The CRM market is being rebuilt from scratch. Not incrementally. Not with AI features bolted onto 20-year-old architecture. From scratch.
And you can meet almost every company doing it at SaaStr AI Annual 2026, May 12-14 in SF Bay.
I wrote recently about how we went from barely using Salesforce to making it the center of our entire GTM operation once we deployed 20+ AI agents. The thesis: Follow the Agents. Pick the CRM where your agents do the most work.
In almost every company on both sides of that thesis, the incumbents going agentic and the startups built AI-native from day one, will be at SaaStr AI Annual this year. Here’s who to find and what to ask them.
The Incumbent Going Agentic
Salesforce / Agentforce
Salesforce is no longer just a CRM company. It’s becoming an AI agent platform that happens to have a CRM.
At SaaStr, we have 20+ AI agents plugged into Salesforce. A year ago it was shelfware. Today it’s our operating system. Why? Because Salesforce executed a strategy no one else could: they acquired the best agents on the market (Qualified, Momentum) and built Agentforce with 2,000 people. The result is a platform where your agents share context, share data, and don’t step on each other.
Our numbers on Agentforce: 72% open rate on win-back emails to 1,000 ghosted leads. 10%+ response rate on contacts considered dead. Those results only happen because Agentforce has full CRM history on every contact. That’s what native integration actually means.
Salesforce is a Diamond+ partner of SaaStr AI Annual. Come see what Agentforce looks like in production, not in a demo.
The Next-Gen Challengers
These are the startups betting that CRM needs to be rebuilt from the ground up for an AI-native world. All four are well-funded, well-built, and will be at SaaStr AI Annual.
Aurasell (Platinum Sponsor)
Aurasell is a Platinum Sponsor of SaaStr AI Annual and one of the most ambitious next-gen CRM plays in market. Founded by Jason Eubanks (ex-CRO at Harness) and Srinivas Bandi (ex-SVP Engineering at Harness), with deep roots at VMware, Nutanix, Meraki, and Twilio. $30M seed from N47, Menlo Ventures, and Unusual Ventures that closed in 28 hours.
The pitch that resonates with CROs: your average sales org runs Salesforce plus Outreach plus Gong plus ZoomInfo plus Apollo plus Clari plus a CPQ tool plus six other things. Aurasell replaces 15+ of those tools with one AI-native platform. ICP targeting, buyer personas, account research, conversation intelligence, personalized outreach, forecasting, agentic workflows, CPQ, all in one system. They claim 50% reduction in GTM tech stack costs.
What makes Aurasell strategically smart: they also ship a GTM OS layer that runs on top of your existing Salesforce or HubSpot. You don’t have to rip and replace. You add the intelligence layer, consolidate tools gradually, and migrate to full Aurasell when you’re ready. For any CRO who’s been burned by a migration project, that’s a very different conversation than “switch everything on day one.”
Come meet the Aurasell team in the Platinum area at SaaStr AI Annual.
Monaco (Diamond Sponsor)
Sam Blond (ex-CRO of Brex, ex-Founders Fund partner) and his brother Brian launched Monaco in February 2026 with $35M from Founders Fund. Angels include Patrick and John Collison (Stripe), Garry Tan (YC), and Neil Mehta (Greenoaks). The founding team also brings the former CPO of Apollo/Qualtrics and former SVP Engineering of Clari.
Monaco’s model is different from every other next-gen CRM: it combines AI-native software with experienced human salespeople who supervise the AI’s work. CRM + prospect database + AI agents that run outbound, all with real sales professionals in the loop reviewing output, training the AI on your product, and taking the actual customer meetings. No avatars. For seed and Series A companies that can’t yet hire a seasoned VP of Sales, Monaco is essentially renting one.
We use Monaco ourselves at SaaStr. It was booking meetings with some of the biggest AI companies from Day 1 after go-live. The AI + human model produces results that pure AI SDRs haven’t matched.
Sam Blond is one of the best GTM minds in B2B. Come find him and the Monaco team at SaaStr AI Annual.
