Today's SaaS Pulse
OpenAI acquires Ona to embed secure workspaces for autonomous AI agents
OpenAI announced the acquisition of Ona, a 79‑person cloud development environment provider, to embed secure, persistent workspaces for autonomous AI agents. Ona’s platform has seen a 13‑fold rise in weekly agent sessions across banks, pharma firms, and sovereign wealth funds. Analysts estimate the deal value between $450 million and $500 million.
Also developing:
By the numbers: NinjaOne raises $400M Series C extension
Amazon Blocks ChatGPT's New Shopping Agent – What the Fallout Could Mean for You
OpenAI’s Shopping Research and Perplexity’s new shopping assistant launched this week, offering AI‑driven price comparison, review analysis, and product recommendation. In response, Amazon updated its robots.txt to block ChatGPT from scraping its site, cutting off access to Amazon product pages, prices, and reviews. The move highlights a strategic clash between Amazon’s desire to protect its traffic monopoly and the rising influence of AI shopping agents that could redirect consumer journeys. Retailers now face pressure to make their sites AI‑ready or risk being invisible to these emerging assistants.
Revenue per Employee Beats Headcount as Growth Metric
We need to stop celebrating headcount growth. For the last decade of easy money, "We just doubled the team" was code for "We are successful." Founders felt insignificant if they didn't have a massive org chart to manage. But the...
AI Boosts Skills, Not a Reason to Skip Learning
AI agents are a force multiplier for your skill level in any particular field. This is why the argument of “don’t learn engineering because of AI” is bogus. This will basically be true in most areas of work. Those that...
AWS Is Building a New DNS Backstop to Prevent Further Outages
Amazon Web Services announced Accelerated Recovery for Route 53, a feature that guarantees a 60‑minute recovery time objective for DNS changes in the US East (N. Virginia) region. The enhancement lets customers modify public hosted zones and provision infrastructure during regional...
Popular JavaScript Library Can Be Hacked to Allow Attackers Into User Accounts
A critical vulnerability (CVE‑2025‑12816) was discovered in the widely used Node‑forge JavaScript cryptography library, allowing attackers to craft malicious ASN.1 structures that bypass signature and certificate validation. The flaw carries an 8.6/10 severity rating and affects an ecosystem with roughly...
Launch LinkedIn Matched Ads & Affiliate Programs Efficiently
This Week in GrowthRise — B2B Marketing Mastermind Recap (Nov 26, 2025) Another insightful session inside the GrowthRise Mastermind for B2B Marketing Leaders ($1M+ ARR). The focus this week: practical strategies to improve LinkedIn advertising, implement affiliate programs and leverage...
This Devious Botnet Tried a Trial Run During the Recent AWS Outage - so when Will It Be Back?
A new Mirai‑based botnet called ShadowV2 briefly emerged during the recent AWS outage, operating for roughly 15 hours. The cloud‑native malware infected IoT devices such as routers, NAS boxes and DVRs across more than two dozen countries, targeting vulnerabilities in...
Founders Succeed by Pruning, Not Adding Features
Most founders add. Few subtract. But the real test isn't how many features or products you can stack. It's having the discipline to stop, cut, or walk away before you lose focus. Lessons in saying no: - Not driving revenue? Drop it. - No proof in...
Scale SaaS on Lean Budgets with AI‑Powered Growth
This Week in SaasRise — CEO Mastermind Recap (Nov 23–26, 2025) Another strong week in the SaasRise CEO & Founder Masterminds. Theme: Doing more with less...leaner budgets, smaller teams, smarter systems and using AI + top talent to scale without...
Gartner: Enterprise Software Spend Will Grow a Stunning 15.2% Next Year. But Most Of That Will Go to Price Increases...
Gartner forecasts enterprise software spending to jump 15.2% in 2026, but roughly 9% of that growth will simply offset price hikes on existing products. The remaining expansion is concentrated in AI‑driven applications and infrastructure, with AI software spending expected to...
