🎯Today's SaaS Pulse
Updated 2h agoWhat's happening: FoodOp secures £4.4 million to scale AI‑powered kitchen SaaS
FoodOp, a SaaS platform for professional chefs, raised £4.4 million in a round led by MK Capital to accelerate its rollout in the UK and US. The service is used daily by over 2,000 chefs across more than 700 kitchens, automating procurement, menu planning and budgeting with AI‑driven tools.
Also developing:
Blog•Jan 16, 2026
Meritech’s Look at 2025 Exits: M&A at $587B Hits a Decade+ High … But IPOs Were a Whimper
Meritech reports that 2025 delivered a muted IPO market, with only six pure‑play software listings, while merger‑and‑acquisition activity surged to $587 billion—the highest in a decade. Leading private firms such as SpaceX, OpenAI and Stripe continued to stay private, limiting public‑market supply. The median software IPO posted solid revenue metrics but delivered a 10 % loss versus the last private round, contrasting with standout performers like Figma and CoreWeave. Looking ahead, a potential SpaceX IPO could reshape the 2026 exit landscape.
By SaaStr
Social•Jan 16, 2026
Solve Real Problem First, Then Exit Becomes Simple
I see this pattern over and over in great exits. Founders don’t start by trying to sell. They start by solving a real problem well. Arman Iranpour (@ArmanIranpour) and Matt Aleali (@aleali_mahdi) were real estate investors frustrated by how slow and...
By Andrew Gazdecki
News•Jan 16, 2026
Meta Is Shutting Down Its Horizons VR for Businesses - I Doubt It Will Be Missed
Meta announced it will retire Horizon Workrooms, its business‑focused VR collaboration app, on 16 February 2026 and cease sales of commercial Quest headsets by 20 February 2026. The move signals a strategic pivot toward artificial‑intelligence initiatives while keeping its consumer‑oriented VR lineup intact. Meta...
By TechRadar
News•Jan 16, 2026
Newo.ai Partners with IONOS to Deliver AI Receptionists for Small Businesses
Newo.ai has teamed up with IONOS to launch an AI‑powered Receptionist that small businesses can install in as little as three minutes through the IONOS portal. The solution handles phone calls, texts, web chat and social media 24/7, aiming to...
By AiThority
News•Jan 16, 2026
Ternary and Alvin Announce Strategic Partnership to Optimize Google Cloud and BigQuery Spend
FinOps platform Ternary has partnered with autonomous BigQuery optimizer Alvin to deliver a combined solution for Google Cloud cost management. The joint offering blends Ternary’s end‑to‑end visibility, budgeting and anomaly detection with Alvin’s continuous, AI‑driven query optimization. Together they aim...
By AiThority
News•Jan 16, 2026
It Was A Big Year For Cybersecurity
Cybersecurity venture funding surged to $18 billion in 2025, a 26% increase over 2024 and the third‑largest total in a decade. Seven mega‑rounds of $400 million or more, highlighted by Cyera’s $940 million and Saviynt’s $700 million raises, drove the headline growth. Despite higher...
By Crunchbase News
News•Jan 16, 2026
What’s in, and What’s Out: Data Management in 2026 Has a New Attitude
In 2026 data management is moving from fragmented toolchains to unified, AI‑ready platforms. Native governance is being baked into catalog services like Unity Catalog and Snowflake Horizon, automating quality checks while retaining human decision‑making. The lakehouse architecture is consolidating storage,...
By CIO.com
News•Jan 16, 2026
Who Pays for Agentic AI? The Enterprise Budget Problem No Vendor Will Address
Enterprise leaders are wrestling with the promise of agentic AI that layers intelligent agents over traditional systems of record. Vendors tout a three‑tier stack—transactional applications, data platforms, and AI agents—but CIOs face a budget paradox: data teams lack funds for...
By Diginomica
News•Jan 16, 2026
ASOS Bets on Topshop Brand Revival with European Website Launch
Topshop has unveiled a dedicated EU ecommerce site, eu.topshop.com, covering 23 European markets and built on Shopify for faster browsing and richer storytelling. The launch follows ASOS's 2021 acquisition of the brand after Arcadia's collapse, aiming to transform the iconic...
