When Sam Blond left his job as a VC for Founders Fund a year ago — just 18 months after he started — he told the world that being a VC wasn’t for him and he was “going back to operating.”
On Wednesday, he officially brought his new startup, Monaco, 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).
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.
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.
So what attracted such a venerable list of investors? Monaco is entering the crowded field of AI sales tech with a twist. It isn’t just competing with SaaS-era tech via its AI-native alternative; it’s also supplying experienced human salespeople to be experts in the AI loop, monitoring and guiding the AI’s work.
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.
The product is intended to automate much of the sales grunt work. “We can replace full workflows with agents,” 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. “We orchestrate and execute that sequence. We schedule a meeting,” Blond says.
The human-in-the-loop salespeople help ensure that the AI isn’t hallucinating and train it to sell the product, and the actual customer meetings are done by the people. No avatars.
That makes Monaco a rare AI sales startup that isn’t talking about human replacement. Instead, it’s making experienced salespeople available to companies too nascent to hire them directly.
“It’s this combination of the technology, but also the service,” Blond says. “Monaco does not have an agent pretending to be a sales rep trying to sell to the customer.”
Currently, Monaco’s 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’s a flat fee and currently discounted while the product remains in beta.
He’s also well aware that he’s 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’s startups like Attio, Clay, and Conversion, and the crop of so-called AI SDR (sales-development representative) tools — human-replacement agentic startups like 11x, Artisan, and 1mind.
On top of that, the incumbents, including Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho, and ZoomInfo, are all offering their own AI and agentic tools.
Blond points out that today’s top players were built in another era, and none of the upstarts are performing well enough to be a clear-cut winner.
“There definitely is not the ‘Cursor for sales’,” he says, referring to the popular AI coding tool. “But there will be.”
He obviously wants Monaco to be that winner. “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.”
Still, out of all the areas he could have entered after leaving Founders Fund, why duke it out among so much competition?
Blond, speaking earnestly, says that having spent his entire career in sales, “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 having fun doing so. The company employs about 40 people and the office, filled with fellow career salespeople, sports WWII-esque motivational posters on the wall with slogans like “Save Startups” and “Build the future with Monaco.” There’s even an office gong that rings out every time the AI lands a meeting with a prospect.