The $35M CRM Bet
Ross Sylvester, Co-Founder & CEO, Adrata | Feb 2026 | ~7 min read
Sam Blond was a partner at Founders Fund. Before that, he was CRO at Brex, where he helped scale revenue from $0 to $500M+. He could have stayed in venture. Instead, he left to build an AI-native CRM to compete with Salesforce. With $35M, Stripe's founders backing him, and the conviction that the entire CRM needs to be rebuilt from scratch.
The same week he launched, another startup raised $30M to do the exact opposite -- layer AI on top of existing CRMs rather than replace them.
Two bets. Same week. Opposite architectures. This is the most interesting strategic divergence happening in GTM right now.
The Rip-and-Replace Bet
Monaco emerged from stealth on February 11, 2026. The founding team reads like a fantasy draft for B2B sales infrastructure:
- Sam Blond -- Former CRO at Brex, former partner at Founders Fund
- Brian Blond -- Co-founder, Sam's brother
- Abishek Viswanathan -- Former CPO at Apollo and Qualtrics
- Malay Desai -- Former SVP of Engineering at Clari
The funding is $35M total -- a $10M seed and a $25M Series A, both led by Founders Fund. The angel list is a who's-who of tech: Patrick and John Collison (Stripe founders), Garry Tan (Y Combinator CEO), and Neil Mehta (Greenoaks Capital).
Monaco's thesis is simple and radical: the CRM should not be a database. It should be an agent.
Traditional CRMs store records. You put data in, you pull data out. The system knows what you tell it and nothing more. Monaco's pitch is that an AI-native CRM -- built from scratch with agents at the core -- can proactively recommend and take action. Not "here's a dashboard." More like "I noticed the champion went cold after the security review, the CFO just posted about cost cuts on LinkedIn, and three similar deals stalled at this exact stage last quarter. Here's what the two that closed did differently."
The target market is revealing: Monaco is going after seed and Series A startups. Not enterprise. Not mid-market. The earliest-stage companies that haven't yet built muscle memory around Salesforce. This is a land-grab strategy -- get companies before they become Salesforce customers, grow with them, and create a generation of revenue leaders who never learned to think in Salesforce's paradigm.
The Layer-On-Top Bet
One day later, on February 12, 2026, Aurasell launched with $30M in seed funding from Next47, Menlo Ventures, and Unusual Ventures.
Aurasell's thesis is the opposite of Monaco's: don't replace the CRM. Ride on top of it.
Aurasell positions itself as the "world's first AI-native GTM Operating System" -- a layer that runs intelligent, automated workflows on top of existing Salesforce, HubSpot, and other enterprise CRM environments. The promise: revenue teams can add AI-driven execution and automation across their current CRM without the risk, disruption, or political friction of replacing core systems. Implementation time claimed: as little as two hours.
This is the pragmatist's bet. Every CRO knows that ripping out Salesforce is a multi-quarter, multi-million-dollar project that touches every team in the revenue organization. The data migration alone can take months. The workflow rebuilds take longer. The political capital required to propose "let's replace Salesforce" at a $100M+ company is enormous. Aurasell bets that most CROs would rather add intelligence to the system they already have than burn organizational capital replacing it.
The Incumbent's Response
Meanwhile, Salesforce is not standing still.
The Q3 FY2026 earnings tell a story of a company that is simultaneously dominant and under pressure:
- $10.3B quarterly revenue, up 9% year over year
- Agentforce: $540M ARR, up 330% YoY -- the fastest-growing product in Salesforce history
- 18,500+ Agentforce deals since launch, with 9,500+ paid
- $1.4B combined ARR for Agentforce and Data 360, up 114% YoY
- 3.2 trillion tokens processed through the platform
Those are extraordinary numbers. Agentforce is not vaporware. It's a real product with real adoption at real scale. Salesforce's distribution advantage -- hundreds of thousands of existing customers who can add Agentforce to their existing Salesforce deployment -- is the single biggest moat in enterprise software.
But the cracks are there too.
~1,000 layoffs in February 2026, including people on the Agentforce team itself. Five senior executives departed in three months. The company moved Heroku into "sustaining engineering" -- no new features, no strategic investment, just keeping the lights on. Analysts interpreted this as the early stages of sunsetting the platform. These are not the moves of a company that feels secure in every part of its portfolio. They're the moves of a company making aggressive bets on where the future is and cutting everything else.
The executive exodus is particularly notable. Adam Evans, EVP and GM of Salesforce AI, left to pursue startups. Denise Dresser, CEO of Slack (a Salesforce subsidiary), left to become CRO at OpenAI. When your AI leader and your collaboration leader both leave within months of each other, it signals something about internal conviction.
The Market Context
These three approaches -- rip-and-replace, layer-on-top, and evolve-from-within -- aren't happening in a vacuum. The entire revenue technology landscape is restructuring.
