A year ago, Sam Blond departed his venture capital role at Founders Fund after just 18 months, publicly declaring that the VC path was not for him and signaling his return to "operating" within a company.
This Wednesday, Blond officially unveiled his new startup, Monaco, emerging from stealth mode. He co-founded the venture with his brother, Brian Blond, who also transitioned from a sales career into venture capital, currently serving as a partner at Human Capital and previously at Sutter Hill. The founding team is further strengthened by Abishek Viswanathan, formerly CPO at Apollo and Qualtrics, and Malay Desai, previously SVP of engineering at Clari.
Sam Blond confirmed to TechCrunch that Monaco has successfully secured $35 million in funding, comprising a $10 million seed round and a $25 million Series A round. Both investment rounds were led by Founders Fund, with Human Capital also participating. Prior to its public beta launch on Wednesday, the startup had been discreetly refining its AI sales platform through an exclusive private beta program.
The well-connected Blond brothers, with Sam having previously served as head of sales at Brex, also attracted support from a distinguished group of angel investors. These prominent backers include Stripe founders Patrick and John Collison, Y Combinator chief Garry Tan, and Greenoaks Capital founder Neil Mehta.
What drew such an esteemed roster of investors to Monaco? The company distinguishes itself in the highly competitive AI sales technology landscape with a unique approach. Beyond offering an AI-native alternative to traditional SaaS-era solutions, Monaco integrates experienced human sales professionals into the AI loop, where they monitor and guide the AI's operations, ensuring optimal performance.
Monaco aims to serve nascent seed and Series A-level startups with a comprehensive product suite. This includes an AI-native customer relationship management (CRM) system and a proprietary database, similar to Zoominfo, designed for identifying potential prospects. Its AI agents are capable of generating and executing email outreach campaigns and drafting follow-up communications, all under the watchful eye of human experts. The platform also incorporates additional functionalities, such as a meeting notetaker.
The core purpose of Monaco's product is to automate a significant portion of routine sales tasks. Blond elaborates, "We can replace full workflows with agents." He provides an example: Monaco constructs a prospect database, pinpoints specific individuals within a target company for pitching, and determines the optimal engagement sequence. "We orchestrate and execute that sequence. We schedule a meeting," Blond explains.
The integrated human salespeople play a crucial role in preventing AI "hallucinations" and in training the AI to effectively sell the product. Importantly, all actual customer meetings are conducted by human representatives, not digital avatars.
This approach positions Monaco as a distinctive AI sales startup, one that explicitly avoids the narrative of human replacement. Instead, it offers experienced sales professionals to early-stage companies that might not yet have the resources to hire such talent directly.
"It’s this combination of the technology, but also the service," Blond emphasizes. He further clarifies, "Monaco does not have an agent pretending to be a sales rep trying to sell to the customer."
Monaco currently identifies its primary competitor as Hubspot, which, like Monaco, is positioned as a more cost-effective solution for young companies compared to market leader Salesforce. While Blond refrained from disclosing Monaco's specific pricing, he noted it would be a flat fee, offered at a discounted rate during the product's beta phase.
Blond is acutely aware of operating within an intensely crowded market. He notes that Y Combinator alone has nurtured hundreds of sales startups in recent years, spanning from AI CRMs to highly specialized AI tools. This competitive landscape also includes companies like Attio, Clay, and Conversion, alongside a growing segment of AI SDR (sales-development representative) tools, which are agentic startups designed for human replacement, such as 11x, Artisan, and 1mind.
Furthermore, established industry players like Salesforce, Hubspot, Zoho, and Zoominfo are actively developing and integrating their own AI and agentic solutions.
Blond highlights that the current market leaders were founded in a different technological era, and presently, no emerging startup has yet demonstrated sufficient dominance to be declared a definitive winner.
"There definitely is not the ‘Cursor for sales’," he remarks, referencing the well-known AI coding tool. "But there will be."
Clearly, Blond envisions Monaco as that future leader. "In the broad category of sales technology, there’s a market leader right now. That market leader is Salesforce," Blond states. "We are in the early innings of the next platform shift that will lead to a new market leader."
Given the multitude of opportunities available after his departure from Founders Fund, one might question why he chose to contend in such an intensely competitive sector.
Blond, speaking candidly, explains that his decision stems from his lifelong career in sales. "As a non-technical founder," he articulates, "there’s really only one type of technology company that I’m qualified to be the founder of: a sales technology company."
It's evident that Blond is thoroughly enjoying this endeavor. The company, which employs approximately 40 individuals, operates from an office populated by fellow career salespeople. Its walls are adorned with motivational posters reminiscent of WWII-era propaganda, bearing slogans such as "Save Startups" and "Build the future with Monaco." A distinctive feature is an office gong, rung ceremoniously each time the AI successfully secures a meeting with a prospect.
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