By InternetRetailing
News•Jan 16, 2026
Why Vixio Has Become Essential for Managing Rapid Regulatory Change
Vixio, a RegTech platform launched in 2006, now serves financial services, gambling and payments firms by automating regulatory change management with AI‑enhanced technology and human expertise. It monitors 200+ jurisdictions, 1,400 authorities and over four million data points, offering tools...
By Fintech Global
News•Jan 16, 2026
How TCS Is Taking the Coastal Route to Reach Top 5 Salesforce GSI Status
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) closed a $700 million acquisition of Coastal Cloud, a leading pure‑play Salesforce consultancy in the United States. The deal adds roughly 400 Salesforce consultants and over 3,000 multi‑cloud certifications to TCS, bolstering its Agentforce 360 AI platform. Together...
By Diginomica
News•Jan 16, 2026
Top E-Signature Solutions for Fintech: A 2026 Review
The 2026 review evaluates five leading e‑signature platforms—pdfFiller, Scrive, OneSpan, Adobe Sign, and DocuSign—tailored for financial institutions. It outlines each solution’s core features, compliance focus, and pricing structures, highlighting pdfFiller’s low‑cost integration and OneSpan’s bank‑grade security. The analysis shows how...
By TechBullion
News•Jan 16, 2026
CIO Interview - Brenda Van Velkinburgh Digitizes Workers' Comp Insurance for Ascot Group
Ascot Group, after acquiring AmFed, modernized its workers' compensation platform to enable online insurance services. VP of IT Brenda Van Velkinburgh led a shift from a 30‑year legacy system to the OutSystems low‑code platform, delivering quoting, policy administration, claims, and client...
By Diginomica
News•Jan 16, 2026
Something for the Weekend - LinkedIn’s Algorithm Uses 'Proxy Bias' To Suppress Visibility. Here's Who Gets Hurt
In early 2025 LinkedIn altered its feed algorithm, introducing proxy bias that dramatically reduced visibility for women founders and other protected groups. Controlled experiments showed female accounts reaching as low as 0.6% of their audience, while comparable male accounts achieved...
By Diginomica
News•Jan 16, 2026
IT Portfolio Management: Optimizing IT Assets for Business Value
IT portfolio management applies investment‑style discipline to an organization’s mix of legacy, cloud and emerging systems. CIOs must evaluate assets across five criteria—mission‑critical importance, utilization, risk, intellectual‑property value, and total cost of ownership/ROI—to ensure each technology delivers business value. The...
By CIO.com
News•Jan 16, 2026
Why CIOs Need a New Approach to Unstructured Data Management
Enterprises now store petabytes of data, with 90% of it unstructured and spread across hybrid, multi‑vendor environments. The average useful lifespan of most data has shrunk to 30‑90 days, yet organizations retain it indefinitely, inflating storage costs and compliance risk....
By CIO.com
News•Jan 16, 2026
Exolum Steps on the Gas of Its Transformation
Exolum, a $1 billion‑plus fuel logistics firm operating in 11 countries, is accelerating its digital transformation to stay competitive amid the energy transition. The company has centralized many operational functions, using AI‑driven tools such as Copilot and custom copilots to automate...
By CIO.com
News•Jan 16, 2026
Soterix Systems Welcomes Paul Smith as EVP of Sales, North America
Soterix Systems announced Paul Smith as Executive Vice President of Sales for North America, tasked with accelerating adoption of its NexaiQ true‑AI cloud platform. Smith arrives from Salient Systems after more than a decade leading enterprise AI sales teams. He...
By AI-TechPark
News•Jan 16, 2026
Unifyr Receives $20M Investment
Unifyr, a Cary, North Carolina‑based AI‑driven partner ecosystem platform, announced a $20 million investment from Investcorp Technology Partners Fund V. The capital will be deployed to accelerate Unifyr’s international expansion and to enhance its platform capabilities. CEO Michael Kugler said the...
By FinSMEs
News•Jan 16, 2026
Frankenmuth Taps Duck Creek to Modernise Distribution
Frankenmuth Insurance has selected Duck Creek Technologies to replace its legacy agency management system with the Duck Creek OnDemand Distribution Management SaaS platform. The new solution, now live, supports commercial, home, auto and life lines across more than 800 independent...
By Fintech Global
News•Jan 16, 2026
Jones, the AI-Powered Insurance Verification Platform, Appoints Veteran SaaS Executive Paul Szemerenyi as CEO
Jones, the AI-driven insurance verification platform for construction and real estate, announced veteran SaaS executive Paul Szemerenyi as its new chief executive officer. The change follows co‑founder Omri Stern’s move to the board to focus on long‑term strategy and innovation....
