Monaco raises a Series B from Benchmark and Founders Fund as the AI-native CRM blows past early revenue targets

Speaker 1: Take care. Up next.

Speaker 2: Before our next guest. What do want here? We actually are are running behind. So we're gonna bring in the legend, the living legend, Sam Blond.

Speaker 1: Let's bring him in from Monaco. Sam, company's Monaco calling in from San Francisco, I assume. But get that cash register

Speaker 2: out a CRM. No. Don't count guys.

Speaker 5: Yeah. Great seeing you.

Speaker 1: Great seeing you. Thank you

Speaker 5: so much for having me.

Speaker 10: Of course.

Speaker 5: Round two.

Speaker 1: Round two.

Speaker 5: Oh. What

Speaker 4: Do you

Speaker 2: wait by by the way, do you leave

Speaker 5: Did did did you guys wanna hear the gong?

Speaker 1: Yes. You

Speaker 5: wanna hear the gong?

Speaker 1: You have a gong? Okay. Here. Show us the gong. You have a gong? Hang on. Let's see if we can bigger gong than us.

Speaker 7: You guys

Speaker 5: seen the gong? Oh. Yes.

Speaker 1: This is

Speaker 2: Hey, team.

Speaker 1: Let's hit the gong.

Speaker 2: Congrats, everyone. Okay. I have a question for you. Do you leave up the whiteboard behind you to just kind of torture and mess with your competitors? So they're

Speaker 1: like screenshotting it and trying to like

Speaker 2: you just

Speaker 5: It's it's mostly art point. It's kind of funny. It's like it is a cool it is a cool wall because it goes like all the way around.

Speaker 1: Oh, yeah.

Speaker 5: It's big. Like, whiteboard wall. There is something up here that still has dates from last October.

Speaker 1: Okay.

Speaker 5: So I don't know that it's like current currently functional, but It's seen some more. We use

Speaker 7: it every once in while.

Speaker 1: It's seen some more. But, yes, kick us off with the news. What happened?

Speaker 5: Let's see. Well, thank you for having me on. Round two. Great seeing you both. Always. And we were we're so fortunate. We launched in February. Things are going really well. Jack Altman was an investor through Alt Capital, and so he receives the monthly updates. We've known each other for a long time now. And recently, you know, the business is is performing, I think, better than we would have anticipated last time we caught up, which was mid February. And Jack reached out and said, We're interested in doing something with you and in this space. And we caught up, and I think this is just the dream round for us. We did Founders Fund in the series a. That's a firm that John, you and I have a lot of history with.

Speaker 1: Couldn't

Speaker 5: have dreamt a better round for the series a, and then we're we're repeating it with the b. I think both with Benchmark leading, Founders Fund tripling down, Jack joining the board. It's awesome. So I

Speaker 1: I thought this was an Ev Randall special. I thought you were just like, I got to make F some money, my former colleague. But interesting that it's Jack Altman. Makes sense though. I mean, Lattice, a lot of experience like adjacent to this space, a lot of career lineage there. But take us through the product. How has the company evolved? What's traction like?

Speaker 5: Let's see. Launched in February. We entered February pre revenue. We had some design customers. It's tough to do this thing where you like predict how the first few months are going to go because you have no data history. On February 10, literally no one knew who Monaco was because we didn't have LinkedIns that were up. We didn't have a website that was up. We went from sort of like this deliberate stealth mode with design customers where there were a small handful of people that we were partnering with to build the product, to trying to make as big of a slash as we possibly could. And I think, like, you know, we sit here three months later in May, and we sort of blew past all of the sort of business performance expectations that we had in that period of time, measured by, like, you know, number of customers, revenue, customer sentiment, which is is maybe the most critical of those things. But, you know, just sort of couldn't have hoped for a better start to the business.

Speaker 1: In go to market, in sales, I imagine that there's a ton of processes that you just want to make reliable, more efficient, all of that. And I'm sure you're executing on that. But I'm interested, has anything stuck out to you that's sort of like the Studio Ghibli moment for this sector? Like, you know, image generators came out. Was like, yeah, can make a picture of a horse or a cat. But then like there was this thing where it was like, no one really knew that that was coming and then all of a sudden it was like this delightful new experience. Now you can like turn yourself into a cartoon if you want. Is there some like net new process or like your customers when you see them use the product you're like, oh, they're doing things a little bit differently. It's not just sending the email. It's not just the CRM management. It's not just all the other pieces. It's something that like, oh, this is uniquely enabled by AI.

Speaker 5: Yeah. I think there there are three things that come to mind that differentiate Monaco Yeah. Relative to anything else in the market. The third one is sort of the like

Speaker 2: It will shock us.

Speaker 1: It will shock us.

Speaker 2: The third one will shock us. This is good.

