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
How ChatGPT Works: A Guide to Its Interface on Mobile and Web
The guide walks users through the ChatGPT interface on both mobile and web, detailing how to access account settings, upgrade to Plus, and connect services like Gmail. It explains where to find chat history, how to enable temporary chats, and how to browse custom GPTs for specialized tasks. The article also maps the prompt bar’s placement, the plus (+) menu that unlocks features such as Agent mode, Deep research, Study Mode, web search and file uploads, and the voice icon that activates ChatGPT Voice with microphone and screen‑sharing capabilities. By highlighting each UI element, the piece equips beginners to navigate and leverage the full suite of ChatGPT tools across devices.
Databricks Unifies Iceberg V3 and Delta Lake
Super excited to announce Apache Iceberg v3 support in Databricks! This marks the unification of the data plane of Iceberg and Delta Lake inside Databricks. Great job by everyone in the community that made this possible! https://lnkd.in/gvBqW-Hi
Agentforce Instantly Taps Your Salesforce Data for Contextual Emails
“Here’s what I think most people miss about Agentforce: it knows everything your Salesforce knows. That’s the beauty of it. It has all your Salesforce data if you click a button and want it to – and then you can...
Google Calendar Can Finally Block Off Time without Faking a Meeting
Google Calendar now lets users block off time for tasks, marking themselves as busy and automatically rejecting meeting requests, effectively turning tasks into pseudo‑meetings. The feature, long‑requested by Workspace users, adds options such as adjustable time blocks, “do not disturb”...
AI Agents Unlock Solutions We Couldn’t Scale Before
The vast majority of AI use will be for things we don’t even do today. The real impact of AI agents will be that we can affordably solve problems that we couldn’t solve before, lower the cost of needed services...
Production AI Teams Favor Open‑Source Models and Database‑Backed Agents
70% of production AI teams use open source models. 72.5% connect agents to databases, not chat interfaces. This is what 375 technical builders actually ship - & it looks nothing like Twitter AI. 70% of teams use open source models...
Microsoft Unveils Its First "AI Superfactory" - Here's What the Future of Computing Will Really Look Like
Microsoft unveiled its first AI superfactory, linking large AI datacenters in Wisconsin and Atlanta via a dedicated fiber network that acts as a virtual supercomputer for massive model training. The facilities pack GPUs densely across two floors, employ Nvidia Blackwell...
Acquisitions Close Quickly, but Relationships Take Years
If you want to potentially get acquired — start now. It often really, quietly takes years. What do I mean? Well for sure, acquisitions themselves technically often happen very quickly. The acquiring CEO reaches out, they meet up...
Data, Not Algorithms, Fueled the AI Revolution
My biggest takeaways from Fei-Fei Li : 1. Just nine years ago, calling yourself an AI company was considered bad for business. Nobody believed the technology would work back in 2016. By 2017, companies started embracing the term. Today, virtually...
This Week in SaaS Nov 11 - 17, 2025
This edition of "This Week in SaaS" delivers a concise roundup of the week’s most notable SaaS activity, highlighting dozens of sizable AI‑driven funding rounds, two high‑profile M&A deals and an IPO opening, alongside three fresh blog posts on UI/UX,...
AI Startups Should Prioritize Upmarket Strategy over Quick Downmarket Wins
Last week, we brought together more than 325 founders, LPs, and go-to-market leaders at Google NYC HQ for the Stage 2 Capital Summit. It continues to be my favorite day of the year, as I get a front-row seat to...
Gamma Raises $68M, Hits $100M ARR, Remains Ultra‑Lean
Gamma just raised $68M at a $2.1B valuation while already doing $100M ARR. Here’s how they’re building one of the leanest AI companies in the world👇
Your Online Reservations Are Telling Restaurants All About You
OpenTable is rolling out an AI‑assisted tagging feature that surfaces diners’ habits—such as preferred drinks, spending level, review activity, and likelihood of cancellations—to restaurant staff via its reservation and table‑management platform. The tags are generated from POS data collected across...
Gamma Scales to $100M ARR with 50‑person AI Team
Gamma just raised $68M at a $2.1B valuation while already doing $100M ARR. Here’s how they’re building one of the leanest AI companies in the world👇 For 35 years, presentation software barely changed. People kept using legacy tools built in...
Investors Chase Metrics; Strategics Chase Product Fit
Is the process the same for M&A vs. a capital raise? While the process is largely the same, there are some differences. The biggest difference: investors tend to be hyper focused on metrics, while strategics tend to be more focused...
How to Create a B2B Content Marketing Machine
The post outlines how to build a repeatable B2B content marketing machine that drives massive audience reach and revenue growth, emphasizing a weekly anchor piece of content that is systematically repurposed across newsletters, blogs, LinkedIn, video, and ads. It stresses...