By AiThority
Social•Jan 16, 2026
Unexpected Clients Refine Our Ideal Customer Profile
We thought we knew our customer. We were wrong. We started with universities. It was a need we had ourselves. Selling to universities was… hard. So we pivoted. And then pivoted again. Somewhere along the way, our webinar platform ended...
By Jonathan Rintala
Social•Jan 16, 2026
Customer Assumptions Failed, Real Insight Beats Strategy Decks
We thought we knew our customer. We were wrong. But that eventually taught us more than any strategy deck ever could. https://t.co/lF3XrnVMxY
By Jonathan Rintala
News•Jan 16, 2026
Building a Better Bugbot
Cursor’s Bugbot, an AI‑driven code‑review agent, has evolved from a prototype to an agentic architecture that now scans over two million pull requests each month. By introducing a custom resolution‑rate metric and running 40 systematic experiments, its bug‑resolution rate climbed from...
By Hacker News
Social•Jan 16, 2026
Add AI to Inbound for Instant Deal Qualification
"Which AI Agent vendor should you pick?" with @kylecnorton CRO @owner "The lowest hanging fruit is adding AI to Inbound. To instantly qualify deals, instantly answer customer querstions, and instantly set up a meeting with a human AE." https://t.co/TUcLRTLEiB
By Jason Lemkin
News•Jan 16, 2026
Show HN: Aventos – An Experiment in Cheap AI SEO
Aventos introduced an AI search analytics platform aimed at small businesses, offering a forever‑free tier and paid plans from $10 to $23 per month. The service monitors brand mentions in AI‑driven search results such as ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews,...
By Hacker News
Podcast•Jan 16, 2026•37 min
The Embedded Tax Revolution: Ben Borodach, CEO of April, on Building Tax Infrastructure From Scratch
In this episode, Ben Borodach, founder and CEO of april, explains how his company built the first nationally licensed tax engine in over 15 years to embed real‑time tax intelligence into banking, fintech, and payroll platforms. He discusses the technical...
By Fintech One-on-One
Social•Jan 15, 2026
The Untold Truths Every First‑Time Founder Needs
What nobody tells first-time founders Clip from my chat with Sam Lessin : https://lnkd.in/gN3JzMXv
By Lenny Rachitsky
Social•Jan 15, 2026
Built a No‑Code Unified Semantic Search in Days
Your timeline is probably full of people shouting that they’ve cured cancer and achieved world peace using Claude Code.... so maybe you've had enough. But I can’t help being incredibly excited about it, so I wanted to share my experience...
By Christoph Janz
News•Jan 15, 2026
Oracle Trying To Lure Workers To Nashville For New 'Global' HQ
Oracle is positioning Nashville as its new global headquarters, pledging a massive riverfront campus and a 8,500‑job creation target by 2031. The company is offering tens of thousands of dollars in relocation incentives to attract cloud and AI talent, making...
By Slashdot
Social•Jan 15, 2026
Sumo.com Soft Launches New Feature, Seeks Feedback
Sumo.com - soft launched something new there today. 👋 Love your feedback 👋
By Noah Kagan
News•Jan 15, 2026
Dell CIO on Moving Enterprise Transformation From Pilots to Scale
Dell Technologies’ chief information officer Doug Schmitt says enterprises must move beyond scattered pilots and adopt platform‑centric initiatives that can be scaled across the organization. He emphasizes narrowing project portfolios, establishing clear data ownership, and accelerating AI use cases to...
By SiliconANGLE
News•Jan 15, 2026
Aviator (YC S21) Is Hiring to Build Multiplayer AI Coding Platform
Aviator, a Y Combinator S21 graduate, is hiring senior and full‑stack engineers to expand its AI‑powered software development platform. The company’s suite—including MergeQueue, FlexReview, and the newly launched Runbooks—automates code merges, review routing, and collaborative workflow automation. Its tools already...
By Hacker News
News•Jan 15, 2026
Solving the Problems That Accompany API Sprawl With AI
Enterprises facing API sprawl risk security breaches and missed revenue opportunities. IBM’s Neeraj Nargund highlights that AI‑infused “smart APIs” can provide automated discovery, observability, and context‑aware governance across thousands of endpoints. The latest IBM API Connect 12.1 embeds AI throughout...
