{"id":476167,"date":"2026-02-13T00:20:23","date_gmt":"2026-02-13T00:20:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/476167\/"},"modified":"2026-02-13T00:20:23","modified_gmt":"2026-02-13T00:20:23","slug":"former-founders-fund-vc-sam-blond-launches-ai-sales-startup-to-upend-salesforce","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/476167\/","title":{"rendered":"Former Founders Fund VC Sam Blond launches AI sales startup to upend Salesforce\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Sam Blond left his job as a VC for Founders Fund a year ago \u2014 just 18 months after he started \u2014 he told the world<\/a> that being a VC wasn\u2019t for him and he was \u201cgoing back to operating.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n

On Wednesday, he officially brought his new startup, Monaco<\/a>, out of stealth. It was co-founded with his brother Brian Blond, who is also an ex-sales professional turned VC. (Brian is a partner at Human Capital and was formerly at Sutter Hill.) The brothers are joined by two other co-founders, Abishek Viswanathan (previously CPO at Apollo and Qualtrics), and Malay Desai (formerly SVP of engineering at Clari).\u00a0<\/p>\n

Monaco has raised a total of $35 million, between a $10 million seed and $25 million Series A round, Sam Blond tells TechCrunch. Both rounds were led by Founders Fund, with participation from Human Capital. The startup has been quietly testing its AI sales platform through a private beta for a while, but on Wednesday opened it up to a public beta.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The well-connected Blond brothers (Sam was previously head of sales at Brex), also attracted a bunch of big-name angels as backers: Stripe founders Patrick and John Collison, Y Combinator chief Garry Tan, and Greenoaks Capital founder Neil Mehta. \u00a0<\/p>\n

So what attracted such a venerable list of investors? Monaco is entering the crowded field of AI sales tech with a twist. It isn\u2019t just competing with SaaS-era tech via its AI-native alternative; it\u2019s also supplying experienced human salespeople to be experts in the AI loop, monitoring and guiding the AI\u2019s work.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The startup is targeting young seed and Series A-level startups with a product suite that includes an AI-native customer relationship management (CRM) system and a built-from-scratch ZoomInfo-like database for finding prospects. Its AI agents can create and execute email outreach campaigns and draft follow-up emails all monitored by the human experts. It includes other features, too, like a meeting notetaker.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The product is intended to automate much of the sales grunt work. \u201cWe can replace full workflows with agents,\u201d Blond says (pictured above, third from left, with brother Brian, pictured second from left). For instance, Monaco builds a database of prospects, identifies the exact people at a target company to pitch, and the sequence in which to target them. \u201cWe orchestrate and execute that sequence. We schedule a meeting,\u201d Blond says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Techcrunch event<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tBoston, MA
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tJune 23, 2026\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

The human-in-the-loop salespeople help ensure that the AI isn\u2019t hallucinating and train it to sell the product, and the actual customer meetings are done by the people. No avatars.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That makes Monaco a rare AI sales startup that isn\u2019t talking about<\/a> human replacement<\/a>. Instead, it\u2019s making experienced salespeople available to companies too nascent to hire them directly.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s this combination of the technology, but also the service,\u201d Blond says. \u201cMonaco does not have an agent pretending to be a sales rep trying to sell to the customer.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Currently, Monaco\u2019s main competition is HubSpot, priced as it is to be more affordable for young companies than the big kahuna of the market, Salesforce. Blond declined to tell us what Monaco will charge, except to say that it\u2019s a flat fee and currently discounted while the product remains in beta. \u00a0<\/p>\n

He\u2019s also well aware that he\u2019s in an exceptionally crowded market. Y Combinator alone has graduated hundreds of sales startups in the past couple of years, ranging from AI CRMs to niche AI tools. Then there\u2019s startups like Attio, Clay, and Conversion,<\/a> and the crop of so-called AI SDR (sales-development representative) tools \u2014 human-replacement agentic startups like 11x<\/a>, Artisan<\/a>, and 1mind<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On top of that, the incumbents, including Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho, and ZoomInfo, are all offering their own AI and agentic tools. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Blond points out that today\u2019s top players were built in another era, and none of the upstarts are performing well enough to be a clear-cut winner.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThere definitely is not the \u2018Cursor for sales\u2019,\u201d he says, referring to the popular AI coding tool. \u201cBut there will be.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

He obviously wants Monaco to be that winner. \u201cIn the broad category of sales technology, there\u2019s a market leader right now. That market leader is Salesforce,\u201d Blond says. \u201cWe are in the early innings of the next platform shift that will lead to a new market leader.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, out of all the areas he could have entered after leaving Founders Fund, why duke it out among so much competition? \u00a0<\/p>\n

Blond, speaking earnestly, says that having spent his entire career in sales, \u201cAs a non-technical founder, there\u2019s really only one type of technology company that I\u2019m qualified to be the founder of: a sales technology company.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

He\u2019s clearly having fun doing so. The company employs about 40 people and the office,\u00a0filled with fellow career salespeople, sports WWII-esque motivational posters on the wall with slogans like \u201cSave Startups\u201d and \u201cBuild the future with Monaco.\u201d There\u2019s even an office gong that rings out every time the AI lands a meeting with a prospect.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Sam Blond left his job as a VC for Founders Fund a year ago \u2014 just 18…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":476168,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,69385,5607,242483,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-476167","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-crm","14":"tag-exclusive","15":"tag-founders-fund","16":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=476167"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476167\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/476168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=476167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=476167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=476167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}