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
Nasdaq Reaches Another ATH. Nvidia Tops $5T. But Navan’s IPO and JAMF’s $2B Exit Show B2B Still Isn’t Easy.
Nasdaq reached a new all‑time high and Nvidia topped a $5 trillion market cap, underscoring the AI‑driven rally in public markets. Yet the week’s two B2B SaaS exits—Navan’s IPO at a $4.7 billion valuation (7.7× 2024 revenue) after a 20% opening‑day drop, and JAMF’s take‑private for $2.2 billion (3.1× $710 million ARR)—show that lofty private‑company multiples have evaporated. Both firms boast strong scale and margins, but Navan remains unprofitable and JAMF’s growth has slowed to double‑digit rates, driving the lower multiples. The analysis warns founders and investors that late‑stage rounds priced at 15‑30× ARR in the 2020‑22 boom may now result in significant write‑downs.
Dream Big, Build Incrementally: Canva’s Path to $42B
"I don't want to look at the bricks around me and ask how high I can stack them. I want to design the most magical, wonderful, mythical castle on a hill and then figure out how to build it." Melanie...
Traffic Is No Longer a Reliable Growth Metric
Kyle Poyar argues that raw traffic is becoming a misleading growth metric as AI‑driven search, especially ChatGPT, delivers far higher‑intent leads that convert six times faster than Google. He shares seven insights from Webflow’s VP of Growth, including the need...
Prep Your Team First to Preserve Initiative Momentum
The fastest way to kill momentum on a new initiative is to launch it without preparing your team first. The best founders set the stage before launching one. They make sure everyone has the context they need and create an...
Short‑term Ad Win, but No Scalable Growth
I got this spot for FounderStack for $699. So far, it's generated: - +400 website visits - 1 sale ($799) So I'm breakeven. And it's only been 3 days. 2 more sales, and the ROAS is similar to the ads I run on Facebook, and I...
AI App of the Week: Assistant UI – The React Library That’s Eating the AI Chat Interface Market
Assistant UI, a TypeScript/React library backed by Y Combinator, has become the de‑facto standard for AI chat interfaces, pulling in over 200,000 monthly downloads and adoption by firms such as LangChain, Athena Intelligence, and Stack AI. The library offers composable...
Built Our Own Better Partner Platform After Rewardful Fell Short
I signed up for Rewardful. But they didn't have the features we needed. After a quick chat with support: They didn't have any plans to add it. So we're now vibe coding our own! (And honestly, ours is already better 😂) Stay tuned, we're about to...
AI Agents Unlock Unlimited SaaS Consumption for Enterprises
This is a great anecdote from Atlassian. The fear everyone was that AI agents would somehow compress the role of enterprise software. Generally the opposite will be true, assuming the software company executes effectively (either startups or existing players). Enterprise...
Semrush Has a New Tool to Help Marketers Win in the AI Age - Make Sure Your Business Doesn't Get...
Semrush unveiled Semrush One, a platform that fuses its traditional SEO analytics with AI‑driven visibility tools that track brand presence in large‑language‑model search engines such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. Leveraging a dataset covering more than 808 million domains and trillions...
Sciloop AI Automates End‑to‑End Scientific Research Loop
Sciloop (@SciloopAI) automates the entire scientific research loop from hypothesis generation to experiment design, execution, analysis, iteration— and drafts real research papers. https://t.co/r1FbEEsymk Congrats on the launch, @bilalasmat04 & @OsmanSiddiquer! https://t.co/Joyoks9w6v
AI BDR Generates 25% of Pipeline in 60 Days
Update: 🤖25% of our pipeline in past 60 days was from our AI BDR Not 100%. But up from 0% 90 days ago.
Why The Top Quartile in Venture Is Brutal Today: When “Doing Great” Isn’t Enough to Raise Money
SaaS founder Jason Lemkin reports that SaaStr’s AI‑driven pitch‑deck analyzer, after reviewing over 1,600 decks, shows a stark shift in VC expectations for companies with $2‑10 million ARR. While a 200% YoY growth rate at $3 M ARR once guaranteed a Series A,...
Fix Your Broken GTM Strategy, Not One Hack
If your deals aren’t closing… If your demo calendar is empty… If your outbound DMs and Emails are hearing crickets… Then it’s time to fix your broken Go-To-Market Strategy. Now there’s tons of advice out there on that one new growth hack.
AI Assistant Powers 250k Researchers From Question to Publication
AnswerThis (@answerthisio) is the AI assistant that helps researchers find, analyze, and write research papers. Over 250k researchers visit https://t.co/n4pWiYjHyS monthly to go from research question to publication on one workspace. https://t.co/CSkZcXirW5
Shadow IT Is Threatening Businesses From Within - and Today’s Security Tools Simply Can’t Keep Up
New research highlighted by 1Password’s 2025 Annual Report shows that over half of employees (52%) have installed unauthorized apps and a third ignore AI usage policies, exposing firms to data leakage and cyber‑attack risk. The rapid adoption of AI‑driven SaaS...