Strong SaaS Finance Starts with Clean Data Foundations
I had a CFO coaching session today and spoke with a coaching prospect. The recurring theme? Our finance data foundation. We can have great software in place to do a lot of things for us, but data is the big...
Make Your SaaS UI/UX Beautiful
The post argues that a beautiful, frictionless UI/UX is now a baseline requirement for SaaS growth, not a luxury, and that poor design cannot be compensated by marketing. It highlights how AI‑powered design tools and modern component libraries let founders...
Celebrating Innovation: Breakthrough Winners Redefine Go‑to‑Market
Still buzzing from an incredible Breakthrough week. The energy. The ideas. The customers who continue to raise the bar on what’s possible in go-to-market. Huge congratulations to this year’s Breakthrough Award winners — from Rithum and Socure to Blue Yonder,...
How ChatGPT Can Help You Look After Your Wellbeing
TechRadar’s AI Week 2025 piece outlines how ChatGPT is being used as a low‑pressure companion for mental‑wellness, from prompting daily journaling and reminding users of short meditation or breathing exercises to acting as a sounding board between therapy sessions. The...
Respect, Equip, Trust Employees to Win Customers
I was reading a sharp Forbes piece about how employee experience makes or breaks customer experience, and it sparked a familiar reminder from my own work: the brands customers love are usually the ones where employees feel respected, equipped, and...
Stop Relying on P&L; Use Forward‑Looking Metrics
Your agency’s P&L is the last document you should use to make decisions. There are 3 other metrics that will make you way more money: Truth is, P&Ls are good to have when looking at the business’ last month. But,...
Big Data, Big Challenge - How Life Sciences Turn Information Overload Into Insight
Chief Growth Officer Andrew Wyatt of Sapio Sciences outlines how big data is reshaping life‑science research, from early disease‑trend detection and precision‑medicine design to more evidence‑based decision‑making. He highlights that traditional on‑premise infrastructure can’t keep pace with the volume, velocity...
Key Lessons From Parker Conrad on Scaling Teams
Here MY TAKEAWAYS on the my interview with Parker Conrad of Rippling. There's a bunch of nuggets in here between what I learned at HubSpot and Parker learned at Rippling. Full interview in the comments.
Building Scalable SaaS: Frameworks and AI Integration Insights
Had a great conversation with Anna Anisin on DSS Podcast. We talked about the right ways of building SaaS software, the frameworks I follow to build complex systems and the best practices of adding AI to an existing product.
Stop Building Financial Plans on Hope and Prayer: Why Your C-60/C-90/C-10 Planning Is Backwards
Jason Lemkin warns founders that many financial plans are built on hopeful Q4 spikes rather than realistic data, leading to cash crises. He advocates using a C‑60 revenue plan—about 60% confidence with linear growth—and a conservative C‑90 cash plan that...
Define Purpose, Own It, Measure Execution for Results
Execution converts ideas into outcomes. Each initiative should have a defined purpose: Performance, Productivity, Incubation, or Transformation. Clear ownership and measurement keep progress visible and on track. https://lnkd.in/gKsrMrPX #Leadership #Management
AI Hype Hits Goldilocks Sweet Spot for Support, Not Sales
Reading through the new 2025 SaaS Survey report from KeyBanc Capital Markets and Sapphire Ventures , I found this chart of #AI hype for different categories interesting. The "properly hyped" figures are the Goldilocks of Hype. 😂 Note the significant...
How to 10x the Value of Your Business Without Adding a Single Customer
The post shows how to dramatically increase a company’s valuation by maximizing customer lifetime value instead of chasing new leads, detailing formulas for LTV, churn reduction, and revenue expansion. It highlights retention tactics, upselling, cross‑selling, and pricing adjustments as levers...
Ownable Ideas: The Sticky, Actionable Brand Core
My friend Sarah Hart ✤ casually dropped “Be the Glitch” in a LinkedIn post. She had no idea what she’d just said... I DM’d her immediately: “THAT’S IT. That’s your ownable idea. Repeat that, again and again.” An ownable idea isn’t just...
Clone, Simplify, Undercut: Win By
Don't worry about copycats. Become the copycat. Cloning bloatware SaaS isn't lazy... It's smart. Strip features. Tighten UX. Drop the price. You're not inventing a new category. You're removing the waste from an old one. Positioning becomes effortless: - Put...
The First $100,000,000 ARR at Datadog: How Founder CEO Olivier Pomel Built a Customer-Centric Observability Giant
In this episode, Datadog founder‑CEO Olivier Pomel recounts how the company reached its first $100 million ARR by obsessively prioritizing genuine customer insight over sales or engineering shortcuts. He explains why closed alphas and annual contracts stifle learning, why enterprise SaaS...