By The New Stack
News•Jan 15, 2026
Vast Positions Its AI Operating System for Continuous, Data-Driven AI
Vast Data is launching an AI operating system that unifies data services across cloud, on‑premises and edge, enabling compute‑near‑data processing. The platform’s disaggregated shared‑everything (DASE) architecture decouples storage throughput from GPU count, addressing the top scaling bottleneck identified by theCUBE...
By SiliconANGLE
News•Jan 15, 2026
Introducing Pulse: The World’s Best News Reader
SaaSRise unveiled Pulse, an AI‑driven daily news reader built for founders, operators, and other builders. The platform curates, ranks, and summarizes high‑quality content across SaaS, AI, venture capital, cybersecurity, and more, delivering concise insights in seconds. By organizing feeds around...
By SaasRise
News•Jan 15, 2026
ScyllaDB’s New Cloud Challenges DynamoDB Cost, Performance
ScyllaDB has launched X Cloud, a managed NoSQL service that claims to match or exceed DynamoDB’s performance at roughly half the cost. The platform can scale from 100 k to 2 million operations per second while keeping P99 latency in the single‑digit...
By The New Stack
Social•Jan 15, 2026
SEO Is Dead; Embrace Generative Engine Optimization Now
Today's Thought: The "Blue Link" Era is Over. Is Your Growth Plan Stuck in 2010? For decades, we’ve told Marketing: “Rank on page one.” We’ve told Sales: “Don’t worry, the leads are coming from search.” But the seismic shift to...
By Tiffani Bova
Social•Jan 15, 2026
Replit's AI Agent Now Delivers 99% Accurate Code
When I started using @Replit last summer, agent v1, you didn’t really know if anything you told the agent to do … would really work in practice when it created the code. You hoped. But you just didn’t...
By Jason Lemkin
News•Jan 15, 2026
Claude Code Just Got Updated with One of the Most-Requested User Features
Anthropic has rolled out a major update to Claude Code called MCP Tool Search, which introduces lazy loading of tool definitions. The change stops the model from pre‑loading every available tool, cutting token consumption by up to 85 percent. Early...
By VentureBeat
Social•Jan 15, 2026
CFOs Must Secure Data Quality Before AI Adoption
CFO's really want to use AI this year. But it still comes back to data quality and structure. Shocker. I'm holding a live session next week to help CFO's and Controllers assess their AI readiness. I'm teaming up with the...
By Ben Murray
Social•Jan 15, 2026
Refine Existing Content to Close Deals, Not Just Publish
I’ve sat in a lot of pipeline reviews where content looked like it was doing its job. At first glance, everything looks healthy. Pages are getting published. Rankings improve. Traffic trends upward. Then the conversation turns to which pieces actually...
By devbasu
News•Jan 15, 2026
The Cost of EKS Auto + Capabilities vs Fairwinds Managed KaaS
Amazon’s EKS Auto Mode and EKS Capabilities automate the infrastructure layer of Kubernetes—node provisioning, scaling, networking and storage—while leaving architecture, add‑on lifecycle, and 24×7 incident response to the customer. Fairwinds Managed Kubernetes‑as‑a‑Service (KaaS) assumes those omitted responsibilities, delivering design, full...
By Security Boulevard
Social•Jan 15, 2026
Instant Outbound: AI Finds Ready Buyers, Books Meetings
Clodo (@ClodoAI) is the Vibe GTM. Execute your outbound at the speed of thought. Clodo finds prospects who want to buy now & automates personalized campaigns to get meetings booked. https://t.co/l7pajZ2yis
By YCombinator
Social•Jan 15, 2026
AI Analyst Rori Automates Risk Audits, Saves Millions
Roe AI (@try_roe_ai) is building Rori, a Cursor-like tool for risk and compliance. Rori acts like a senior analyst. It pulls data from internal tools and public records, connects people, companies, transactions, and behaviors, and produces audit-ready evidence, saving teams millions...
By YCombinator
News•Jan 15, 2026
Fetch.ai Launches FetchCoder V2 to Help Developers Ship Autonomous Agents
Fetch.ai unveiled FetchCoder V2, an AI‑powered coding assistant designed specifically for building autonomous software agents. The tool operates spec‑driven, letting developers describe desired functionality before generating and validating code. It embeds safety mechanisms such as command blocking, audit trails, and...
By SiliconANGLE