Within 28 hours of opening its seed round, Aurasell raised $30 million to fund what it calls the first “AI-native” customer relationship management platform. The San Francisco startup is positioning itself against Salesforce and other incumbents that dominate the $70 billion CRM market. Its goal: replace the patchwork of tools that have grown up around legacy platforms with a single system built from the ground up around AI.
A Clean-Sheet Approach to CRM
Aurasell was founded in 2023 by Jason Eubanks, a former sales executive at Cisco Meraki and Twilio, and Srinivas Bandi, who previously worked at VMware, Nutanix, and Harness. The pair argue that traditional CRM software has forced sales leaders to stitch together dozens of products to make up for shortcomings in the core platforms. “The tool bloat is not only costly but a productivity killer for sales teams,” Eubanks said.
Eubanks recalled that Harness alone used nearly a dozen sales support tools, with annual subscription costs running into the millions. This shaped Aurasell’s design: one system that integrates prospecting, forecasting, account research, and analytics while using AI agents to automate manual work. “There’s an opportunity to use AI to inject intelligence in an automated way into these processes that were formally manual,” he said.
The startup’s investors argue that beginning from scratch gives Aurasell an advantage over incumbents layering AI on top of older code bases. “While established players are retrofitting AI into decades-old architectures, these builders are starting fresh with a clean sheet approach,” said Lak Ananth, CEO of Next47, which led the seed round, along with investments from Menlo Ventures and Unusual Ventures
AI Native vs Salesforce’s “AI Migrant”
Salesforce remains the market leader, reporting $34.9 billion in revenue in its 2024 fiscal year, with CRM products accounting for roughly one-quarter of its business. The company has aggressively integrated generative AI features under the “Einstein GPT” brand and introduced usage-based pricing for AI capabilities. For large customers already embedded in Salesforce’s ecosystem, the breadth of integrations and the weight of existing data stores provide a strong incentive to stay.
But that breadth is also where critics see weakness. As Eubanks put it in Aurasell’s launch announcement, “Today’s CROs have been turned into CIOs, forced to wrangle with software that is anything but modern. Legacy systems of record are unwieldy, expensive, and require ecosystems of fragmented tools to be built on top of CRMs”.
Aurasell is betting that a single AI-native platform can reduce this sprawl. The company claims its system can replace more than a dozen disjointed sales products by unifying contact signals, forecasting, conversation intelligence, outreach, and quoting in one environment. By contrast, Salesforce relies on a marketplace of add-ons and third-party integrations to extend its core CRM.
Whether starting fresh will outweigh the incumbents’ scale remains uncertain. Salesforce has more than 150,000 customers worldwide and remains deeply embedded across industries. At the same time, newer entrants are proving there is investor appetite for alternatives. Boston-based Creatio raised $200 million at a $1.2 billion valuation last year, and Seattle-based Clarify announced a $15 million Series A in June.
The Stakes for Aurasell
With roughly 40 engineers, half focused on AI, and a product built for what it calls the “agentic era” of software, Aurasell is aiming to prove that sales teams are ready to shift away from decades-old frameworks. Its business model is straightforward: annual subscription fees charged per user.
Bandi said the large round was necessary to cover the infrastructure and hiring costs required to build a new CRM from scratch. The oversubscribed round, initially reaching $40 million before being scaled back, suggests investors see potential for disruption despite the risks.
Aurasell’s founders are clear about what they want to overturn. As Eubanks wrote in a post announcing the launch, “We have allowed our CRO’s to become CIO’s. I’ve lived it as a customer for 20 years and am dedicated to redefining what ‘good’ looks like for GTM products”. For companies frustrated with software sprawl and escalating subscription costs, Aurasell’s promise of an integrated, AI-driven system may be compelling.
