Today's SaaS Pulse
AI Features Slash SaaS Gross Margins, Survey Shows 52% Average
SaaS firms that embed AI often count inference and infrastructure costs as regular COGS, driving margins down. While traditional SaaS targets 70‑80% gross margin, the ICONIQ 2026 State of AI survey finds AI‑enabled products average only about 52% margin. A $100 revenue example illustrates margin dropping from 80% to 65% when $15 of AI‑related costs are added.
Also developing:
Executive Function: Building Systems that Can Make Decisions without You | Jeanne DeWitt Grosser (COO, Vercel)
Vercel’s COO Jeanne De Witt Grosser, former Stripe leader, joins First Round’s Executive Function podcast to dissect what separates good executives from great ones. She details Vercel’s rigorous executive interview framework, the use of driver trees for metric ownership, and why COOs often absorb marketing to control the full customer journey. The conversation also explores the transition from frontline manager to manager of managers, and the importance of context‑driven performance feedback.
Leverate to Launch Prediction Market Technology for Brokers at iFX EXPO
Fintech firm Leverate will debut a turnkey prediction‑market technology for brokers at iFX EXPO Dubai 2026. The solution lets brokers add event‑based contracts to existing platforms without building pricing, risk or execution infrastructure in‑house. Leverate’s offering follows a recent trend,...
Bank ABC’s Ila Bank Goes Live with Temenos Core on AWS
Bank ABC’s digital‑only ila Bank has migrated its retail account and lending operations to Temenos’ Core Banking platform hosted on Amazon Web Services, completing the first phase of a broader transformation. The migration, which also incorporated Temenos Payments and Data...
How We Made Geo Joins 400× Faster with H3 Indexes
Floe’s query planner now rewrites spatial joins by generating H3 cell coverages for each geometry and joining on the resulting integer keys. This pre‑filter reduces the candidate pairs dramatically, turning a quadratic ST_Intersects join into a hash‑join followed by a...
Tracxn Continues to Report Flat Revenue in Q3 FY25; Slips Into Losses
Bengaluru‑based data platform Tracxn reported flat Q3 FY26 revenue, slipping to Rs 21 crore, a 2% decline from the same quarter last year. Total expenses rose 8.6% to Rs 22.8 crore, driven largely by employee benefits, pushing the company into...
New Speakers for the Tech.eu Summit London 2026 Announced: Leaders From OpenAI, Notion Capital, PolyAI, Oxa and Many More...
Tech.eu has unveiled a fresh slate of speakers for its London 2026 Summit, featuring executives from OpenAI, Notion Capital, PolyAI, Oxa and other high‑growth firms. The two‑day event runs on 21‑22 April at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre and will...
Zendesk Spam Wave Returns, Floods Users with 'Activate Account' Emails
A fresh wave of spam is exploiting unsecured Zendesk support portals, flooding users worldwide with fake “Activate account” emails. Attackers submit tickets through open Zendesk forms, triggering automatic confirmation messages to large address lists. The campaign mirrors a January incident,...
The Payroll Software Dilemma Facing Accountancy Practices
In this episode, Ian Davidson of Quarry Payroll Consulting discusses the strategic crossroads accountancy practices face as legacy payroll software reaches end‑of‑life, weighing migration to modern cloud platforms against outsourcing payroll to specialist providers. He outlines the heavy resource demands,...
Bringing a B2C Mindset to a B2B Challenge - Piyush Sagar Mishra, Twilio Head of Marketing Innovation and AI, Explains...
Twilio created the Head of Marketing Innovation and AI role for Piyush Sagar Mishra, leveraging his B2C background to re‑imagine B2B go‑to‑market. Mishra’s team built the MAISON framework—a trust‑first AI stack that combines a solid knowledge base, sandboxed models and agentic workflows....
Luciq Expands Agentic Mobile Observability With a Full Lifecycle Agentic Loop
Luciq has expanded its Agentic Mobile Observability platform to cover the full mobile app lifecycle, adding a coordinated four‑agent loop that detects, triages, resolves, and guards releases. The new Agentic Instrumentation lets teams instrument apps in under 10 minutes, while...