Reevo
The best-funded next-gen CRM play: $80M seed co-led by Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins. Founded by David Zhu (ex-Head of Engineering at DoorDash, where he scaled teams from $700M valuation to $75B market cap at IPO) along with three other DoorDash, Square, and Stripe operators. 90 employees already, engineering-heavy.
Reevo is going after the full GTM stack: marketing, sales, and customer success in one AI-native platform. Similar to Aurasell’s ambition of replacing fragmented tool sprawl, but broader in scope and with a different DNA. Where most CRM startups are founded by sales leaders, Reevo is founded by platform engineers who scaled one of the most complex marketplaces on Earth. That engineering-first approach shows in the architecture: Reevo generates its own first-party activity data from emails, meetings, and calendars rather than relying on integrations.
Come find the Reevo team at SaaStr AI Annual and see what an engineering-led CRM platform looks like.
Lightfield
Keith Peiris built Tome to 25 million users, shut it down, and started over with a CRM built around “complete customer memory.” You never enter data. Connect your inbox, five minutes later you have a populated pipeline. Schema-less from day one, so your data model evolves as your business does. 2,500 companies in three months. 100+ YC startups. $81M raised at a $300M valuation. Hundreds already migrating from HubSpot.
If you poll current YC startups, the vast majority are using neither Salesforce nor HubSpot. Lightfield is eating that cohort. Best for founder-led sales through ~50 employees. If you’re doing founder-led sales and still manually updating HubSpot after every call, go talk to the Lightfield team at SaaStr AI Annual.
The AI SDRs Reshaping Outbound
A CRM is only as valuable as the agents running on it. And the AI SDR category is where the rubber meets the road. The companies building AI sales agents are effectively deciding which CRM platforms win, because their integrations determine where the data flows. Several of the most important AI SDR companies are at SaaStr AI Annual this year.
Artisan (Diamond Sponsor)
Artisan is a Diamond Sponsor of SaaStr AI Annual, and for good reason: they closed $250K+ on site at SaaStr last year and $1M+ in the months after. We’re their #1 performing customer. We run three separate Artisan instances across different outbound campaigns. Combined with Agentforce, we’ve sent 60,000+ personalized outbound emails with response rates around 6.7%, roughly double the industry average.
The key architectural insight we learned running Artisan alongside Agentforce: don’t give two agents the same list. Split by data source. Artisan handles prospects NOT in your CRM. It pulls LinkedIn activity, company news, and real-time signals to personalize outreach. Agentforce handles prospects already in Salesforce, where it has full relationship history. Match the agent to where the data lives.
Artisan is the best pure AI SDR we’ve used. Come see them in the Diamond area.
Monaco (Diamond Sponsor) is listed above in the Next-Gen Challengers, but it’s worth repeating here: Monaco is also an AI SDR, not just a CRM.
The AI + human model where experienced salespeople supervise the AI’s outbound and take the actual meetings is producing results we haven’t seen from any fully autonomous SDR tool. If you’re evaluating AI SDRs and haven’t looked at Monaco’s hybrid approach, find Sam Blond’s team.
Qualified (Super Gold Sponsor) is technically an inbound AI agent, not an outbound SDR, but it belongs in this conversation because it’s the other half of the equation.
We run Artisan and Agentforce for outbound, Qualified for inbound. Together they cover the full pipeline. Qualified powers our “digital Amelia” on saastr.com: 700K+ sessions, $1M+ closed, 71% of closed-won sponsorship deals from AI-qualified leads in one month.
The Agentic CRM Ecosystem (Also at SaaStr AI Annual)
The next-gen CRM players get the headlines, but some of the most important companies in the agentic CRM stack are the ones that plug into your CRM and make it smarter. Many of them are sponsors this year:
Momentum (Super Gold Sponsor) auto-transcribes every sales call and pushes structured data into your CRM.
Next steps, objections, competitor mentions, decision-maker signals. No rep touches CRM. Also acquired by Salesforce. If you want to understand what “zero-touch CRM updates” looks like in practice, find the Momentum team.
Vivun (Super Gold Sponsor) built what might be the most important AI agent in technical sales: an AI Sales Engineer called Ava.
