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Why $35M AI Sales Startups Still Can't Replace Your SDR Team

· 5 min read
MarketBetter Team
MarketBetter Team
Content Team, marketbetter.ai

Monaco just raised $35M. 11x raised $74M. Artisan raised $12M. Billions are flowing into AI sales tools with one implied promise: your human SDR team is about to become obsolete.

Except it's not.

And here's the thing — the smartest founders in the space know this. Sam Blond, Monaco's CEO, specifically designed his platform with human-in-the-loop guidance. He ran sales at Brex. He's seen what works. And he chose not to promise full automation.

So why does the "replace your SDRs" narrative persist? And why is it wrong?

The Automation Fallacy​

There's a persistent belief in tech that if you throw enough money and compute at a problem, you can automate it away. It works for some things — data entry, scheduling, report generation.

But sales isn't data entry.

What AI Can Automate​

  • ✅ Finding prospects in databases
  • ✅ Writing initial email drafts
  • ✅ Scheduling meetings
  • ✅ Logging CRM data
  • ✅ Researching companies
  • ✅ Prioritizing lead lists
  • ✅ Following up on sequences

What AI Can't Automate (Yet)​

  • ❌ Building trust with a stranger
  • ❌ Reading the room on a discovery call
  • ❌ Adapting a pitch in real-time based on subtle cues
  • ❌ Navigating office politics to reach the decision maker
  • ❌ Knowing when to push and when to pull back
  • ❌ Genuine empathy when a prospect shares a problem
  • ❌ Creative problem-solving for unique objections
  • ❌ Relationship-building over months of a sales cycle

The first list is grunt work. The second list is what actually closes deals.

The Results Speak​

11x.ai, the most well-funded "replace your SDR" company, has a ~3.5/5 rating on G2 after more than a year in market. Multiple reviewers cite generic-sounding outreach and lack of nuance.

Meanwhile, human-in-the-loop platforms like MarketBetter (4.97/5 on G2) consistently outperform on customer satisfaction. Why? Because they augment humans instead of replacing them.

The data is clear: AI that makes SDRs more productive beats AI that tries to replace them.

What $35M Buys You (and What It Doesn't)​

Monaco's $35M buys:

  • World-class engineering talent
  • An impressive AI-native CRM
  • A built-from-scratch prospect database
  • AI-powered email outbound with human oversight
  • A meeting notetaker

What it doesn't buy:

  • The ability to replace human judgment in complex sales
  • Magic that makes email-only outreach compete with multichannel
  • Website visitor identification (Monaco doesn't have it)
  • An AI chatbot for inbound leads (Monaco doesn't have it)
  • A smart dialer for phone outreach (Monaco doesn't have it)
  • Instant credibility (they're still in public beta)

Monaco is smart to embrace human-in-the-loop. But even their approach outsources the human element to Monaco's own experts — rather than empowering your team.

The Right Way to Think About AI + SDRs​

The question isn't "Can AI replace my SDRs?" The question is "Can AI make each SDR 3-5x more productive?"

The answer is yes. Here's what that looks like:

Without AI SDR Tools​

A typical SDR's day:

  • 30 min researching prospects manually
  • 45 min writing and personalizing emails
  • 20 min logging CRM data
  • 30 min figuring out who to call first
  • 15 min looking up prospect context before calls
  • = 2+ hours of admin before any real selling

With AI SDR Tools (MarketBetter)​

  • Daily Playbook: Opens to a prioritized task list — no figuring out what to do
  • Visitor identification: Warm leads surfaced automatically — no cold list building
  • AI email drafts: Personalized sequences ready to review and send — no starting from scratch
  • Pre-meeting intel: Auto-generated briefs — no manual research
  • Smart dialer: AI-powered scripts and call intelligence — more effective calls
  • AI chatbot: Inbound leads captured 24/7 — no leads slipping through

Time saved: 2+ hours per SDR per day. That's 2+ hours of additional selling time. Multiply by your team size. That's the ROI of AI — not replacement, but augmentation.

Why the "Replace" Companies Will Pivot​

Here's a prediction: within 18 months, most "AI SDR replacement" companies will pivot to "AI SDR augmentation." The market is telling them what works:

  1. Buyers prefer human interactions for complex B2B purchases
  2. Fully autonomous outreach produces diminishing returns as every company uses it
  3. Human-in-the-loop platforms have higher customer satisfaction (G2 ratings prove it)
  4. The total addressable market for "augment SDRs" is larger than "replace SDRs" — because every company with SDRs is a prospect, not just companies that want to cut headcount

Monaco already got the memo — they embedded human guidance from day one. The question is whether their feature set will catch up to platforms like MarketBetter that deliver the complete SDR stack.

The Bottom Line​

$35M doesn't replace human judgment, empathy, and relationship-building in sales. It never will.

What money CAN buy is better tools that make every SDR dramatically more effective. That's the right investment — in AI that empowers your team, not AI that replaces it.

MarketBetter gets this. Your SDRs keep their jobs. They just become superhuman at them.

Make Your SDRs Superhuman

MarketBetter doesn't replace your SDRs — it makes them 3-5x more productive. Visitor identification, daily playbook, smart dialer, AI chatbot. Book a demo and see the difference.