Former Founders Fund VC Sam Blond launches AI sales startup to upend Salesforce

Sam Blond made it clear last year that venture capital was not his long-term destination. After leaving Founders Fund after just 18 months in the role, he publicly stated that investing was not the right fit and that he intended to return to building and operating companies.

Now he has done exactly that. On Wednesday, Blond officially unveiled his new startup, Monaco, which is emerging from stealth mode. The company was co-founded with his brother, Brian Blond, who transitioned from a sales career into venture capital and currently serves as a partner at Human Capital, having previously worked at Sutter Hill Ventures. The founding team also includes Abishek Viswanathan, formerly chief product officer at Apollo and Qualtrics, and Malay Desai, formerly senior vice president of engineering at Clari.

Monaco has secured $35 million in total funding, comprised of a $10 million seed round and a $25 million Series A. According to Sam Blond, both rounds were led by Founders Fund, with participation from Human Capital. After operating quietly in private beta for a period, the company opened access to a broader public beta on Wednesday.

The Blond brothers’ extensive network in the tech ecosystem also helped draw notable angel investors. Among them are Patrick Collison and John Collison, founders of Stripe; Garry Tan of Y Combinator; and Neil Mehta, founder of Greenoaks Capital. Sam Blond himself previously served as head of sales at Brex, further strengthening his ties within the startup community.

Monaco is entering the highly competitive AI-driven sales technology space, but with a distinctive model. Rather than simply positioning itself as an AI-native replacement for traditional SaaS tools, the startup combines artificial intelligence with experienced human sales professionals embedded in the workflow. These human experts oversee and guide the AI’s output to ensure accuracy and effectiveness.

The company is initially targeting early-stage startups — particularly seed and Series A companies — with a suite of tools that includes an AI-native customer relationship management (CRM) system and a prospecting database built from scratch, similar in concept to ZoomInfo. Monaco’s AI agents can build and execute outbound email campaigns, draft follow-up communications, and manage outreach sequences. The platform also offers additional features, including automated meeting note-taking.

Blond says the objective is to automate much of the repetitive work traditionally handled by sales teams. “We can replace full workflows with agents,” he explained. Monaco constructs a database of prospects, identifies key decision-makers within target organisations, determines the optimal engagement sequence, and orchestrates and executes outreach. The system can even schedule meetings directly.

Crucially, however, the actual sales conversations are conducted by human representatives. The company does not rely on AI avatars to interact with customers. Instead, experienced sales professionals monitor the AI’s actions to prevent hallucinations, refine messaging, and ensure alignment with product positioning.

This hybrid approach makes Monaco somewhat unusual among AI sales startups, many of which promote automation as a direct replacement for human sales development representatives. Blond emphasises that Monaco is not designed to eliminate human sellers but to make seasoned sales expertise accessible to younger companies that may not yet have the resources to hire full-time teams.

“It’s this combination of the technology, but also the service,” Blond said. “Monaco does not have an agent pretending to be a sales rep trying to sell to the customer.”

Competition-wise, Monaco positions itself closer to HubSpot in pricing and target customer base, rather than directly competing with Salesforce at the enterprise level. Blond declined to disclose specific pricing details, noting only that the company charges a flat fee and is offering discounted rates during the beta phase.

The broader landscape, however, is crowded. Y Combinator alone has produced hundreds of sales-focused startups in recent years, spanning AI-native CRMs, niche sales tools, and AI sales development representative platforms. Other players in the market include Attio, Clay, and Conversion, as well as AI SDR-focused companies such as 11x, Artisan, and 1mind. Established incumbents — including Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho, and ZoomInfo — are also integrating AI and agentic capabilities into their existing platforms.

Blond acknowledges the competitive intensity but argues that the current market leaders were built during a previous technological era. In his view, no new entrant has yet emerged as the clear dominant AI-native sales platform.

“There definitely is not the ‘Cursor for sales’,” he said, referencing Cursor, the widely adopted AI-powered coding assistant. “But there will be.”

Blond hopes Monaco will fill that role. “In the broad category of sales technology, there’s a market leader right now. That market leader is Salesforce,” he said. “We are in the early innings of the next platform shift that will lead to a new market leader.”

As for why he chose such a competitive sector for his return to operating, Blond offers a straightforward answer. Having spent his career in sales, he believes this is the domain where he is most qualified to build.

“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 said.

Monaco currently employs around 40 people. The company’s office reflects its sales-driven culture, featuring vintage-style motivational posters with slogans such as “Save Startups” and “Build the future with Monaco.” An office gong rings each time the AI successfully secures a meeting with a prospective customer — a symbolic nod to the blend of technology and human effort at the heart of the company’s strategy.