Sam Nazari

🧪 Why Moonshot exists: Automating CRO end-to-end On The SaaS CFO Podcast, Aviv Frenkel, PhD, Co-founder & CEO of Moonshot AI, broke down the core problem with traditional CRO: 👉 Design a test. 👉 Build the test. 👉 Run the test. 👉 Two months later… you forgot why you ran it. That friction is exactly why Moonshot was created. 🤖 Automates the entire CRO process—end to end 🔍 Identifies what’s not working on your website 🛠️ Recommends how to fix it ⚡ Fixes it for you (or with just a few clicks) 👥 No guessing. No extra hires. No bloated CRO teams. When you’re running an e-commerce business, conversion rate is everything—and the market is massive. While many tools exist, Aviv points out that most are still point solutions, solving only one slice of an “ancient” problem. Moonshot’s bet? Replace fragmented tools with autonomous optimization. 🎧 Episode 224 is now available, links down below 👇 YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gNVdytjC Apple: https://rpb.li/tgVFdD Spotify: https://rpb.li/7pwzP5xca #SaaSCFO #Ecommerce #CRO #GenAI #SaaSPodcast

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🧪 Why Moonshot exists: Automating CRO end-to-end On The SaaS CFO Podcast, Aviv Frenkel, PhD, Co-founder & CEO of Moonshot AI, broke down the core problem with traditional CRO: 👉 Design a test. 👉 Build the test. 👉 Run the test. 👉 Two months later… you forgot why you ran it. That friction is exactly why Moonshot was created. 🤖 Automates the entire CRO process—end to end 🔍 Identifies what’s not working on your website 🛠️ Recommends how to fix it ⚡ Fixes it for you (or with just a few clicks) 👥 No guessing. No extra hires. No bloated CRO teams. When you’re running an e-commerce business, conversion rate is everything—and the market is massive. While many tools exist, Aviv points out that most are still point solutions, solving only one slice of an “ancient” problem. Moonshot’s bet? Replace fragmented tools with autonomous optimization. 🎧 Episode 224 is now available, links down below 👇 YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gNVdytjC Apple: https://rpb.li/tgVFdD Spotify: https://rpb.li/7pwzP5xca #SaaSCFO #Ecommerce #CRO #GenAI #SaaSPodcast

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ServiceTitan just joined our State of SaaS metrics tracking - and their first numbers as a public company are worth noting: ARR: $930M, growing 26% YoY Net new ARR: +$191M CAC payback: 21 months Magic Number: 0.72 NRR: 110% Free cash flow margin: 14% Rule of 40: 40 Rule of X: 66 The watch-out? High G&A spend (26% of revenue) and operating margin of –14%. For context, GitLab is at 19%, Monday at 13%. Trading at ~11.5x ARR, ServiceTitan has strong growth but efficiency questions to answer. Watch the full episode for all the Q2 breakdowns linked in the comments below. #SaaS #ServiceTitan #Growth #Efficiency #Metrics

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🌟 The SaaS world moves fast, and scaling efficiently requires strategic alignment, operational rigor, and cross-functional coordination. Fractional COOs are helping early- and mid-stage SaaS companies grow seamlessly while maintaining agility. At 𝗗𝗶𝗴𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗥𝗲𝗳𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲, we’re committed to 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗻𝘀𝗽𝗮𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗰𝘆 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗮𝘂𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗶𝘁𝘆—spotlighting leaders who combine operational expertise with strategic insight to drive measurable results. 👋 𝗠𝗲𝗲𝘁 Dawn Strobel, 𝗙𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗖𝗢𝗢 Dawn helps SaaS companies align strategic objectives with day-to-day execution, ensuring scalable growth without sacrificing agility. She specializes in operational strategy, cross-functional alignment, process optimization, and efficiency audits. Here’s what she’s known for: ✅ Operational strategy for scaling 🏷️ Cross-functional alignment 🌟 SaaS process optimization 🔎 Operational efficiency audits Dawn empowers SaaS teams to scale smarter, improve performance, and operate with clarity—turning strategy into action at every level. 🔗 Learn more about Dawn Strobel and other Fractional COO professionals for SaaS companies here: https://lnkd.in/dSzCuv-R

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Thanks for the coverage Sales & Marketing AI - we are very excited about the reception to the first BAIO Platform. This is the mid-market challenge: you don’t have a 40-person innovation lab. You have 3 people and a deadline. The good news? You don’t need an army. You need a first win. Mid-market CEOs will win with AI. Not because they bet on tools, but because they built momentum. Start small. Start fast. Start with something measurable: - Automate your onboarding. - Clean your product catalog. - Scrape your competitors. - Route the right leads to the right reps. Find the 10% of customers most likely to churn — and act. Then do it again. This is how you close the Execution Gap. With Business Automation, Intelligence & Outcomes — not just more dashboards. Let’s stop talking pilots. Let’s start shipping outcomes. #ExecutionGap #MidMarket #BusinessAIPlatform #BAIO

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A SaaS business hit a growth plateau. One Apexx Sprint realigned their ICP, offers, and RevOps workflows → pipeline grew 25% in 8 weeks. Full case story here: [https://lnkd.in/d6KjYHr7]

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Lyra: $6 Million Seed Funding Raised For AI-Based Sales Meeting Platform: Lyra, an AI-native meeting platform for sales teams, has successfully completed a $6 million seed funding round, raising its valuation to $40 million. Led by 468 Capital, the investment also includes contributions from Rebel Fund, Y Combinator, Transpose Ventures, and executives from companies like Ramp, Gusto, and Zapier. The post Lyra: $6 Million Seed Funding Raised For AI-Based Sales Meeting Platform appeared first on Pulse 2.0.

