The $35M AI Sales Startup That Refuses to Replace Humans

When a VC Quits to Solve the Problem He Funded

$35 million. That's what Monaco raised in just one year, from a VC who couldn't stand being a VC anymore. Sam Blond lasted exactly 18 months at Founders Fund before declaring "being a VC wasn't for him" and jumping back into operating. Now he's building what he thinks will dethrone Salesforce.

The Blond brothers aren't your typical tech founders. Sam was head of sales at Brex, Brian's a partner at Human Capital. They recruited Abishek Viswanathan (ex-CPO at Apollo and Qualtrics) and Malay Desai (former SVP of engineering at Clari). The investor lineup reads like a Silicon Valley who's who: Stripe founders Patrick and John Collison, Y Combinator's Garry Tan, and Greenoaks Capital's Neil Mehta.

What convinced this A-list crowd to back yet another sales startup in an impossibly crowded market?

The Contrarian Bet: AI + Humans, Not AI vs Humans

While every other AI sales startup promises to eliminate human salespeople, Monaco is doing the exact opposite. They're putting experienced human salespeople directly into the AI loop, monitoring and guiding the AI's work.

Here's how it works: Monaco's AI-native CRM builds prospect databases, identifies exactly who to target at each company, and sequences the outreach. The AI creates email campaigns and drafts follow-ups. But here's the twist—real human sales experts oversee everything, ensuring the AI isn't hallucinating and training it to sell effectively.

The actual customer meetings? Those are handled by humans. No avatars, no AI pretending to be a sales rep. "Monaco does not have an agent pretending to be a sales rep trying to sell to the customer," Blond emphasizes.

It's a rare AI startup that's making experienced salespeople accessible to companies too young to hire them directly, rather than promising to replace them entirely.

Taking on the $50B Goliaths

Monaco is positioning itself as the affordable alternative to Salesforce, targeting seed and Series A startups who find the market leader too expensive. While Blond won't reveal pricing details, he says it's a flat fee model currently discounted during beta.

The competition is brutal. Y Combinator alone has graduated hundreds of sales startups in recent years. There's Attio, Clay, and Conversion building new CRMs. Then there are the "AI SDR" tools like 11x, Artisan, and 1mind that explicitly aim to replace human sales development reps. Meanwhile, incumbents like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zoominfo are all rolling out their own AI features.

"There definitely is not the 'Cursor for sales,'" Blond says, referring to the popular AI coding tool. "But there will be." He wants Monaco to be that winner.

Why Fight in the Most Crowded Arena?

Of all the markets Blond could have entered after leaving venture capital, why choose the most saturated one? His answer is refreshingly honest: "As a non-technical founder, there's really only one type of technology company that I'm qualified to be the founder of: a sales technology company."

He's clearly enjoying the challenge. Monaco employs about 40 people in an office decorated with WWII-style motivational posters sporting slogans like "Save Startups" and "Build the future with Monaco." There's even a gong that rings every time the AI successfully books a meeting with a prospect.

"In the broad category of sales technology, there's a market leader right now. That market leader is Salesforce," Blond says. "We are in the early innings of the next platform shift that will lead to a new market leader."