How Zoom Grew 30x Almost Overnight
In this episode, Eric Yuan recounts his journey from a frustrated employee at a video‑conferencing startup to founding Zoom, detailing the company’s rapid 30‑fold expansion during the COVID‑19 pandemic. He explains how Zoom scaled its technology, culture, and operations to...
AI-Native IT Documentation Platform Redefines How MSPs Work, Solving Pain Points and Generating Value in Real Time
Lexful unveiled an AI‑native IT documentation platform at the Right of Boom conference, targeting managed service providers (MSPs). Backed by Top Down Ventures and led by CEO Pinar Ormeci, the solution replaces static records with real‑time operational intelligence. Core features...
Romanian EdTech Startup Kinderpedia Raises €2.2M in Growth Funding Round
Romanian EdTech startup Kinderpedia secured €2.2 million in a growth‑stage round led by Simpact Ventures, part of a €3.5 million target. The AI‑powered platform now serves schools in over 40 countries, reaching more than 500,000 teachers, parents and administrators. Funds will accelerate...
Battle-Testing Lynx at Allegro
Allegro’s mobile team, after six years with the in‑house MBox server‑driven UI, sought a solution that could deliver native performance while retaining cross‑platform flexibility. They evaluated Lynx, an open‑source framework that renders natively on iOS, Android, and Web from a...
Finova Wins Five-Year Contract Extension with Key Group
Finova has secured a five‑year contract extension with Key Group, the UK’s leading later‑life lender, to continue powering its more2life mortgage products. The renewed deal will see Key Group adopt Finova’s next‑generation lending platform and an agile pricing engine, enabling...
Synthesia and Flatpay Founders Back Pluto.markets in $6M Raise
Danish neobroker Pluto.markets secured a $6 million seed round, bringing its total capital to nearly $10 million since its 2021 launch. The round was led by Seed Capital and featured a roster of Danish unicorn founders from Synthesia, Flatpay, Pleo and others....
Fintower Completes €1.5M Oversubscribed Seed Round
Swedish fintech Fintower announced the close of an oversubscribed €1.5 million seed round, drawing participation from new backers such as Chalmers Ventures, Akka and the Stena family, alongside existing investors like Almi and Inet. The company offers an AI‑driven SaaS platform...
HR Tech Company Talentguide Raises €1.3M to Expand Data-Driven Skills Management in Europe
Ghent‑based HR‑tech firm talentguide raised €1.3 million to accelerate its European rollout. The round was led by NXT II, Travvant, Miles Ahead Capital, imec.istart and several founders. talentguide’s AI‑driven SaaS platform converts unstructured HR data into a skills intelligence layer for both...
Apollo Appoints New CEO to Scale Next Phase of Growth
Apollo.io announced Matt Curl as its new chief executive officer, succeeding founder Tim Zheng who will remain chairman. Curl, who has served as COO and advisor since 2019, helped drive the company’s recent operational improvements and margin expansion. Apollo now...
Qontext Closes $2.7M Pre-Seed Round to Develop a Context Layer for AI
Berlin‑based Qontext announced a $2.7 million pre‑seed round led by HV Capital, backed by AI‑infrastructure veterans. The startup builds an independent context layer that supplies AI systems with up‑to‑date, enterprise‑wide data. Its platform targets fragmented customer, product, and policy information that...
ICE Seeks Industry Input on Ad Tech Location Data for Investigative Use
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has issued a Request for Information seeking commercial ad‑tech tools that provide location data and large‑scale analytics for investigative use. The RFI, framed as market research, asks vendors to demonstrate platforms that can ingest, correlate,...
CommerceX Raises ¥17.3B Series A for Retail Tec
CommerceX Holdings, a Japanese retail‑tech firm, raised ¥17.3 billion in a Series A round that combines equity and debt financing. The capital will fund an aggressive M&A strategy and upgrades to RECORE, its cloud‑based POS system for the reuse industry. Management targets...
Google's 52x AI Growth
Google’s Q4 2025 earnings call highlighted a dramatic AI surge, with Gemini processing over 10 billion tokens per minute—a 52‑fold year‑over‑year rise to an annualized 430 trillion tokens. Serving costs fell 78%, delivering a 4.5× efficiency gain per GPU hour. Cloud revenue...
