$250 Million Startup Challenges Salesforce With Autonomous AI Agents
Actively AI is a New York-based startup making serious waves in the world of enterprise sales, and for good reason. With just a few years under its belt, the company showed up with a pretty straightforward pitch: put autonomous artificial intelligence agents to work doing what currently requires entire sales teams. The target? None other than Salesforce, the giant that has dominated the CRM market for decades.
The core idea is simple but powerful: instead of relying on human reps to track and prioritize hundreds of accounts manually, Actively creates a dedicated AI agent for each account. Built on advanced language models and trained on the client company’s own historical data, the agent researches account information, writes personalized outreach, builds presentations, identifies what human reps missed, and even suggests next steps — all autonomously.
As Mihir Garimella, 26-year-old co-founder and CEO of Actively, put it: if you had unlimited money, you would hire a million salespeople and assign one to every company. Now, with AI agents, that is actually possible.
And the numbers the company is already putting up are hard to ignore. 👀
With a recent $45 million Series B round co-led by TCV and First Harmonic, and a market valuation of $250 million, Actively AI officially enters the conversation about the future of enterprise software. The round comes just over a year after a $17.5 million Series A led by Bain Capital Ventures, bringing the company’s total funding to $67.5 million.
What Actively AI Actually Does Differently
The pitch behind Actively AI goes well beyond just another sales automation tool. The company is not delivering an assistant that simply suggests actions or organizes tasks into a pretty list. What it built is, in practice, an intelligent layer that acts autonomously within the sales process, making decisions, running research, and generating personalized content without a human needing to step in at every stage. This completely changes how a sales team operates day to day, especially at companies dealing with a high volume of accounts that need to scale without necessarily hiring more people.
Each account gets a dedicated artificial intelligence agent that works almost like a personal analyst for that business relationship. The agent monitors buying intent signals, tracks market changes and shifts in the target company’s profile, adapts outreach messaging as context evolves, and even decides the right moment to loop in a human rep. It is no exaggeration to say the system works like an SDR — that pre-sales professional responsible for qualifying leads — except it operates at scale and never takes a break. For companies that need to cover hundreds or even thousands of accounts simultaneously, this represents a very real shift in operations.
What makes all of this even more interesting is that Actively is not just automating repetitive tasks. The platform uses advanced language and reasoning models to build contextualized sales arguments, identify the right decision-makers within an organization, and even anticipate common objections based on interaction history. This ability to apply reasoning within a commercial context is exactly what sets autonomous agents apart from any other automation tool that already existed on the market.
Concrete Results That Turn Heads
Clients who have already adopted the Actively AI platform are reporting some pretty impressive results, and that helps explain why the company managed to attract so much investment in such a short time.
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Ramp, the fintech valued at $32 billion, attributes tens of millions of dollars in new revenue over the past year to Actively’s system. On top of that, deals driven by the platform’s AI showed a close rate roughly 23% higher compared to traditional approaches. That is a significant number when we are talking about B2B sales at scale.
Another case that illustrates the impact well is Verkada, a security startup. According to the company, Actively’s platform doubled sales rep productivity, with each salesperson booking around 25 meetings per month — a volume that would normally require a much larger team to achieve.
These are not just pretty metrics in an investor deck. They show that the autonomous agent approach applied to sales already works in practice and is generating measurable impact at companies across different industries.
The Founders Behind Actively AI
Actively AI was founded in 2022 by Mihir Garimella and Anshul Gupta, who met at Stanford. Both are under 30, and the duo brings a generational perspective to the problem they are trying to solve.
Gupta, 27, likes to point out that the Salesforce data model was built in 1999 — literally the year he and Garimella were born. In the founders’ view, that model was perfect for a world where everything was done by humans, but artificial intelligence pulled the rug right out from under that premise.
The analogy they use is pretty telling: Salesforce is experiencing a horseless carriage problem. The reference is to 19th-century carriages that swapped horses for newly invented engines but kept basically the same design. In Actively’s view, Salesforce is doing something similar by layering AI on top of software that was designed for a world where humans manually entered and updated data.
It is the classic innovator’s dilemma, as Gupta puts it: the dominant company struggles to embrace a change that fundamentally challenges the model that made it successful in the first place.
Why Salesforce Is at the Center of This Fight
Salesforce did not get to where it is today by accident. For decades, the company built a robust CRM ecosystem that became practically indispensable for sales teams around the world. Integrations, partners, certifications, user communities — all of this creates a massive barrier to entry for any competitor looking to challenge that space.
But what Actively AI is doing is not exactly a head-on competition in the traditional CRM arena. The startup is attacking from a different angle: it questions whether the current model, where humans manage tools, even makes sense anymore when AI agents can manage the processes themselves.
