The most interesting battle in software right now

Happy Tuesday Brex Community,

Salesforce made a big announcement this past Thursday. Basically, they're trying to cross the chasm from a legacy software company (around $170B market cap and roughly 80K employees) to becoming fully agentic. It's an ambitious move and honestly one that needed to happen if they want to compete with all the AI-native startups coming at them.

I've been using a CRM my entire career since I've always been in GTM, and it's always been painful. The opportunity with AI is to finally make it a much better UI and UX experience for the people actually using it every day. So I'm genuinely glad the incumbents are waking up and that there are so many upstarts going after them too.

When I talk to startups these days, the CRMs that come up most are Salesforce and Hubspot on the incumbent side. On the emerging side, it's mostly Attio, and I'm hearing more about Monaco as well (shout out to Sam Blond, ex Brex CRO).

Whichever CRM you're on, you're going to see a lot of positive changes as an end user. The future is bright for frontline employees who are typically juggling 5+ systems that touch prospect and client data. Whether you're using Codex, Claude, MCP, or whatever else, this is going to be a major unlock for getting time back and making people more efficient.

Outside of the battle between the frontier models, the CRM battle is the most interesting one to watch for me, given the TAM and the opportunity.

Have a great week!

Shai Goldman

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Startup of the week is Lekondo , which is an a16z speedrun company.

Problem Shopping agents have been promised for years, and every version has failed for the same reason. They don't actually know you. Without a daily signal of your taste, an agent guesses from purchase history and browse data that record transactions without capturing who you are. The result is algorithmic recommendations, closets full of things you never wear, and a shopping experience that still requires you to do all the work.

Solution Lekondo is the first AI-native platform for commerce, backed by a16z Speedrun. We start with the daily loop. Lekondo today is an OOTD (Outfit of the Day) app where users post what they're wearing, and our AI catalogues every item into a personal digital closet. Every outfit deepens a taste graph that captures what you own, how you combine it, and what contexts you dress for. On top of that sits a shopping agent: a product you open every day to see recommendations curated to your taste.

Why Now Two things had to be true for this to work. First, AI models can now identify items in outfit photos accurately enough to build a closet automatically, and they can generate clean flatlay product shots good enough to stand in as store-quality visuals. Second, Gen Z has normalized posting outfits as daily self-expression, which gives us the native social behavior that generates the data. Every upload deepens the taste graph, which means the product gets smarter the more you use it. In the past three months, Lekondo has grown 35% week over week to over 35,000 monthly active users and 150,000 outfits.

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Brex is the intelligent finance platform built for speed and control. Combining corporate cards, banking, treasury, expense management, bill pay, travel, and accounting, Brex helps companies spend smarter and move faster in 120 countries. By integrating AI across every workflow, Brex enables founders and finance teams to eliminate manual work, do more with less, and accelerate impact. More than 35,000 companies from startups to enterprises run on Brex, including Anthropic, Cursor, ServiceTitan, Robinhood, DoorDash, and Sonos