When Sam Blond left his job as a VC at Founders Fund a year ago, just 18 months after joining the company, he told the world that being a VC wasn’t for him and he was “going back to management.”
On Wednesday, he officially brought his new startup, Monaco, out of stealth. The company was co-founded by his brother, Brian Blond, also a former sales professional turned VC. (Brian is a partner at Human Capital and previously worked at Sutter Hill.) The brothers were joined by two other co-founders, Abhishek Viswanathan (formerly CPO at Apollo and Qualtrics) and Murray Desai (formerly senior vice president of engineering at Clari).
Monaco has raised a total of $35 million, from a $10 million seed round to a $25 million Series A round, Sam Blond told TechCrunch. Both rounds were led by Founders Fund, with participation from Human Capital. The company has been quietly testing its AI sales platform through a private beta for some time, but opened it to a public beta on Wednesday.
The well-connected blonde brothers (Sam was previously a head of sales at Brex) have also attracted big-name angels as backers, including Stripe founders Patrick and John Collison, Y Combinator head Garry Tan and GreenOaks Capital founder Neil Mehta.
So what has attracted such a venerable list of investors? Monaco is entering the crowded field of AI sales technology with a twist. We’re not just competing with SaaS-era technologies through AI-native alternatives; We also supply experienced human salespeople as experts in the AI loop to monitor and guide the AI’s work.
The startup targets young seed and Series A-level startups with a suite of products that includes an AI-native customer relationship management (CRM) system and a ZoomInfo-like database built from the ground up to find leads. Its AI agents can create and execute email outreach campaigns, with all drafts of follow-up emails monitored by human experts. Other features are also included, such as the ability to take meeting notes.
This product aims to automate many of the tedious tasks associated with sales. “You can replace your entire workflow with an agent,” says Blond (pictured above, third from left, with brother Brian, second from left). For example, Monaco builds a database of prospects and identifies the exact people to pitch at target companies and the order in which to target them. “We coordinate and execute that sequence. We schedule meetings,” Blond says.
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Human salespeople make sure the AI isn’t hallucinating and train it to sell your product. In addition, the actual meeting with the customer will be conducted by the person in charge. There are no avatars.
That makes Monaco the rare AI sales startup that isn’t talking about human replacement. Instead, companies have access to experienced salespeople who are unable to hire them directly.
“This is a combination of not only technology but also services,” Blond says. “In Monaco, there are no agents posing as salespeople trying to sell to customers.”
Currently, Monaco’s main competitor is HubSpot, which is more affordable for younger companies than market giant Salesforce. Blonde wouldn’t say how much Monaco charges, other than to say it’s a flat fee and currently discounted while the product is still in beta.
He is also well aware that he is in a very crowded market. Y Combinator alone has graduated hundreds of sales startups over the past few years, from AI CRMs to niche AI tools. Additionally, there are startups such as Attio, Clay, and Conversion, a family of so-called AI SDR (Sales Development Representative) tools, and human resource replacement agent startups such as 11x, Artisan, and 1mind.
On top of that, established companies like Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho, and ZoomInfo all offer their own AI and agent tools.
Blond points out that today’s top players were created in a different era, and none of the emerging companies have performed well enough to emerge as clear winners.
“There is absolutely no such thing as a ‘cursor for sale,’” he says of the popular AI coding tool. “But it will be.”
He clearly wants Monaco to be the winner. “In the broad category of sales technology, there is currently a market leader, and that market leader is Salesforce,” says Blond. “We are in the early stages of transitioning to the next platform that will lead to a new market leader.”
Still, of all the fields he could have entered after leaving Founders Fund, how did he manage to rise above so much competition?
Blond has spent his entire career in sales, and says earnestly, “As a non-technical founder, there’s really only one type of technology company that’s suitable for founders: sales technology companies.”
He clearly enjoys doing it. The company employs about 40 people, with offices filled with career salespeople and walls covered in motivational World War II-style posters with slogans like “Save the Startup” and “Build a Future in Monaco.” Every time the AI successfully interviews a prospect, the office gong may sound.
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