Salesforce, for its part, is not standing still. The company has been investing heavily in its own AI suite, Agentforce. According to financial results released in February, Agentforce has already generated more than $9 billion in sales for customers and brings in roughly $800 million in annual recurring revenue. The tool is in use at more than 23,000 companies, and Salesforce is also reportedly planning the launch of a new product called Agent Albert, capable of automatically analyzing data and taking actions on its own.
However, some customers have reported difficulties with Salesforce’s AI. According to reporting from outlets like The Information and The Wall Street Journal, the system has produced incorrect responses in certain scenarios and struggles to pull data from outside the Salesforce ecosystem. More complex and nuanced queries also present challenges for the tool, according to those reports. Salesforce pushed back on those characterizations and stated that its platform is a unified system where AI and data work together, rather than a legacy stack with AI bolted on top.
CEO Marc Benioff has rejected the idea of an imminent SaaS apocalypse, arguing that artificial intelligence will strengthen the company rather than weaken it.
Still, there is a structural difference between adding AI layers on top of an existing system and building something where AI is the core from day one. Actively AI was built from scratch for a world where autonomous agents are the main characters in the process, not just sidekicks. That gives the startup an architectural advantage that is hard to replicate by simply tacking new features onto a platform with more than 25 years of history.
The Bigger Picture: AI Shaking Up the Software Market
The Actively AI story does not exist in a vacuum. Artificial intelligence is starting to reshape how software is built and used across virtually every category. More advanced models have made it clear that entire blocks of work — from code generation to sales lead collection — can be fully automated.
This shift has been putting pressure on the stock prices of established enterprise software companies. Design platform Figma, for example, saw its shares drop more than 50% over the past year, pressured by tools like Anthropic’s Claude Design. Both Intuit and ServiceNow saw their shares fall roughly 40% in 2025. And Salesforce itself is down about 30% in 2026.
This landscape reinforces the perception that companies unable to adapt quickly to the autonomous agent paradigm could lose relevance. And for startups like Actively, which were born with this native architecture, the current moment represents a massive window of opportunity.
Integration Instead of Replacement — For Now
One important detail about Actively AI’s approach is that it does not require companies to ditch Salesforce in order to start using the platform. The startup’s technology integrates directly with the tools teams already use day to day, including email, Slack, and yes, Salesforce itself.
This strategy is smart because it reduces adoption friction. Nobody needs to go through a painful migration or convince the entire organization to abandon a tool that is already deeply embedded in their processes. Actively simply plugs into what already exists and starts operating as an additional layer of intelligence.
But Garimella makes a strategically relevant observation: over time, value will shift from where data is stored to the systems that actually use that data. Instead of functioning as the central source of truth, software like Salesforce could end up becoming just one of many sources feeding a broader intelligence layer.
Gupta adds to that vision by saying there is an open window with this cataclysmic technology shift. As companies start relying less on Salesforce as their source of truth, they may eventually begin to replace it altogether.
What Investors Are Seeing
Ali Rowghani, founder of First Harmonic and one of the investors in the round, brings an interesting perspective. Rowghani was COO of Twitter and an early investor in companies like DoorDash and Coinbase, which lends weight to his assessment. In his view, Actively has an advantage because it is building for a world dominated by agents. He acknowledges that Salesforce will respond, but says this kind of disruption to a technology’s fundamental premises creates opportunity for startups.
The $45 million raise is not just financial validation. It represents the confidence of experienced investors that this model — where AI agents operate independently within complex sales processes — has real potential to scale. A $250 million valuation for a company this young signals that the market is taking this bet very seriously.
What This Move Reveals About the Future of Enterprise Software
The trajectory of Actively AI is not an isolated case. It is part of a larger wave of startups redesigning entire categories of enterprise software around the logic of autonomous agents. What used to be done by people using tools is progressively being done by artificial intelligence systems that use the tools on their own, while humans supervise outcomes instead of executing tasks. This role reversal has enormous implications for how companies hire, train, and organize their teams, especially in sales, marketing, and customer service.
For companies that need to decide how to position their tech stack in the coming years, what Actively AI represents is an opportunity to rethink long-held assumptions. It is not just about swapping one tool for another, but about questioning whether the process itself still needs to work the same way. Software innovation has always moved in waves, and each wave brought new market leaders along with it.
When you look at the use cases Actively has already demonstrated — where sales teams managed to significantly increase account coverage without expanding headcount — it gets easier to understand why excitement around the company is running so high. The question hanging in the air is whether we are at the beginning of another one of those big transitions, and if we are, who is going to be best positioned to ride what comes next. 🚀