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Most SaaS stories skip the painful middle. This one lives in it. Sigma Computing spent years chasing product-market fit. Multiple builds didn’t land. The team got smaller. Feedback stayed polite—but non-committal. The turning point came when they rebuilt fast for a real customer use case instead of chasing “good ideas.” One conversation finally flipped from “interesting” to “I want this.” Even then, they chose to rebuild again—because the product still wasn’t right. A good reminder: PMF isn’t about speed. It’s about listening, surviving, and making hard calls when it finally starts working. Full story here: https://saasclub.io/448

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It’s 2025 B2B SaaS Benchmarks Report release day! We curate everything we see/hear into what’s most relevant for $2-20M SaaS. We at also included an Interactive Quarterly Board Scorecard Tool in there, which you can use to get everyone on the same page at your next board meeting. We’ve been using it for 5 years at EVERY Jurassic Capital portco board meeting. Thought it was time to share. Here are some key highlights from this year’s report: 1. Retention Under Pressure - Gross Revenue Retention (GRR) dropped to 88% median for $5-20M ARR companies (down from 90%), with logo retention falling to 86% - Net Revenue Retention (NRR) declined to 101% showing expansion is becoming increasingly challenging - AI is making switching easier, forcing vertical SaaS to rely on unique datasets and specialized labor for stickiness ⠀2. Growth vs. Efficiency Trade-offs - ARR Growth continues declining for 4th consecutive year - $5-20M companies at 27% - Burn Multiples are stable at 1.5x while gross margins improved to 77% as companies focus on capital efficiency ⠀3. Sales Getting Tougher - Expansion ARR now 37% of total new ARR as new logo acquisition becomes harder - Sales cycles finally dropped 9% YoY in early 2025 after years of increases, showing some market softening and hopefully leading to growth later in 2025 ⠀4. Lean Operations - Teams are doing more with less: Series A companies down to 15 people (from 20 in 2023) - Hiring at historic lows with dramatic reduction in 2024 software hiring, likely due to AI improving efficiency in OpEx - OpEx % of Revenue is dropping for companies utilizing AI (with some re-deploying into Growth via Sales & Mktg), while COGS are increasing due to compute costs - Founder salaries plateau around $140k median after $5M revenue ⠀5. Market Recovery driven by AI, but cautious road ahead for equity-backed companies, driven by barbell effect - Growth/PE dry powder and re-opening of IPO window drove best first half for software M&A ever in quantity with median multiples slowly rising to 4.2x - Concentrated LP fundraising into fewer firms leading to fewer rounds at higher valuations: Seed/Series A up 30%/2% in valuations but down 48%/60% in volume - Seed and Series A companies are still ~2 years to graduate to the next round; Bridge rounds increased to record highs as Seed/Series A at 46%/36% of all rounds - AI companies command 41% valuation premium over those that aren’t defined as AI Huge thanks as always to the researchers (like Carta, Peter Walker, SaaS Capital, Benchmarkit, PitchBook, Pilot.com, Software Equity Group, ChartMogul, Maxio, and so many more) who actually find this data via surveys, their own reporting/software, etc., and then we get to curate down. You all rock. See full report below and access our Benchmarking Tool here: https://lnkd.in/exT4bkva

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SDR agencies are scaling fast by replacing manual outreach with AI agents. Platforms like Threadia AI, Artisan AI, AiSDR, Clay, and Apollo now automate prospecting, enrichment, and personalization at massive scale sending tens of thousands of tailored emails, managing multiple clients simultaneously, and delivering reply rates up to 12.7% without adding headcount. Companies like ClickUp cut lead qualification and routing time by 7x, while autonomous SDRs now routinely replace the output of 5+ human reps and drive 20x ROI. Multi agent systems are pushing conversion rates up to 7x higher while reducing outbound costs by 60–70%, proving AI SDRs aren’t just more efficient they’re redefining how pipeline is built.

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SaaS Founders are facing an existential crisis. These were the words of Venkat Thiruvengadam Founder and CEO of DuploCloud when we recorded an episode of The SaaS Revolution show podcast yesterday. Venkat's seen it before. When B2B Software moved to the cloud, those that didn't move or moved too late faced extinction. In the era of AI, Venkat already made his move last year. Duplocloud has moved from pure cloud solution to an Agentic AI solution for DevOps. We touched on much more and also the advantage Vertical SaaS companies will have in moving to become AI Native. Podcast out soon and don't wait too long to figure out your AI Strategy.