Scale SaaS on Tight Budgets with Simple Systems
This week’s SaasRise masterminds focused on practical wins founders are seeing right now. Members discussed how to grow with small marketing budgets, use LinkedIn and retargeting more effectively, and build simple content systems that don’t burn out the team. They...
Combine Upmarket Scale with Downmarket Simplicity for Success
Go upmarket, you scale faster, with less churn. And if you also stay downmarket too at the same time and keep serving those small customers well? Then you end up with a product that is both super powerful. ...
Prompt Security's Itamar Golan on Why Generative AI Security Requires Building a Category, Not a Feature
Prompt Security, founded by Itamar Golan in August 2023, built a full‑stack GenAI security platform and was acquired by SentinelOne for an estimated $250 million in August 2025. The company pioneered runtime protection, shadow‑AI discovery, and real‑time data sanitization, moving beyond...
20+ AI Agents Show Real Yet Fragile Moats
New!! Our 20+ AI Agents and Their Moats: Real But Weak https://t.co/Mqv9RIodfK
Bootstrapped to $82M: How Callum Mckeefery Built Reviews.io From His Kitchen Table
In this episode, bootstrapped founder Callum McKeefery details how he and his wife grew Reviews.io to $12 M ARR and sold it for $82 M without outside funding, emphasizing a SEO‑driven viral loop, high revenue per employee, and a non‑equity compensation model...
SaasRise CEO Mastermind Recaps for the Week of November 23-26, 2025
The SaasRise CEO Mastermind week of November 23‑26, 2025 centered on low‑cost growth tactics for SaaS founders. Participants exchanged tactics for stretching tiny marketing budgets through LinkedIn retargeting and lean content workflows. They also debated hiring reliable sales talent, choosing...
Adapt or Risk Obsolescence in AI-Driven Sales
AI may not take your job in sales like it has take so many jobs in support already. But if you’re not at least a little worried it will, I think your career is at serious risk. We will still...
Pentagon Contractors Want to Blow up Military Right to Repair
Pentagon contractors are pushing a data‑as‑a‑service (DAS) model to replace the right‑to‑repair provision in the upcoming National Defense Authorization Act. The provision, championed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Tim Sheehy, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, would require manufacturers to share...
Validate PMF with Retention Before Scaling Sales Hires
I keep hearing the same story: A founder raises a $15M Series A. A board member says, “Hire 20 reps in November.” A few months later… all 20 are gone. It still happens, far more often than we like to...
DeleteMe Has Discounted All Plans by 30% - Scrub Your Data From the Internet for Less This Black Friday
DeleteMe, a data‑removal service that scrubs personal information from online data brokers, announced a 30% discount on all subscription plans for Black Friday. The promotion applies to its basic, advanced and premium tiers, which already cover removal from hundreds of...
AWS Might Now Have Around 900 Data Centers - That's Twice as Many as Previously Thought
Leaked data indicates Amazon Web Services operated roughly 914‑924 data centers in 2023, more than double earlier estimates of 100‑475. The count spans over 50 countries and is expected to rise as AWS adds new availability zones, regions, and a...
Design Variety Exists, Yet SaaS Stuck in Clones
I've always found watches, gauges, and dials inspiring because they demonstrate there are so many different ways to design and present essentially the same information. Shape, and type, and proximity, and size, and orientation, and color... There are so many ways...
Secure Reliable Term Sheets by Leveraging Early Negotiation
Many first-time founders consider the signing of a term sheet as the signal that the deal is nearing its close and the majority of the terms are set in stone. These founders are then surprised when, during exclusivity, the buyer...
Stop Paying Full Price: Get 5 Years of Genuine Microsoft 365 with up to 54% Discount for Black Friday
Microsoft 365 Family and Personal subscriptions are slashed for Black Friday on Newegg, with the Family plan at $86.99 (33 % off) and the Personal plan at $45.99 (54 % off). Both are 12‑month licences that can be bought in multiples to lock...
