Can Monaco Really Be the “Cursor for Sales”? Why Salesforce Should Still Worry
Sales teams are drowning in tools, yet still complain their stack is broken. Into that frustration steps Monaco, a new AI-native sales platform founded by ex–Founders Fund investor and former Brex sales chief Sam Blond. Backed with $35 million and a who’s-who of Silicon Valley angels, Monaco wants nothing less than to become the next Salesforce — but built for the agentic AI era, with humans deliberately kept in the loop.
In this piece, we’ll unpack what Monaco is actually doing, why the “AI + services” model is more radical than it looks, what it means for incumbents like Salesforce and HubSpot, and how this could reshape go-to-market strategy — especially for European startups.
The news in brief
According to TechCrunch, former Founders Fund VC and ex–Brex head of sales Sam Blond has officially launched Monaco, an AI-driven sales startup emerging from stealth with $35 million in funding: a $10 million seed and a $25 million Series A, both led by Founders Fund. His co-founders include his brother Brian Blond (Human Capital), Abishek Viswanathan (ex-CPO at Apollo and Qualtrics) and Malay Desai (formerly SVP of engineering at Clari).
Monaco offers an AI-native CRM, a homegrown ZoomInfo-style prospect database, and AI agents that design and execute outbound email campaigns, including follow-ups, plus features like automatic meeting notes. Crucially, Monaco also provides experienced human salespeople who supervise the AI’s work and handle real customer meetings.
The company is targeting early-stage startups (seed and Series A) and is currently in public beta with a flat-fee pricing model, temporarily discounted. Its competition ranges from HubSpot and Salesforce to newer AI SDR tools such as 11x, Artisan and 1mind, as well as other AI-first CRMs and prospecting tools. Monaco employs around 40 people today.
Why this matters
Monaco’s ambition isn’t just “another AI feature” on top of a CRM. It’s an attack on three different layers at once:
- The system of record (Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho)
- The outbound engine (ZoomInfo, Apollo, Clay and others)
- The human sales development layer (SDR teams, agencies, BPO providers)
By bundling all three into one AI-native platform plus a pool of expert salespeople, Monaco is effectively saying: “Stop assembling a GTM stack. Rent ours.”
Who gains, who loses?
Winners:
- Very early-stage startups without senior sales talent. For a flat fee they can get a functioning outbound motion, instead of spending months hiring and wiring together tools.
- Non-technical founders who know their market but not modern sales ops. Monaco sells a plug-and-play sales engine, not just software.
Threatened:
- Point-solution vendors (single-purpose AI email tools, enrichment tools, basic AI note-takers). If Monaco handles the full workflow, many niche tools become optional.
- Traditional SDR outsourcing agencies. Monaco turns what used to be “we’ll throw more junior humans at your funnel” into “we’ll orchestrate the whole thing with AI, validated by senior operators.”
- Incumbent CRMs at the low end, especially HubSpot’s startup segment, where price and complexity matter most.
The real problem it targets
Most startups don’t fail because they lack a CRM. They fail because they never figure out a repeatable sales motion. Today that motion is cobbled together from:
- A legacy CRM
- A prospecting database
- An email/sequencing tool
- Call recording, note-taking, analytics
- A half-trained SDR team
Monaco’s bet is that in an agentic AI world, the unit of value is not the tool, but the workflow outcome: qualified meetings on the calendar and a growing pipeline. That’s what founders will happily pay for.
If Monaco can consistently deliver that outcome for small teams, it doesn’t need to “replace Salesforce” to matter. It just needs to become the default GTM stack for the next generation of startups — before they ever touch Salesforce.
The bigger picture
Monaco sits at the intersection of several powerful trends.
1. From SaaS to “AI + ops” hybrids
We’re seeing a wave of companies that reject the pure-SaaS playbook and combine software with services: think AI-powered customer support providers that include their own agents, or AI bookkeeping tools that ship with human accountants in the loop. Monaco applies the same logic to sales.
This isn’t just a UX choice; it’s a go-to-market weapon. By owning both the software and the operators, Monaco can:
- Iterate its AI on real-world playbooks faster than a pure SaaS vendor
- Deliver immediate value without asking the customer to rewire their org
- Learn across customers in a way agencies can’t, and tools don’t
The downside is classic: services compress margins and slow scale. The question is whether AI automation can push Monaco closer to SaaS economics over time.