AI Is the Rocket, PLG Is the Fuel
There’s ZERO chance companies like Cursor, Lovable or any AI-native SaaS can scale at this lightning pace without PLG. You can’t scale with AI alone. You need a strong product-led motion to power it. Without a self-serve product experience and...
Build a Scalable System to Convert SaaS Leads
Learn how to turn SaaS leads into loyal customers with a scalable sales and success system. This guide walks you through the key steps — from building your ABM and content engines to structuring a sales team, tracking core metrics,...
For AI to Succeed in the SOC, CISOs Need to Remove Legacy Walls Now
The article argues that for AI to be effective in security operation centers, CISOs must dismantle legacy tool sprawl and governance bottlenecks by adopting unified single‑agent architectures like CrowdStrike Falcon that consolidate telemetry across endpoints, cloud, identity and threat intel....
Integrate Five Systems to Scale SaaS Sales & Success
How to Turn Leads Into Customers: Building a Scalable SaaS Sales & Success System Generating leads is exciting. Converting them into paying customers — and keeping them happy — is where real SaaS growth happens. After building your outbound engine,...
Get Instant Funding Verdict by Uploading Deck
Wondering if you can get funded ... or not? Wonder no more Upload your deck to SaaStr AI VC and we'll tell you -> https://t.co/S5UFYzoN7a https://t.co/VLRaBqjNa3
Welcome to TechRadar's AI Week
TechRadar announced its AI Week 2025, a seven‑day series of beginner‑focused guides and feature stories on artificial‑intelligence tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. The initiative promises step‑by‑step walkthroughs for prompt engineering, practical use‑cases at work and home, and tips...
Castari Offers Vercel‑style Platform for Deploying AI Agents
Castari (@castari_dev) is building the Vercel for AI agents. They manage the infrastructure needed for you to deploy sandboxed agents into production. https://t.co/Q2EyM0JR53
Seeking Public Index for Customer Acquisition Costs Across Industries
is there a publicly available index for cost of customer acquisition across various types of businesses? this feels like one of those secrets hiding in plain sight…
Code Execs Correctly to Safeguard SaaS Metrics
Where should you code your execs on the SaaS P&L? Most teams get this wrong — and it wrecks their metrics. Here’s how to code leaders to the right cost centers and protect CAC, gross margin, and OPEX accuracy. Watch: https://t.co/BFmus5yUp7 #SaaS https://t.co/1ZU2FBx4Be
Voize Raises $50M to Free Nurses From Admin
Congrats to voize on their $50M Series A! voize frees nurses from admin so they can focus on what truly matters: people. Today, more than 75,000 nurses in 1,100+ care facilities use voize to document care through natural speech, right at the...
Founders' Tension Ripple: Emotional Contagion Shapes Company Strategy
Most founders underestimate how much emotional contagion they create. A single moment of tension in you can ripple through the company as if it were strategy.
Even Saturated Markets Hide Unmet Customer Needs
Most markets look saturated until you actually talk to customers. Then you realize nobody is truly happy with the current options. There’s always room for something better. Go build it.
AI Teammates Automate Insurance Paperwork, Freeing Agents for Clients
Acolite builds AI teammates for insurance agencies so teams can spend more time with clients. Forward an email or delegate from your AMS, and Acolite issues COIs, pre-fills ACORDs, and cleans SOVs — fast, accurate, secure, with humans in the loop. https://t.co/MUONLogKx6 Congrats...
Scaleup Success: Key Lessons From Conrad and Halligan
Parker Conrad (Rippling) + Brian Halligan CEO (HubSpot) combined scaleup CEO Lessons. https://t.co/fsC08olygw
PE Avoids Fresh Equity, Hindering Mid‑market Reinvestments
Private equity rarely likes putting fresh equity into existing deals—making reinvestment almost impossible when a mid-market business hits turbulence. Great insights from Matt Blumberg on Episode 218 of The SaaS CFO Podcast 👉 https://t.co/o4rtC8sd0B https://t.co/zPkgTo9BgC
CEOs Split Time: Recruiting, Customers, and Everything Else
Where you'll spend your time as CEO as you scale: 50% on Recruiting 50% on Customers & Prospects and 50% on All the Rest
Only 5% Ready Now, 95% Will Buy Later
Only 5% of your Ideal Customers are ready to buy now. BUT... 95% will buy from you (or your competitor) at a later date. This is both a challenge and an opportunity for us. A challenge that not all your leads are going to...
Early Customers Are Gold—Nurture Them Relentlessly
Your startup's early customers shape everything. Treat them like gold and take care of them.