Planning Your First Sales Hire? You Don't Need a Performer. You Need a Producer.
In this episode, Garrett Brown explains why early-stage startups should hire a Sales Producer—not a traditional Sales Performer—for their first sales hire. He defines the Producer role as the person who invents the sales playbook, identifies target customers, sets pricing,...
Stripe Alumni Raise €30M Series A for Duna, Backed by Stripe and Adyen Execs
Duna, a business identity verification startup founded by Stripe alumni, closed a €30 million Series A round led by Alphabet’s CapitalG with participation from current and former Stripe and Adyen executives. The company’s platform aims to create a reusable digital passport for...
Salesforce Leads Gartner CDP Magic Quadrant, Powering Trusted AI
I’m thrilled to share that for the third year in a row, Salesforce has been named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Customer Data Platforms, placed Furthest in Vision and Highest in Execution. Data 360 is the...
Tenable Pops After Blowout Earnings and Bullish 2026 Outlook
Tenable Holdings posted a strong fiscal fourth‑quarter, reporting adjusted earnings of $0.48 per share and revenue of $260.5 million, both surpassing analyst expectations. Year‑over‑year revenue grew 11% to $999.4 million, while calculated billings rose 8% to $327.8 million. The company added 502 new...
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SaasRise Mastermind Recap - Feb 4, 2026
The Feb 4 2026 SaasRise Mastermind session delivered a deep‑dive into the toughest hurdles SaaS CEOs face, from turning legacy software into scalable cloud services to crafting a focused enterprise go‑to‑market motion. Participants were urged to adopt infrastructure‑as‑code tools like Terraform, invest...
Classic SaaS Scaling Model Is Dead, AI Reigns
SaaS isn’t dead, even with the massive sell off this year (and really since July 2025). But … what is dead is the classic pattern and way to scale: - 1, maybe 2 players, take over a space by $10m-$20m...
Show HN: Morph – Videos of AI Testing Your PR, Embedded in GitHub
Glance is an AI‑powered testing tool that reads a pull‑request diff and automatically determines which UI interactions to exercise. It runs the tests in managed or developer‑provided browsers and captures video recordings, screenshots, console errors, and network logs. All artifacts...
Use AI Now or Get Left Behind
If you know AI can already do a part of your job, you should be the one taking advantage of that. Aggressively. If you're waiting for permission, someone else isn't. Here's what happens when you wait. Your competitor figures it out....
Turn Any Website Into a Live, Structured Data Feed
Meter launches a no‑code web‑scraping and change‑detection platform that lets users describe data extraction in plain English. The service runs scrapes every 15 minutes, bypasses major anti‑bot defenses, and rotates residential and datacenter proxies. Detected content changes trigger webhooks, delivering...
Former Workplace From Facebook Engineers Launch AI Startup Slashwork to Banish Teamwork Slop
Former Facebook Workplace engineers have launched Slashwork, an AI‑first enterprise collaboration platform, announcing a $3.5 million seed round led by 20VC. The team, which includes ex‑Workplace leaders and investors such as former Slack CTO Cal Henderson and Intercom co‑founder Des Traynor,...
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How to Set Up an Outbound Cold Email System for B2B Outreach in 2026
Cold email remains a viable B2B channel in 2026 when treated as a scalable infrastructure rather than a sporadic tactic. Companies calculate the required volume—often millions of messages annually—to achieve systematic market coverage, breaking it down to a few thousand...
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How to Sell a $5M ARR SaaS Firm
Reaching $5 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) marks a pivotal inflection point for SaaS founders. At this scale, buyers treat the company as a serious acquisition target, yet the firm remains too small for a full‑scale investment banker process. The article...
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How to Do Enterprise SaaS Sales
Enterprise SaaS sales is a distinct discipline, not a scaled‑up version of SMB selling. Founders must first determine whether they are replacing an existing solution or pursuing a first‑time buy, as this shapes the timeline and risk. Mapping the three...
Access P
If you want to check out P9 without leaving your terminal window, now you can. ssh ssh.pointnine.com PS: I've vibe-coded this in the last 1-2 days, still a bit buggy, and I have some ideas to make it better.
