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.
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