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.