2. The agentic AI wave
The article notes that many competitors position themselves as AI SDRs that replace humans. That sounds efficient, but in practice, fully autonomous outbound agents raise issues:
- Hallucinations that create brand risk
- Messages that feel robotic and destroy response rates
- Compliance and consent problems in stricter jurisdictions
Monaco’s “expert in the loop” stance is a pragmatic answer: use AI for speed and coverage, humans for judgment and relationship-building.
3. History repeating: from Siebel to Salesforce — to what next?
Salesforce dethroned Siebel by embracing the cloud and radically simplifying deployment. But Salesforce itself is now a 25-year-old platform, optimized for large enterprises, customized workflows and admin-heavy orgs.
If AI agents become the primary interface to sales data and workflows, the winning system of record will be the one designed from day one for agents to read, act and learn, not just for humans to click through. That’s the opening Monaco is betting on.
However, there’s a crucial difference from the Siebel → Salesforce era: today’s incumbents are not asleep. Salesforce has Einstein, HubSpot has its own AI features, and both can buy promising challengers. Monaco has to move fast and carve out a defensible niche before it’s either copied or acquired.
The European / regional angle
For European startups, Monaco’s model is both tempting and tricky.
On the one hand, Europe is full of technically excellent teams with weak outbound DNA. Many founders in Berlin, Paris, or Stockholm know how to build product, but struggle to build US-style outbound machines. An AI-augmented, done-for-you sales engine is exactly what they want.
On the other hand, Europe has:
- GDPR and ePrivacy rules that make large-scale cold outreach and data aggregation more sensitive than in the US.
- National regulations in countries like Germany that tightly constrain unsolicited B2B outreach.
A ZoomInfo-like database built into Monaco could face hard questions from EU customers:
- Where is the data sourced from?
- What’s the legal basis — legitimate interest, consent, something else?
- Can contacts easily exercise their rights to access or deletion?
Then there is the EU AI Act, which will demand transparency and risk management for AI systems that profile individuals or make decisions affecting them. Sales tooling isn’t in the highest risk category, but automated prospect scoring and outreach could still trigger obligations around human oversight and documentation.
European SaaS vendors — from Pipedrive (founded in Estonia) to smaller regional CRMs — have an opening here. They can position themselves as AI-native and natively compliant, with EU data residency and privacy baked in.
If Monaco wants to win in Europe, it will have to localise not only language and integrations, but also compliance posture and go-to-market. Simply importing a Silicon Valley outbound culture won’t work in DACH or the Nordics.
Looking ahead
Monaco is still early, but several fault lines will determine whether it becomes a serious challenger or just another well-funded experiment.
1. Can it prove a repeatable playbook across industries?
If its success depends on a few star operators and hand-crafted sequences for each client, scaling to hundreds of startups will be painful. The real win is if Monaco can distil patterns into reusable “AI playbooks” that work out-of-the-box for common SaaS archetypes.
2. Can it migrate from services-heavy to product-heavy margins?
Investors will tolerate services early on, but long term Monaco has to show:
- Rising automation rates (more of the work done by agents, less by humans)
- Healthy gross margins closer to software than consulting
- Low churn, because switching your GTM engine is painful
3. How will incumbents respond?
Salesforce and HubSpot already pitch AI copilots; the next step is deeper automation. They could:
- Embed their own agentic outbound flows
- Partner with or acquire AI SDR platforms
- Launch “Salesforce-as-a-service” style offerings with partners
Monaco’s best defence is speed and focus on a very specific customer: early-stage, product-led B2B startups who haven’t yet ossified around Salesforce.
4. Regulatory and trust shocks
One ugly incident — an AI agent sending non-compliant or offensive outreach at scale — could trigger a backlash, especially in Europe. Monaco’s human-in-the-loop design is partly insurance against that, but only if enforced rigorously.
The bottom line
Monaco is less about killing Salesforce tomorrow and more about owning the first serious sales stack a startup ever adopts. By fusing an AI-native CRM, its own data layer and embedded human experts, it challenges the idea that founders must assemble their go-to-market from a dozen tools and hires.
Whether it becomes the “Cursor for sales” is far from guaranteed. But the direction is clear: in the next decade, startups may buy outcomes — meetings, pipeline, revenue motion — rather than software seats. The real question for readers building or selling B2B products is simple: when your competitors plug into an AI-powered GTM engine like this, can you afford not to?