CEO Matt Darrow built presales at Zuora through their IPO. When generative AI threatened to make Vivun’s original presales management product obsolete, he pivoted hard into building Ava. It’s now doing eight figures in ARR and tripling. Ava preps you before meetings, answers complex technical questions in real time during calls, maps solutions to buyer requirements, handles objections, and builds business cases. For companies with complex technical sales cycles who can’t hire enough sales engineers to cover demand, this is the AI agent that scales technical expertise without scaling headcount. Deep Salesforce integration.
Attention (Super Gold Sponsor) is another call intelligence platform that records calls, analyzes conversations, and auto-populates CRM fields.
We use both Attention and Momentum at SaaStr. Our reps literally never manually update CRM anymore. The AI handles it.
Glyphic (Gold Sponsor) is a next-gen conversation intelligence platform founded by ex-Google DeepMind and Apple researchers.
Think Gong competitor but built AI-native from scratch. Automates CRM updates, scores deals against MEDDIC/BANT/SPICED frameworks, and provides AI-driven coaching. If you’re evaluating conversation intelligence in 2026, Glyphic is worth 15 minutes.
People.ai (Super Gold Sponsor) has been doing revenue intelligence longer than most.
$198M raised, $1.1B valuation, and they just launched an MCP integration that connects AI agents like Claude and Copilot directly to complete revenue activity data. Red Hat reported 50%+ improvement in win rates using People.ai’s open architecture. If your problem is that your CRM data is incomplete because reps don’t log activity, People.ai solves that.
Relevance AI (Gold Sponsor) is a next-gen AI agent builder platform.
If you want to build custom AI agents that plug into your CRM workflow without writing code, come talk to them.
Pylon (Gold Sponsor) handles B2B customer support across channels.
As CRMs evolve to span the full customer lifecycle, post-sale intelligence is becoming just as important as pre-sale. Pylon is building that layer.
Vivun (Super Gold Sponsor) is building the pre-sales intelligence platform.
As deals get more technical and SE-led, the pre-sales motion is becoming a critical part of the CRM data layer. If your sales engineers are running the relationship on your biggest deals, Vivun captures that.
nue (Super Gold Sponsor) handles revenue management, billing, and CPQ.
The quote-to-cash flow is the last mile of CRM, and most companies are still doing it in spreadsheets. nue closes that gap.
PLAUD (Gold Sponsor) makes AI meeting recording hardware that captures call data and pushes it into your CRM workflow.
Physical device, not just software. If your team is in the field or taking meetings outside Zoom, PLAUD fills the gap that software-only call intelligence misses.
Larridin (Super Gold Sponsor) builds an analytics layer for enterprise AI usage.
Their product Scout tracks which AI tools your sales team is actually using, how well, and where adoption is stalling. I wrote about them recently. If you’ve deployed AI agents and need to know whether your team is actually using them, Larridin measures that.
Ampersand (Gold Sponsor) builds the integration infrastructure that connects AI agents and B2B products to CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot.
When you deploy an AI agent that needs to read from or write to your CRM, something has to handle the authentication, the data syncing, the rate limits, and the field mapping. Ampersand is that layer. As the number of agents plugging into CRMs explodes, the companies building the connective tissue between agents and systems of record become critical. Worth finding if you’re building AI products that need deep CRM integration.
Openprise (Silver Sponsor) does RevOps data orchestration.
The unsexy but critical plumbing that keeps your CRM data clean, deduplicated, and routable. Every AI agent you deploy is only as good as the data it reads. Openprise makes sure that data isn’t garbage.
Follow the Agents. We’ll Help You. At SaaStr AI Annual 2026.
A year ago, “which CRM should I use?” was a straightforward question with two answers: Salesforce or HubSpot.
Today, the answer is: Follow the Agents. Pick the platform where your AI agents do the most work. For large sales teams with proven CROs, that’s probably still Salesforce. For early-stage startups going AI-native from day one, it might be Aurasell, Monaco, Reevo, Lightfield, or Attio.
Every company making that decision, on both sides, will be at SaaStr AI Annual 2026. May 12-14, SF Bay. Come meet them.
Get your tickets at saastrannual.com.
