How An IIT Kanpur Engineer Found His Way From Maps To Monaco - Snehil Saluja

Sales reps are hired to sell, yet much of their working day goes to everything around the sale. They research accounts before every call and then log what happened in the CRM, a chore few of them enjoy. "Reps don't like filling the CRM at all," says Snehil Saluja, co-founder of Overlayy.

Overlayy was built to take that work off their plate. Snehil describes it as a proactive deal notepad for sales reps. Before a meeting, the platform called the rep to brief them on the person and account they were about to meet. After the meeting, it called again to capture what had happened. That context then filled the CRM and prepared the rep for the next conversation. "We wanted them to focus only on selling, while Overlayy and its agents did all the admin work for them," he says.

Co-founded in early 2024 by Snehil and Anmol Chaman, and backed by Better Capital and angel investors across India and the US, Overlayy went on to win paying customers among US sales teams. In September 2026, Monaco, the San Francisco-based AI-native revenue platform, announced that they acquired the company. Both founders now hold senior product and engineering roles at Monaco.

Snehil came to sales from an unlikely direction. He studied civil engineering at IIT Kanpur, with a quarter of his coursework in geoinformatics, which amounted to more credits in the subject than a usual IIT Kanpur PhD completes. That grounding took him into building map-based applications, first at Blitz (erstwhile Grow Simplee), where he was among the earliest employees, and later at Attentive AI. In both jobs, the part of the business that held his attention sat a few desks away. “Tech is very predictable,” he says. “The most unpredictable thing is how marketing and sales work and that started exciting me more.”

He ran into the same problem while building an earlier venture of his own, and Anmol had done some selling in a previous role. The two started with a marketing product, kept talking to users, and gradually arrived at the problem Overlayy would go on to solve.

An AI Trained Only on Sales Conversations

In 2024, the hardest part of building Overlayy was accuracy. The models of the time struggled to pull the right insights out of a sales call and often lost track of dates, company names and numbers. For a tool meant to brief reps before important calls, that was a dealbreaker. "Once a rep is not able to trust you as a platform, they will never use you," says Snehil, who led technology at the company. Even rivals that had raised $50 million or $100 million had not solved it well, he adds.

His team chose to narrow the problem. Most models were built for general use, expected to handle every kind of text. Overlayy only needed to understand sales calls, so the team built its own workflows and biased its systems toward sales conversations, accepting weaker results everywhere else. Engineers tested each new competitor release against their own output. On sales-specific tasks, Snehil says, Overlayy came out ahead by a wide margin.

Giving the Product to Reps Before Selling to Their Bosses

The team learned as much from people as from models. In late 2025, Snehil and his colleagues held 246 meetings with potential users across the Bay Area, a stretch of fieldwork he later wrote about on X. Those meetings showed how layered the buying decision inside a sales organisation is. The VP of Sales owns the budget and judges every tool by revenue, while sales managers decide which reps are performing and report upward. The reps who actually make the calls have the least say over the tools they get.

"Everyone is selling to the VP of Sales, because that's the person who has all the budget," he says. Through rep conversations on X and LinkedIn, and in person, the team found widespread frustration with the software reps were being handed. So Overlayy gave the product to reps for free. Once they relied on it, the founders could go to a VP of Sales with proof that the team was already using Overlayy. "No one was actually talking to the individual reps," Snehil says. The approach won Overlayy several clients and a base of users whose feedback shaped the product.

Monaco and the Pull of Seasoned Sales Operators

Overlayy was preparing to raise a larger round and expand in the US when Monaco entered the picture. By then the startup had paying customers and case studies to show. During pilot talks with Brex, Snehil and Anmol heard that Sam Blond, formerly Chief Revenue Officer at Brex, was building something in the same space. On another encounter with Shek, through a cold message Snehil sent while looking for angel investment, he learned that the company was Monaco, which Blond co-founded with Abishek “Shek” Viswanathan, formerly Chief Product Officer at Apollo, and Malay Desai, formerly VP of Engineering at Clari, among others.

Once the idea of getting acquired came up, Overlayy had gathered a total of three acquisition offers. What decided it was the chance to work with a team that Snehil counts among the best go-to-market operators on the planet, each with first-hand experience leading some of the best GTM technology roles and companies in the world.

"Getting access to people like these is very, very rare," Snehil says. "Often interacting with other B2B founders in events makes me realize that we are very young for this." He sees the move as a way to learn fast, with the option of starting up again in three or four years.

The interest ran both ways. Monaco's leadership, Shek and Desai in particular, was impressed by how accurately and appropriately a team of five or six IIT engineers had made AI read sales conversations, at a time when most tools fumbled basic facts. The Overlayy team now works on Monaco's AI and platform efforts.

Snehil's Lessons for Young Indian Founders

Asked what young Indian engineers should take from his journey, Snehil steers away from code. "Tech is the most predictable thing to do right now," he says. Echoing entrepreneur Kunal Shah, he argues that Indians build very well but have yet to learn how to sell and market what they build, a gap he sees clearly among young founders in Bengaluru. He goes further with what he calls a controversial view. San Francisco has no special method for go-to-market either, in his reading. Its founders simply get to meet the right people and solve problems for them, and India lacks that kind of access.

His second lesson came from the market itself. In his view, investor backing and praise count for little next to a customer who pays. "If someone is paying you money, that is the only true signal that what you're doing is right," he says. "No one knows anything. Everyone is clueless, including you, including me, including whom you think is the best in your space, including whom you don't consider a competition. What the market buys is the only true signal of you being right. Not what anyone else says or believes."

The habit of listening to the people who use and pay for a product now travels with the Overlayy team into Monaco, where it is helping build an AI-native revenue platform designed to replace the legacy CRM that reps disliked filling in.