Morgan Chittum here. For decades, enterprise software giants like Salesforce have powered the workflows that keep the world’s biggest businesses running. Rox cofounder Ishan Mukherjee is betting on a future that no longer needs them.
The AI sales startup has raised $100 million in Series B funding at a $1.3 billion valuation, Rox exclusively told Fortune. General Catalyst and March Capital co-led the round, with Sequoia and GV returning and Prosperity7 joining as a new investor.
The pitch: Customer relationship management software shouldn’t just store information. It should put it to work. With Rox, AI agents research customer accounts, recommend who to prioritize, and prepare outreach for clients. Basically, it gives salespeople less administrative work and more time with clients.
Mukherjee’s conviction comes from experience. Before Rox, he started Pixie Labs, which New Relic acquired for roughly $150 million in 2020, and became New Relic’s chief growth officer.
“While running a public company through COVID, I deeply understood that every business relies on Salesforce specifically and their CRM to run their business. That was not the futureproof approach as AI was about to hit scale,” Mukherjee said.
“There are going to be autonomous agents that do customer-facing commercial work across large parts of the economy, not just tech companies,” he added. “And do we think Salesforce is the right partner to help CEOs in the C-suite to actually transform their businesses? I came out of an experience where it was not true.”
He also saw an opening as massive companies like Nvidia and Intel moved customer data out of Salesforce and into their own environments. “What that means is the world’s largest in-app application company, which is Salesforce, was becoming less of a moat, less entrenched,” Mukherjee added.
But how do they plan to take on Salesforce, a company with a $172 billion market cap? Mukherjee pointed to the founding team’s experience developing cutting edge tech. Rox’s cofounders include Shriram Sridharan, a founding member of AWS’s Amazon Aurora database service; former Google employee Diogo Ribeiro; and Stanford AI Lab professor Christopher Ré. Mukherjee, himself, was a product lead for Apple’s Siri Knowledge Graph.
That was a key reason General Catalyst invested pre-product, and pre-revenue, back in 2024, partner Marc Bhargava said, describing Rox as “a talent magnet.”
But talent alone won’t unseat an enterprise software behemoth: “For a long time there’s been a graveyard of companies that said ‘I’m taking on ServiceNow or Workday. I’m taking on Salesforce,’” Bhargava told Fortune. Sticky customer relationships and access to capital have kept those incumbents in control, he said. “But AI is a moment in time to displace many of them.” Those same fears have rattled Wall Street in 2026, at times sending software tumbling in what became known as the “SaaSpocalypse.”
Rox’s argument: AI-native startups can build around agents from the start, rather than retrofit them into older software. “It’s like you have a house and you just throw in one more floor, versus from the beginning you decided it was going to be a four-floor home,” Bhargava added. “It’s a huge opportunity for people to start fresh with a fresh code base built around [large language models]…Those products are ultimately better.”
To be sure, the incumbents aren’t easy targets. Salesforce generated $41.5 billion in revenue for fiscal 2026 and says it has worked with more than 150,000 companies. ServiceNow, meanwhile, ended its latest quarter with 680 customers with more than $5 million each in annual contract value.
Meanwhile, Rox’s early customers include high-profile firms like Ramp, New Relic, Trafigura, MongoDB, Groq, and America’s Auto Auction, to name a few. The startup also says its annual recurring revenue grew more than tenfold since its first year after launch. The fresh capital will fund more AI research and product development. Rox plans to expand its U.S. sales, marketing, and commercial team fivefold next year.
“Us in venture, our whole thing is to back the Davids against the Goliaths,” Bhargava said, “And we think that this will happen here.”
See you tomorrow,
Morgan Chittum X: @morgan_chittum Email: [email protected]
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