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Deal of the Week https://lnkd.in/dbwycUFN Augmented Intelligence Inc. — $20M at $750M valuation https://aui.io Investors: eGateway Ventures (lead), New Era Capital investor group, strategic partners AUI's Stealth Play for the Post-Transformer Era AUI continues to operate under deep stealth while charting a bold path beyond the transformer paradigm — a contrarian stance in an AI landscape dominated by compute-heavy scaling wars led by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind. The company's recently closed $20M bridge SAFE at a $750M valuation cap underscores deep investor conviction that the next wave of AI breakthroughs won't come from bigger GPUs, but from smarter architectures. While the broader market remains fixated on model size and synthetic data pipelines, AUI's research focus lies in neuro-symbolic reasoning, blending the statistical power of deep learning with the logical rigor of symbolic systems. This hybrid approach promises greater reasoning reliability, interpretability, and energy efficiency — three attributes that address growing skepticism around current foundation models' opacity and cost of scaling. The raise brings AUI's total capital to nearly $60M, fueling the quiet development of its Apollo-1 reasoning engine, rumored to be a foundation-model architecture that fuses symbolic logic modules with dynamic neural representations. Insiders describe Apollo-1 as a potential step-change in "grounded AI" — one capable of multi-hop reasoning and factual traceability without massive compute budgets. Within New York's fast-emerging AI corridor, AUI is becoming one of the most closely watched under-the-radar companies, blending research sophistication with enterprise-grade product discipline. Its investor syndicate — composed largely of deep-tech and frontier-AI specialists — sees this as an early bet on the post-transformer paradigm: leaner, more explainable AI that could redefine how intelligence is modeled, trained, and deployed. Deal Significance AUI's bridge round reflects a broader inflection point in AI investing — where capital is shifting from pure scale bets to architecture differentiation and reasoning fidelity. The company represents a hedge against the saturation of transformer economics, where model improvements deliver diminishing returns on exponentially higher costs. If Apollo-1 delivers on its promise of interpretable, low-energy reasoning, it could position AUI as a strategic acquisition target for hyperscalers seeking new compute-efficient architectures, or as the foundation for a new class of hybrid AI platforms capable of combining symbolic logic with generative fluency. For investors, this deal underscores rising conviction that the next "OpenAI-moment" may emerge not from scale, but from structure — and AUI's stealth trajectory gives it the mystique and momentum to be one of the few serious contenders for that title.

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This week in What's Hot 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #463 "Dot.com vibes and the AI house of cards or just the beginning 📈 - celebrating Cognition's insane growth and efficiency" +Databricks tops $4B run rate with $1B from AI, Brian Armstrong on remote work culture and much more... Full post in comments:

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GTM Engineering is the real secret moat since AI has reduced the barrier to creating products. Finding a unique signal, carving out a proprietary channel, and the ALPHA, these add the necessity to solve the growth maze from a different lens. Andrew Chen wrote a piece on this a few months ago: https://lnkd.in/gF3wJxUN Clay created the GTM Engineering role. And Maven created lightning sessions to learn about this fast. If you're in ops and not adding this to your reading/learning list, you're missing out.

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Some Vertical SaaS companies are generating 𝘂𝗽 𝘁𝗼 𝟯𝟬% 𝗼𝗳 𝗻𝗲𝘄 𝗯𝗼𝗼𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗽𝗿𝗶𝘃𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗲𝗾𝘂𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗿𝗲𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽𝘀. They figured out that PE firms can be a distribution channel if you build for it. That means products built for multi-entity environments, data that proves post-acquisition impact, pricing that scales through roll-ups, and teams designed to manage PE relationships over time. We break down how Vertical SaaS leaders engage PE firms across sales, marketing, product, pricing, and customer success in our 𝗣𝗿𝗶𝘃𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗘𝗾𝘂𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗘𝗻𝗴𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗣𝗹𝗮𝘆𝗯𝗼𝗼𝗸. The full checklist is in the comments. 👇

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ICYMI - from VentureBeat Intuit’s new AI agents help businesses get funds up to 5 days faster and save 12 hours a month with autonomous workflows. This is a tangible example of AI driving efficiency. The conversation shifts from if to how we implement AI. How do we ensure these autonomous workflows are not just fast, but fundamentally fair and truthful? AI offers incredible efficiencies, its autonomous nature in critical financial processes raises questions about accountability, bias, and the transparent flow of information, which could inadvertently lead to issues of accuracy or hidden deceptions. Ensuring ethical AI deployment means validating its integrity. Glimmary's AI-powered truth/lie index and deepfake detection for videos can be invaluable for companies showcasing leveraging AI solutions. Assure clients of their reliability and ethical adherence. #AIEthics #BusinessEfficiency #TechInnovation #FutureOfWork

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