Canadian Retailers Turn to Contact Intelligence Platforms to Source Specialized Talent Amid Workforce Shortage
Canadian retailers are increasingly deploying contact‑intelligence platforms to locate niche talent for e‑commerce, supply‑chain and analytics roles, a shift driven by a widening skills gap. The technology has slashed time‑to‑hire for technical positions by roughly 40 percent, while specialized roles...
Bootstrapped Growth: $28‑33M Run Rate, 25% Profit Rise
My predictions for Retention.com and RB2B for 2026: TOP LINE: $28m run rate to $33m run rate (+17%) PROFIT: $12m run rate to $15m run rate (+25%) CHURN: Stays horrible. TEAM SIZE: Flat at 33 FTE. This would be considered...
BoldVoice Raises $21M Series A to Give a Billion Non-Native English Speakers Their Own AI Voice Coach
BoldVoice announced a $21 million Series A round led by Matrix, with participation from Flybridge, Xfund, Corazon Capital, Alumni Ventures, Umami Capital and Y Combinator. The AI‑powered voice‑coaching platform has surpassed five million downloads and generated $10 million in annual recurring revenue. Its proprietary speech...
I Made an Open-Source Juypter Alternative
more-compute is an open‑source, locally‑run Python notebook environment that mimics Jupyter, Marimo, and Google Colab. It stores notebooks as .py files with # %% cell markers and includes a built‑in converter to and from the traditional .ipynb format. Installation is supported...
Retail Mobile CRM Guide 2026: Features, Use Cases, and Top 3 Apps
The episode defines mobile CRM for retail as a frontline‑focused system that lets associates capture context, act quickly, and trigger follow‑ups, distinguishing it from simply shrinking a desktop CRM onto a phone. It outlines essential features—fast in‑the‑moment UX, offline‑first access,...
Converge (YC S23) Is Hiring Product Engineers (NYC, In-Person)
Converge, a YC S23 startup, is hiring senior product engineers in New York to bolster its vertically integrated marketing data platform. Backed by $5.7 million in funding, the company already exceeds $1 M ARR with over 180 customers while operating a six‑person core...
Embedded Payments Give SaaS a Lifeline as AI Reshapes Workflows
AI-driven agentic systems are unsettling traditional SaaS subscription models, prompting a sharp sell‑off that saw software indexes tumble over 14% and marquee names like Thomson Reuters and Salesforce plunge double‑digit percentages. Investors fear that conversational AI could bypass entire application...
Pear Deck’s Deal Showcases High Value, Competitive Bidding, Low Risk
Pear Deck was a fantastic company to work with. Some of the highlights from their transaction include: * A strong enterprise value resulting from high growth * A highly competitive process with multiple buyers * A short exclusivity period with...
Microsoft's Copilot Chatbot Is Running Into Problems
Microsoft’s Copilot chatbot, the centerpiece of its AI‑first strategy, is encountering significant hurdles. Users and former staff cite confusing branding and poor interoperability with other Microsoft tools. Adoption among enterprise customers remains modest and is slipping relative to rivals like...
Don't Let “We Tried That” Kill Innovation
"We already tried that." Did you though? Did you try it with the right people? The right timing? The right execution? Or did you half-ass it once, it didn't work, and now it's dead forever? "We tried that" isn't wisdom....
Clients Demand AI‑Integrated Consultants Over Traditional Advisors
Why did it take me so long to see this? really, to accept it Had a conversation yesterday that finally crystallized what's been happening in the market. 👇 Companies aren't looking for traditional consultants anymore. They're looking for AI-Powered Consultants....
Free Platform for Laid‑Off Journalists Boosts Beehiiv
One of my favorite Win Win marketing moves: Offering people in need free digital product A kind gesture from Team @Beehiiv for any journalists that've been laid off. They get a free platform, Beehiiv gets trial from mainstream media writers. Win win....
AI Coding Multiplies Software Options, Boosting Choice and Personalization
AI coding will lead to 100X more software. That to me doesn’t conclude that every customer wants to be responsible for owning and managing their own ERP. It concludes that customers will have more choice, better features, and far more...