Free Plan Claim Clashes with Credit‑card Request
confusing. copy clearly says "this plan is free" so why do they need my cc? low-trust onboarding experience @AppTweak https://t.co/A65vSbb3hm
Speed Wins: Free Your Calendar to Scale
Founders at $5m+ revenue move fast. Speed wins. You can’t move fast if your calendar is back to back all day Ryan is smart
Wayback Machine Joint
Automattic is collaborating with the Internet Archive to launch a WordPress plugin that automatically redirects users to archived versions of pages that have gone offline, mitigating link rot. The tool detects broken links, fetches a snapshot from the Wayback Machine,...
Free AI Analyzer Grades Your VC Pitch Deck Instantly
Wondering if your VC pitch is good enough? SaaStr AI will tell you. Try the FREE SaaStr AI VC Pitch Deck Analyzer here -> https://t.co/S5UFYzoN7a Try it now. We'll grade it, tell you the exact odds you'll get funded, and...
Customers Prefer Better AI Sales Reps—Deploy Yours Directly
- Do customers even care if your sales reps is AI or human? Not if the AI is better than a human - #1 top advice to get going on AI + GTM: deploy an AI agent -- yourself. ...
CrowdStrike & NVIDIA’s Open Source AI Gives Enterprises the Edge Against Machine-Speed Attacks
CrowdStrike and NVIDIA unveiled an open‑source AI ecosystem that pairs CrowdStrike’s Charlotte AI agents with NVIDIA’s Nemotron foundation models, synthetic‑data tools, and NIM microservices. The agents continuously ingest telemetry from Falcon Complete’s managed detection and response service, delivering autonomous threat...
Scale Smart: Hire Slow, Promote Internally, Balance Talent
A lot of startups get stuck in the mud between 200 and 2000 employees. Here are my tips: 1. Ye old "hire slow and fire fast" is still true. 2. Push off the director layer as long as you can....
VCs Must Choose Between Steady Growth and AI Frenzy
Is Triple Triple Double Double good enough anymore? $1m ARR -> $3m ARR -> $9m ARR -> $18M ARR -> $36m ARR -> rocketship Here's the thing. On the one hand, of course it is. That compounds to 50%+ growth...
VCs: Want More Dealflow? Sign Up for SaaStr’s AI Dealflow
SaaStr has launched an AI‑driven deal‑flow platform that lets founders upload their pitch decks directly to a centralized hub. In its first weeks the service has collected more than 1,542 decks and performed over 556,387 AI‑generated startup valuations. The platform...
AI Supercharges Product Prototyping, Boosts Ideation Speed
Seeing more and more product managers use AI for showing functional product prototypes. It’s accelerating the ideation phase of a product by probably 5-10X. Partly this is because you can show off an idea much more quickly, which gets the...
Agentic AI Boosts FP&A Efficiency with Real‑World Use Cases
Agentic AI and FP&A? Let's find out! Join me for an exclusive live demo and conversation with FutureView Systems, showcasing their new Agentic AI Platform B*EZ, built specifically for FP&A and controller teams. We’ll explore real, tactical AI use cases...
Claude Is Coming to Your Spreadsheets - but Is It Enough to Make You an Emperor of Excel, and What...
Anthropic has unveiled Claude for Excel, an AI assistant that can read, edit, and generate spreadsheets from a sidebar while tracking its actions and citing source cells. The beta, limited to about 1,000 Max, Enterprise and Teams customers, connects to...
AI Week Highlights: OpenAI Recap, Microsoft Deal, NVIDIA Surge
Welcome to this week's edition of AI to ROI: Just the News Edition I write the newsletter twice weekly with my friend Peter Buchanan Our Saturday edition is called "AI to ROI: Just the News" Our Tuesday morning edition includes...
Leadership Improves When You Stop Pretending to Know Everything
For a very long time as CEO of HubSpot, I thought I was supposed to have all the answers. Life got easier for everyone (especially me) when I got over that.
Claude Can Be Tricked Into Sending Your Private Company Data to Hackers - All It Takes Is some Kind Words
Anthropic’s Claude AI tool contains a vulnerability in its Code Interpreter that can be exploited via prompt injection to exfiltrate private user data. The interpreter, recently given network request capability, can be tricked into reading files, storing them in the...
