation—an average of five core GTM channels plus 5.5 experiments—while inbound (23%), outbound (19%) and account‑based GTM (18%) remain the most common...
37signals says offering a six-week sabbatical every three years has been a simple, effective tool to curb churn in an industry where average tenure is about 18 months. The company reports the policy — in place for roughly 15 years...
Progress is easy to fake. You stay busy. You launch things. You talk about traction. Everyone claps because motion looks like momentum. The team feels alive. The investors nod. But the market is silent. Real progress feels different. It feels like doubt....
Interesting data from Wharton showing that 75% of companies see a positive ROI on AI investment. But what’s more fascinating, and revealing, is the delta between companies that are $2B in revenue. Much higher rates of seeing significant gains and...
Fortanix Inc. and NVIDIA unveiled a joint turnkey AI platform that leverages NVIDIA’s confidential‑computing GPUs to run agentic AI in on‑premises or sovereign environments, targeting highly regulated sectors such as healthcare, finance and government. The solution integrates Fortanix’s Data Security...
Azure at a ~$93B run rate growing 39% constant currency Quarterly YoY growth trends below $MSFT https://t.co/YS2msooKX0
Google Cloud at a ~$61B run rate growing 34% (not constant currency). Google cloud includes GCP and GSuite Quarterly YoY growth trends in below chart $GOOGL https://t.co/WBQXU7nwmh
Coveware’s Q3 2025 report shows the ransom‑payment rate fell to a record low of 23 % of all ransomware victims, down sharply from previous quarters. The average ransom dropped 66 % to $376,941 and the median to $140,000, while data‑exfiltration‑only attacks saw only...
Aspect (@aspectratioinc) gives post-production teams AI agents to handle their non-creative work from ingest → review → delivery 🎥 💥 Agents retrieve second-accurate clips, assemble rough cuts, check revisions against notes, and sync to other business tools. https://t.co/IGCeVisCPk
SellRaze (@SellRaze) uses AI to sell your stuff from just a pic. It identifies it, prices it, and lists it across marketplaces automatically. What used to take 30+ minutes now takes seconds. https://t.co/WQVEySzxV9 Congrats on the launch, @JeffMao_ & @TylerMa_! https://t.co/Kc21QX1mCu
Decagon, founded in late 2023, scaled to eight‑figure ARR in roughly 18 months by selling AI customer‑service agents to major enterprises including Hertz and Chime, claiming roughly $800K in annual savings for every $250K spent. Backed by Accel at Series...
Many leaders perceive competitive advantage as a fortress—protected, invulnerable. However, in our rapidly changing world, that perspective may become your greatest flaw. Rethink the barriers. Welcome flexibility. That’s the true advantage. View: https://t.co/vMm2vq9jJV @RogerLMartin
Fixpoint (@gofixpoint) automates hiring vetted experts—doctors, lawyers, PhDs, coders, etc—for AI training data and evals. They handle sourcing and vetting so customers can focus on creating quality data and benchmarking AI. https://t.co/Wg6Ilo4W8V Congrats on the launch, @dbmikus and @jakubonchain!
Jason Lemkin explains that SaaStr has replaced departing employees with AI agents as a routine backfill, not as a cost‑cutting layoff, and now runs over 20 agents covering sales, marketing, support, RevOps and operations. He notes that AI agents require...
Lots of questions about how how many people we have at 37signals. We currently have 62 people. We were around 80 at our employee-count peak a few years ago. We got smaller by not replacing people or specific roles when people left.
Bear (@usebearai) helps companies get recommended by AI Agents like ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, Cursor, Claude Code, and more. It's already used by Browserbase, WisprFlow, and 200+ companies to grow traffic from AI Agents. https://t.co/iPaJDMy3ww Congrats on the launch, @janaksunil & @siddhantpa1iwal!
Trucking Firm Implements A Next-Generation Fleet Safety Solution via @forbes @Samsara https://t.co/9vCM4sH2ZB
Storytime: Client's trial conversion was hovering around 10%. Users couldn't figure out how to get value at onboarding. When dev redesigned the UX around customers’ JTBD, activation doubled.
https://t.co/SWse0SEbKs Are OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) helping your business grow—or are they creating a false sense of strategic clarity? Join Roger Martin, one of the world’s leading strategy thinkers, and Tiffani Bova, bestselling author and growth strategist, for a candid LinkedIn...
Whoever nails real-time voice stands to win the interface layer to AI. Not screens. Not chat bubbles. One of the startups doing great work in this area is @Cartesia (disclosure: I'm an indie investor in the company). Their Sonic-3 low latency models are...