Persistence Pays Off: 9‑Year Journey to $25M ARR
I found a letter I wrote to myself in May 2016. 9 years later, it breaks my heart to read it. I wrote down exactly what I wanted: $25M ARR, lean team, freedom, and the lie I couldn’t afford while stuck...
Four Tests to Verify Your VP’s Effectiveness
Did you hire a good enough VP? 4 part test: - who great did they hire in the first 60 days? - did their #1 key metric improve? - did they take part of the job off your plate? - does the team believe? If they...
Is AI Support Perfect? No. But It’s A Lot Better Than No Support at All
Jason Lemkin argues that companies should deploy AI‑powered customer support now rather than wait for perfection. Well‑trained AI can resolve 60‑70% of tier‑1 queries instantly, delivering 24/7 coverage and cutting response times from hours to seconds. A hybrid model that...
Curated Daily Insights Cut Through Founder Noise
I’ve been thinking seriously about starting a daily newsletter for founders. I’ve written weekly newsletters for more than a decade. I’ve recorded hundreds of podcast episodes. I’ve done videos, interviews, and everything in between. None of that momentum prepared me...
Founders Need Daily, High‑Signal Newsletter Amid Content Overload
I’ve been thinking seriously about starting a daily newsletter for founders. I’ve written weekly newsletters for more than a decade. I’ve recorded hundreds of podcast episodes. I’ve done videos, interviews, and everything in between. None of that momentum prepared me for...
The New Holiday Shopping Concierge Is AI: Why Conversational Search Will Shape Black Friday & Cyber Monday
The article outlines how AI‑driven conversational search is replacing traditional keyword‑based product discovery for holiday shopping. Shoppers can articulate detailed intents—such as budget, use case, and constraints—and receive curated SKU recommendations with rationale. Brands and publishers stand to benefit from...
No One Owns the Website—Complexity Blocks AI Adoption
ATTN: There is a giveaway at the end of this post. Everyone I know who touches websites is living a double life. By day: “We’ll get that website update live soon!! 🫶” By night: Asking chatGPT “how 2 fix a...
M&A Surge Masks Low‑value, AI‑driven Seed Exits
I'm having some major cognitive dissonance about startup M&A. It *seems* to be 🌶️ with a record number of acquisitions according to Peter Walker . Yet Jason M. Lemkin & others are pointing out that in SaaS "the exits... are...
Emergency Alert Systems Across US Disrupted Following OnSolve CodeRED Cyberattack
OnSolve, a cloud‑based mass‑notification platform, suffered a targeted cyber‑attack that forced the shutdown of its legacy CodeRED system. The breach, claimed by ransomware group INC Ransom, resulted in the removal of user contact data and passwords, with a leak possible....
Repeat Your Message, Build Trust and Referrals
Repetition builds riches. Here’s what actually happens in your audience’s brain when you repeat yourself: → Repetition builds familiarity, and familiarity builds trust (mere exposure effect) → Hearing something over time makes it stick in memory (spacing effect) → Your audience starts attributing that...
Solo Founders: Bet on Three Small, Fast‑validated Ideas
Solo founders: stop betting it all on one idea. Run a portfolio of 3 small bets. Pick fast. Validate faster. Here's the playbook: 1) The rule - 3 small bets > 1 big bet. - Target: $1–3k MRR each. 2) Pick bets - Reachable audience. - Already knows the...
Watch Out Coders - Top Code Formatting Sites Are Apparently Exposing Huge Amounts of User Data
WatchTowr researchers discovered that popular code‑formatting services JSONFormatter and CodeBeautify expose user‑submitted data through an unprotected "Recent Links" feature. The flaw allowed crawlers to retrieve five years of JSONFormatter data and a full year of CodeBeautify data, revealing active directory...
Onboarding Should Deliver Value, Not Endless Feature Tours
Hot take: User onboarding is not about education. Most onboarding flows try to teach users about different product features. They shouldn't. Instead, they should get users to experience value as fast as possible. Here's what happens in most cases: You...