Speaker 5: It'll be the like Ghibli moment. Perfect. Let's do it. It it that to use Coogan's language. Yeah. The first two and I I won't go like super deep on these things. I'll I'll time box this to thirty or forty seconds. Yeah. The first two, we're we're an all in one. So we replace traditional or legacy CRM. Yep. These are your Salesforce's, HubSpot's, Adios. Yep. And we also replace all the disparate tools that integrate to those traditional CRMs over APIs. Yeah. And so we're an end to end platform or an all in one, maybe like the rippling version for go to market. So that's like the first category. That in and of itself isn't like the Ghibli moment. Mhmm. The second category is that we are AI native. You know, just sort of definitionally, we started, let's call it post chat GBT. The way that we think about being AI native, agents are the first line of defense. The things that, historically speaking, sales users like me, people in rev ops, SDRs, those workflows that we were doing with manual or human labor, we now have agents doing. And you should think about the user of Monaco as having this front row seat to all of the work that the agents are doing on their behalf. So that's number two. The third thing, and this one is a little bit contrarian, like Peter ism, and it is maybe the thing that I think we have a unique competitive advantage in. It's very difficult for any of our competitors to get right or even be able to do. And that is, there's this thing right now that's like the forward deployed a the forward deployed engineer, the FDE, is like the most valuable asset in deploying AI successfully across enterprise. And you see these OpenAI and Anthropic investing billions of dollars in these almost Accenture style consultant type companies. Well, we sort of invented this concept of the forward deployed AE. Okay. And every customer that we have is paired with a startup sales expert, somebody that has deep experience doing startup go to market. You should think about a lot of our customers. These are seed and series a startups that, one, don't have a lot of experience in go to market, a lot of technical founders and technical early teams, and so this is a very complementary skill set. But two, just definitionally, they have no experience working with the platform and agents that we have in Monaco. And so that buffer, that layer between the customer and the technology itself, that is our forward deployed AE, that is some of, like, the secret sauce for us in terms of making Monaco work better than any of the competitors that you try and just like deploy these agents and the technology in the wild without anybody making sure that you're successful.

Speaker 1: All in one compound startup rippling philosophy. I imagine that eventually you'll get to a point if you're not there already where some big company will come to you and say, ah, but like we're not ripping out this thing and you have to build a connector. Do you have a strategy for that or is that a moment where someone comes to you and says like, yeah. We have this weird niche, like, you know, b to b SaaS product for just our industry that we need to keep around. Is your philosophy agents will connect or you'll just go and rebuild that?

Speaker 5: We have an open API.

Speaker 1: Okay.

Speaker 5: Read and write API. The ability to do clawed MCP. Sure. And so we will integrate and do integrate with third parties. Okay. Examples would be like, have a granola integration. We have a Slack integration. We have a G And Suite many more. We don't today have native sort of traditional CRM integrations. And if you think about the category of sales technology, the market leader today is Salesforce. And Salesforce is a system of record. And then you think about other system of record companies, there are some large players that exist in the space. Mhmm. The other type of sales technology company is a point solution. Mhmm. These are tools that integrate into the system of record. And if you think about the outcomes, the terminal values, the market caps of these point solution type companies, they are less interesting to us to be like I think this word is politically correct now. We don't want to be the tallest midget. We want to be the market leader in sales technology. And in order to be able to do that, we have to disrupt the system of record companies today like the sales forces of the world. But the space will become much larger than it is today because we are not just taking the IT budget away from companies that today are spending on platforms like Salesforce. We are taking the labor budget. And so Monaco is far more expensive than the traditional competitors that exist in the space. And it's because we're not a replacement for the traditional CRMs, we we're not just a replacement for the traditional CRMs. We were a replacement for you hiring a bunch of people to do this for you Sure. In a deeply integrated platform.

Speaker 1: Okay. Where can people go get go to get started? You're in public beta? Full print?

Speaker 5: We're in public beta. Okay. GA in the next couple months.

Speaker 7: Okay.

Speaker 5: I would love to come back.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 5: So that that would be fun. We'll Gong

Speaker 2: Who's the best sales rep at Monaco?

Speaker 5: Who sells the most? Guys, I can't do that.

Speaker 1: You can't pick a favorite.

Speaker 2: You can't objective? Isn't

Speaker 1: There is an objective truth. Can't leak it right now. They'll get poached. Well, look them out to Hawaii.

Speaker 5: Yeah. Come on.

Speaker 2: Comes to him with the dolphins. Yeah. He'll do his little

Speaker 5: We we don't have a worst sales rep, but I I should say that name if we did. Oh, okay. Just if we don't want

Speaker 6: to be Yes.

Speaker 1: Yes. Yes.

Speaker 5: No. This is a little this is maybe like philosophically against what I would recommend for folks. We are in the fortunate position that we are in just inundated to an in demand. Mhmm. We're still on team goals. The whole team is like really working with one another just to try and manage the demand that we have. And so we actually don't even yet, to your point on like, isn't it objective? Yeah. Maybe we don't have a leaderboard. Yeah. It's just ball winning. So what you're saying

Speaker 1: is Mark Benioff has to buy

Speaker 2: a book. Got it. Has the the billboard campaign gone?

Speaker 5: It's great. You know, I think these things, we do we do the launch videos and a bunch of the, you know, launch posts and those sort of things that hopefully get amplified. We do the billboards. Our billboard strategy right now, we're just doing like a dollar symbol and then monaco.com.

Speaker 1: It's a

Speaker 5: little provocative. We have these big poker tournaments and a whole bunch more.

Speaker 2: Who won poker tournament?

Speaker 5: It was the CEO of Syndoso. His name's Chris Rudegarp.

Speaker 2: Nice. Nice. Another sales guy.

Speaker 5: So all of these things, it's sort of like one plus one plus one plus one. It it like equals 10. Like the billboards compound the a poker tournament that compounds the post, that compounds the truck that are driving. Today, we have a plane

Speaker 1: A

Speaker 5: plane? With a banner

Speaker 1: A banner.

Speaker 5: Trailing Monaco behind it. Love down the Bay Area.

Speaker 1: This is blimp adjacent. We're huge fans of this. Anyway, thank you so much Congratulations for coming on the

Speaker 2: on the and always

Speaker 1: Counting down the days till GI. Talk to you soon. Have a great day.

Speaker 5: You guys are the best.

Speaker 7: Thank you

Speaker 1: for having

Speaker 5: me on.

Speaker 2: Thanks, Sam. Goodbye. Yep.

Speaker 1: Up next, have Kevin Hartz from A Star. He's the cofounder and general partner.