For years, Salesforce has been the dominant tool for sales teams, serving as the central system for tracking deals and customer data. Now, New York-based startup Actively AI is betting its AI agents can do much of that work autonomously — and it’s coming for Salesforce’s crown.

Instead of relying on human reps to manually track and prioritize hundreds of accounts, Actively creates a custom AI agent for each one. Built on top of existing large language models and trained on a company’s historical data, the agent can do research for its account, draft outreach, build presentations and flag what reps have missed to suggest next steps.

“If you had unlimited money, you’d hire a million sales reps and put one on each company,” says Actively cofounder and CEO Mihir Garimella, 26. “Now with agents, you can.”

Early customers say Actively’s strategy is already changing how their sales teams operate. Fintech company Ramp (valued at $32 billion) attributes tens of millions of dollars in new revenue over the past year to Actively’s system, with AI-driven deals closing about 23% more often than traditional ones. Security startup Verkada said the platform doubled sales productivity, with reps booking roughly 25 meetings per month, a volume that would otherwise require a much larger team.

Actively announced Tuesday it has now raised a $45 million Series B funding round co-led by TCV and First Harmonic at a $250 million valuation. The round comes just over a year after the company raised a $17.5 million Series A led by Bain Capital Ventures, bringing its total funding to $67.5 million.

Artificial intelligence is beginning to reshape how software is built and used. New, more advanced models have made it clearer that chunks of work, from generating code to collecting sales leads, can be fully automated. That has sent enterprise software stocks spiraling downward. For example, design platform Figma’s stock has collapsed over 50% from last year, facing pressure from tools such as Anthropic’s new Claude Design. Both Intuit and ServiceNow shares are down roughly 40% this year.

Salesforce is down about 30% in 2026 but it’s betting it can stay competitive with its own AI suite, Agentforce. Agentforce has already generated roughly $800 million in annual recurring revenue, according to Salesforce's February earnings. Agentforce is already in use at over 23,000 companies and Salesforce is also reportedly expected to launch a new product, Agent Albert, later this year to automatically analyze user data and take actions on its own. But some customers have said Salesforce’s AI produces wrong answers and struggles to pull in data from outside its system, according to The Information. Others reported the technology struggles with more nuanced questions, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company disputed those characterizations. CEO Benioff has dismissed a looming “SaaS apocalypse,” arguing AI will strengthen the company.

Actively’s founders argue Salesforce is experiencing a “horseless carriage” problem: a reference to 19th-century carriages that swapped horses for newly developed engines but kept the same basic design. In their view, Salesforce is similarly tacking AI onto software designed for a world where humans manually input and update data. It’s the classic innovator’s dilemma, says Actively cofounder Anshul Gupta, 27.

“Salesforce's data model was built in 1999—literally the year Mihir and I were born,” says Gupta. “It was actually the perfect data model for a world in which everything was done by humans…but the rug was pulled out from under them.”

Salesforce says that its platform is a unified system where AI and data work together rather than a legacy stack with AI bolted on.

Actively investor Ali Rowghani, founder of First Harmonic, former COO of Twitter and an early investor in companies like DoorDash and Coinbase, believes Actively has an advantage because it’s building for a world dominated by agents. “I'm sure Salesforce will respond to it, but that kind of disruption of fundamental assumptions or technology creates opportunity for startups,” he says.

Companies don’t need to rip out Salesforce to use Actively — instead, its tech integrates directly into all the tools teams already use, including email, Slack and, yes, Salesforce. Garimella argues that over time, value will move away from where data is kept and toward the systems actually using it. Instead of acting as a central source of information, software like Salesforce may become one of many inputs feeding into a broader layer of intelligence.

“There's a window opened with this new cataclysmic shift in technology,” says Gupta. “Over time, if you start relying upon [Salesforce] less as your source of truth, you can start replacing it.”

This story has been updated with comment from Salesforce.

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