2025 Tech Layoffs: The Great Restructuring 192K+ workers cut across 582+ companies through October. The numbers: Big Tech bloodbath: • Intel: 22-25K (biggest tech layoff at time) • Microsoft: 15K+ • Amazon: 14K announced, 30K rumored • UPS: 48K total (34K ops) • Meta: 3,600-8K • Google: 100s...
You don't resolve a flawed strategy by excessively committing to ineffective OKRs. If your team is focused on metrics without a clear path to victory, it’s not about execution—it’s about evasion. In this edition of Playing to Win, we explore why...
On SaaStr’s own little sales team, “outbound” from humans has still crushed “outbound” developed by our AI SDRs But the nuance is >whichSDR< we’ve ever had But the best AEs have still brought in deals the AI SDRs never would have, and...
.@Jacob_Heller is the co-founder & CEO of Casetext, the AI legal startup behind CoCounsel, which was acquired by Thomson Reuters for $650 million. In his talk at AI Startup School, he shared how his team did it—from picking the right idea...
From kitchens to living rooms: @WilliamsSonoma now powers 1 in 5 U.S. home-furnishings customers via #Agentforce. ✅ 200K+ chats/month ✅ 30% auto-resolved ✅ Faster. Smarter. Happier. 20-years of Trust & @Salesforce @WilliamsSonoma collab & AI-fueled for the holiday season. ❤️ #CustomerSuccess #AI 👉 https://t.co/ZWBfClwNWm
SaaS + large unsexy market = gold Live on @acquiredotcom: Referral SaaS helping contractors (plumbing, HVAC, roofing etc) share & track jobs. > $32K TTM revenue > $26K TTM profit > 84% margins Turning WOM into recurring income. Full listing: https://t.co/NqMh8TRUsA https://t.co/hiQW7jDrXJ
Writing about where AI-powered software is going and I’ve come up with a new name for what we’re all going to end up building. Essay coming later today.
Waited 7 years for our SaaS vendors to build this for SaaStr AI London + SaaStr Annual So today, I built in 1 day on @Replit https://t.co/ymRJa89ima
This is how I learned it was happening (happened?) Go to your industry specific, unsexy, conferences that do not center startups. Not only can you shine, but people will genuinely want to learn about your solution If you’re a little bored you...
The Context Company (@thecontextco) is redefining observability for AI agents. Catch silent failures like bad tool calls, infinite loops, and hallucinations in just 10 lines of code. https://t.co/zR42TgnUrw Congrats on the launch, @rohil_ag & @ksw_arman! https://t.co/KEehDDAOFL
🦜Parrot (https://t.co/Vp7Z5oZ6Zj) is taking down Duolingo. Parrot is the TikTok for language learning - $715K ARR, doubling every two months. They're turning scrolling into learning. https://t.co/KR8mBvZS29 Congrats on the launch, @byAmirHanna, @TheErikDahl, and @JuliAndreeaH!
If an AI tool creates motion without movement, it’s research. When it compresses a release cycle, trims spend, or expands revenue, it becomes infrastructure.
Congrats to @NelsonRay18966, @benrk100, @szymczyk06, and @salespatriot_ on their $5M seed! SalesPatriot is building the next-generation procurement platform for defense and aerospace – replacing decades-old systems with an AI-native platform that helps suppliers quote 7x faster. https://t.co/w4SUzjaqRh
Does AI make it easier to “create a category” as a bootstrapper? Tune in to find out 👇
Congrats to @aquariusacquah, @michaelssilver, and the @joinkaizen team on their $4M seed! Kaizen allows companies to deploy complex browser automation in minutes instead of weeks. Kaizen powers critical automation in healthcare, finance, and logistics.
Congrats to @HenrikTaro, @LudvigSwanstrom, and @VesenceAI on their $9M seed! Vesence brings AI agents to Microsoft Office for law firms. Built for accuracy and quality control, Vesence helps lawyers avoid costly mistakes across Word & Outlook, already seeing 90% weekly...
If you aren’t sure how to get to $100m ARR, just get to $1m ARR Then just ask your customers They will basically tell you
There was a “seats” hangover after the 2021 bubble There will be a “credits” hangover after the 2025 bubble
Apten is an omnichannel AI agent that engages leads across text, call, email, and webchat. It's not only able to start a conversation through webchat, but proactively reaches out via SMS/voice/email once the lead goes inactive. https://t.co/N7hPSoVvG8 Congrats on the launch, @dho1357 and...