AI Editor Narrative Turns Hours of Footage Into Minutes
Narrative (@narrativevideo) is Cursor for video editing. Narrative is the AI video editor that automates the tedious parts, like searching footage, pulling selects and syncing cameras— so pros can edit hours of content in minutes. https://t.co/FsxR3v0CiP
Founders Fail When They Chase Trends Over Real Pain
Too many founders fail because they build what’s really trendy rather than what’s really painful to customers.
Bootstrapped SaaS Sold for $3.5M Proves Modest Success Works
We helped a founder sell their bootstrapped startup for $3,500,000 this week at @acquiredotcom. Another life changing outcome. Proof you don’t need a billion dollar startup to win. A profitable SaaS is enough. Huge congrats to the founder and to the next one...
AI Slows SaaS, but Adds Massive Functionality
SaaS apps are much, much slower since AI It's OK because they do much, much more But not something I would have expected 24+ months ago
Cloud‑migrated DuckDB Slashes Podcast Processing Costs
I sleep better knowing my agents work through the night. Less work for me in the morning. My podcast processor transcribes & analyzes conversations. I started on my laptop, needed a little database to collect podcast data & metadata, & booted...
Night‑Shift Agents Let Me Sleep Better
I sleep better knowing my agents work through the night. Less work for me in the morning. My podcast processor transcribes & analyzes conversations. I started on my laptop, needed a little database to collect podcast data & metadata, &...
Top 10 SaaS Cloud Multiples at Week’s Close
This week in enterprise software: Top 10 #SaaS #Cloud multiples as of today's market close
Question Investor's “Market” Terms; Verify Real Range
The terms of an investment will range on a scale of founder-friendly to investor-friendly. Investors won't always give you the full sense of that range. When presenting a given term (like % of a transaction placed in escrow), investors will...
AI Agents Will Shrink Software Seat Counts
AI is coming for your seats. And it doesn't even mean to. What do I mean? We've gone from 0 to 12 AI Agents at little team SaaStr this year, and as part of that ... we don't need as...
Founders Quickly Become the Bottleneck, Not the Visionary
I have a long-running list of these surprises for first-time Founders and CEOs. Here are a few that weren’t on Brian’s list. 1. Your calendar becomes everyone else’s calendar. Every gap gets filled. 2. The hardest conversations are never on the calendar....
Segmented Margins Turn P&L Into CFO Superpower
Margins by Revenue Stream Is Your CFO Superpower If you offer 2 or more revenue types, you must construct your P&L in the proper format. I can't tell you how many times I've corrected the gross profit and margins by...
ChatGPT's Rapid Rise Could Rival Google by 2030
ChatGPT hit 1B+ daily searches 9 years faster than Google. At this pace, it could match Google by 2030. Here’s how the future of search is changing👇 Google still dominates with about 14 billion daily searches. ChatGPT handles around 2.5...
Cold Email Drives 32% of $6.5M ARR Revenue
32% of RB2B 's $6.5M ARR comes from one channel. (And no, it's NOT my Linkedin) It's COLD EMAIL. But when I ask most founders about cold email... They say it’s dead. So I just recorded a video breaking down......
Weekly Top 10 SaaS Cloud Multiples Revealed
This week in enterprise software: Top 10 #SaaS #Cloud multiples as of today's market close https://t.co/479woZt0Ew
Completed 25 Tasks Using Unstoppable Flow This Week
Slightly lighter this week. Knocked 25 tasks off my hit list this week thanks to Unstoppable Flow. Try it here 👇 https://t.co/2GyyHn36Ab
Securely Empower AI Agents to Spend with Controlled Budgets
Locus (@paywithlocus) gives your AI agents the ability to spend without losing control. A secure way to connect your agents to funds, with identities, budgets, and permissions. Make them pay: for anything, anywhere. https://t.co/Sw9dURzTLS Congrats on the launch, @coledermo & @eliotlee33!
New AppSumo Deal Page Boosts Sales 38%
Testing NEW deal pages for AppSumo. One is up 38%... https://t.co/l7ZXNKwXkt
Must‑listen Episode for Aspiring SaaS Founders
This is a great episode. All aspiring SaaS founders should listen 👇
Demystify VC Funding with SaaStr AI VC
🤷♀️Getting funded shouldn't be a mystery 🔮Knowing the odds VCs will say Yes shouldn't be opaque 🤝 Meeting investors shouldn't require connections We're here to help. SaaStr AI VC -> https://t.co/XzJ5d0OYvZ https://t.co/XbFWOuetFF
Live AI Answers Cut Sales Call Delays to Seconds
Aside (@AsideAI) shows live suggestions during sales calls, helping sales reps answer technical questions. Connect your docs, Slack, and past winning calls — Aside surfaces the right answer in 0.8s. No more “Let me get back to you.” https://t.co/fbWzP2caKy