Struggling with High Storage Costs? Time to Get Deleting, as Study Finds up to 50% of Data Could Be Unused
A Crown Information Management study finds that as much as half of enterprise data sits idle, inflating cloud storage bills. Deleting 100 TB of unused files could trim an average AWS Standard storage customer’s costs by $27,600 per year. The report...
AI Boosts Coding, but Human Prompting Remains Essential
It’s clear that AI agents are going to get better and better at coding. We’re going to be able to give them much bigger tasks, and reviewing that work will get easier and easier over time (both due to reliability,...
Profitable 10‑Year DTC Swimwear Brand Hits Market
You don't see DTC startups like this up for sale often! Shopify DTC swimwear brand built over 10 years on @acquiredotcom. > $1.21M TTM revenue > $179K TTM profit > 120K+ social following > 46K+ customers Full listing: https://t.co/O02iOV89uE https://t.co/fUU6KzOgcv
Black Forest Labs Launches Flux.2 AI Image Models to Challenge Nano Banana Pro and Midjourney
Black Forest Labs unveiled FLUX.2, a new family of image‑generation and editing models that includes four variants—Pro, Flex, Dev and the upcoming Klein—plus an open‑source VAE released under Apache 2.0. The models add multi‑reference conditioning, higher‑fidelity 4‑megapixel outputs, and markedly better...
The First 30 Seconds Matter More Than You Think
The episode explores how the first 30 seconds of a product experience can determine its success, illustrated by the host’s journey from a frustrating start with Beautiful.ai to the instant wow factor of Gamma. It highlights Gamma co‑founder Grant Lee’s...
'The Leap Is Insane': Salesforce CEO Swaps ChatGPT for Gemini 3 and Says He's 'Not Going Back'
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff announced on November 23, 2025 that he has switched from using OpenAI’s ChatGPT to Google’s Gemini 3 after a two‑hour trial, calling the new model’s reasoning, speed, and multimodal capabilities "insane" and saying he will not return...
YouTube Is Working on a Feature that Will Fix the Messy Home Feed
YouTube is piloting an experimental feature called “Your Custom Feed” that lets users type prompts to shape the videos shown on their home page, aiming to curb the platform’s often‑misaligned algorithmic recommendations. The option appears alongside the standard Home button...
Rethink GTM Pricing, Hiring, Compensation for AI Scale
Office Hours: GTM Leadership in the AI Era: Pricing, Hiring, and Compensation Thursday, December 11 5:30–7:30 PM PDT As AI-native companies scale, GTM leaders are being forced to rethink long-standing assumptions about pricing, hiring, incentives, and how revenue organizations should operate in a...
Rethinking GTM Pricing, Hiring, Compensation for AI Scale
Office Hours: GTM Leadership in the AI Era: Pricing, Hiring, and Compensation Thursday, December 11 5:30–7:30 PM PDT As AI-native companies scale, GTM leaders are being forced to rethink long-standing assumptions about pricing, hiring, incentives, and how revenue organizations should...
Clarity Beats Speed: Narrative Accelerates Growth
Marketing is the new bottleneck. I tossed that out as a quick thought. The replies came fast. The private messages went deeper. People wanted to hear more and understand exactly what I meant, so I turned it into a thread....
Seeking Early‑Stage PM for Stealth AI MarTech Startup
Any talented Product Managers with experience in MarTech/SalesTech want to work together? I'm building a new product (currently in stealth mode) and looking to make our first hire on the product side after the holidays. This person: • Loves the...
SaaStr AI VC Secures 682+ Startup‑VC Matches This Month
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Find the Perfect B2B AI VC with One Prompt
And not sure which VCs are right for your start-up? Ask SaaStr AI. In one prompt, we’ll tell you which of 372+ top B2B+AI VCs are best for your startup -> https://t.co/3JyImX3jMX https://t.co/bUh3OE9DWf