Meet the Leaders of the Agentic CRM Revolution at SaaStr AI Annual 2026, May 12-14 in SF Bay!

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