Gartner published its first-ever Magic Quadrant for Revenue Action Orchestration in December 2025. The creation of a new Magic Quadrant category is significant. It means Gartner believes the market has matured enough to evaluate structured competition. Leaders: Gong, Outreach, and Clari. Salesloft was named a Visionary. The fact that this category exists at all tells you where the analyst community sees the revenue technology market heading.
Clari and Salesloft completed their merger in 2025, creating a combined company with approximately $450M ARR and "$10 trillion in revenue under management." Steve Cox was appointed CEO with a mandate to build the "first Predictive Revenue System." The merger is a consolidation play -- combining Clari's forecasting capabilities with Salesloft's sales engagement platform to create an end-to-end revenue orchestration stack. The scale is impressive. But the architecture is still fundamentally traditional: tools built in the pre-AI era, now adding AI features.
This is the strategic question that underlies everything: Is AI in revenue tech an incremental improvement to existing architectures, or does it require entirely new ones?
If it's incremental, Salesforce wins. Their distribution is unbeatable. Every Salesforce customer is one click away from Agentforce. Aurasell and similar layer-on-top approaches also win, because they add value without requiring a painful migration.
If it's architectural, Monaco and the rip-and-replace bets win. A CRM built from scratch with agents at the core will always be more capable than a CRM that adds agents as a feature on top of a 25-year-old data model. But winning architecturally requires overcoming the distribution gap, which is where almost every Salesforce challenger has died.
The Historical Pattern
Here's what makes me skeptical of the rip-and-replace bet, and I want to be honest about this: Salesforce has faced "Salesforce killers" for two decades. None of them killed Salesforce. Freshsales, Pipedrive, Close, Copper, Attio -- all built better products for specific segments. None achieved more than a fraction of Salesforce's scale. HubSpot came closest to creating a real alternative, and even HubSpot has evolved into a complement to Salesforce in many organizations rather than a replacement.
The distribution moat is real. Hundreds of thousands of companies run on Salesforce. Their workflows, their integrations, their training, their data -- everything is built on Salesforce's data model. Switching costs are enormous. And Salesforce has $41B+ in annual revenue to invest in keeping those customers.
But here is what makes me think this time might actually be different: the CRM has never faced an architectural disruption before.
Every previous Salesforce challenger was still fundamentally a database. Better UI, different pricing, simpler setup -- but still a system where you put data in and pull data out. The shift from "CRM as database" to "CRM as agent" is not an incremental improvement. It's a category redefinition. Databases don't disrupt themselves. They add features and call them innovations. But the gap between a database with AI features and an agent that happens to store data is the same gap between a horse-drawn carriage with a motor attached and a car.
Whether Monaco, with $35M and a team of four founders, can actually execute on that vision against a $300B incumbent? That's the $10 trillion question.
What I'm Watching
Which approach wins when the CRM becomes an agent? Three simultaneous bets: Monaco (rip-and-replace), Aurasell (layer on top), Salesforce Agentforce (evolve from within). Each has structural advantages. Monaco has architectural purity. Aurasell has low friction. Salesforce has distribution. In most technology transitions, distribution wins. But in the few where architecture wins -- mobile over desktop, cloud over on-premise -- the outcome is generational.
Does Monaco's startup-first strategy work? By targeting seed and Series A companies, Monaco avoids competing with Salesforce directly. But it also means its first generation of customers are companies with small deal sizes, limited complexity, and high mortality rates. The bet is that some of those startups become the next Brex, the next Stripe, the next OpenAI -- and they bring Monaco with them. It's a 10-year bet, not a 2-year bet. Does the team have the patience and the capital to play it?
What happens to the Clari+Salesloft mega-merger? The combined company has $450M ARR and a mandate to build the "Predictive Revenue System." But they're doing it by combining two pre-AI-era platforms, which is a harder integration challenge than building something new. Meanwhile, every category they operate in -- forecasting, engagement, intelligence -- is being disrupted by AI-native alternatives. Does consolidation create enough scale to compete, or does it just create a bigger target for disruption?
Sources
- Former Founders Fund VC Sam Blond launches AI sales startup to upend Salesforce - TechCrunch
- Monaco Emerges from Stealth with $35M for AI-Native Sales Platform - The AI Insider
- Monaco Launches AI-Native Sales Platform - GlobeNewsWire
- Aurasell Launches World's First AI-Native OS to Run Intelligent GTM Workflows on Any CRM - GlobeNewsWire
- Aurasell raises $30M seed for AI-native CRM platform - TechFundingNews
- Salesforce Delivers Record Q3 FY2026 Results
- Huge Exec Shakeup at Salesforce as New Head of Agentforce Revealed - Salesforce Ben
- Heroku future in doubt as Salesforce freezes features - DevClass
- Clari and Salesloft Complete Merger - Salesloft
- Gong Named a Leader in 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Revenue Action Orchestration
- Clari Named Leader in 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant - Salesloft