SFC Capital invested in Crono through its SEIS Fund in March 2023. Since then, they have built, learned, pivoted, and grown the business.
Hear from Alex Roggero, co-founder & CMO at Crono, about how they went from CRM to horizontal B2B sales solution, and how the sales stack is changing in the age of AI.
1. Why did you start Crono?
We started Crono for a very simple reason: we had a problem ourselves.
Not the market. Not people we knew.
We, as founders, each with around a decade of experience in B2B sales, were deeply dissatisfied with the tools we were using every day.
They didn’t integrate properly with newer channels like LinkedIn, nor with the new generation of CRMs we were adopting, first HubSpot and Pipedrive, then tools like Attio and Folk. They didn’t integrate well with the sales tools we relied on daily, such as Aircall, Prospeo, Hunter, Datagma, and others.
But the biggest issue was data.
Sales tools were sitting on thousands of data points, yet using them almost exclusively for reporting and internal analytics, not to help sales reps prioritize the right actions or be relevant at scale.
Crono was born to change that: turning data into real-time guidance, helping sales teams focus on the best next action for every single lead and keeping everything natively integrated with the whole stack (es. CRMs).
2. What's the biggest thing you've changed your mind about since launching?
That you don’t build a platform in a week.
Not in a month.
And not even in a year.
In Italy we say “Rome wasn’t built in a day” , and we’ve learned how true that is.
At the beginning, we wanted the speed and focus of a vertical tool. What we were actually building, though, was something much bigger: a horizontal environment where B2B sales teams could operate dozens of vertical tools inside a single, purpose-built workspace, very different from a traditional CRM.
We underestimated the patience required for that kind of ambition.
Today, that perspective has changed completely. We’re far more calm and intentional, watching the platform grow layer by layer. That mindset shift, from rushing features to building foundations, has been one of the most important lessons of our journey so far.
3. Over 50% of an SDR's time is wasted. Where does that time actually go?
The truly absurd thing is that the answer hasn’t changed in over a decade: data entry.
What has changed is the context.
Today, teams spend huge amounts of time working on LinkedIn, yet still have to manually copy every sent and received message into systems like Salesforce, dozens or hundreds of times per day.
The result?
Top performers stop tracking activities because otherwise they can’t hit their targets. And companies end up with massive blind spots in their CRM data.
Other major time sinks include manual list building, manual research on each lead, and manually crafting personalized messages.
Ironically, the more manual the work becomes, the less personalization actually happens, sales teams default to generic templates.
When AI is used properly, with the right insights at the right moment, relevance becomes effortless. Personally, I see 50–60% reply rates in my AI-assisted sequences, something that felt impossible just a few years ago.
4. What is Crono 2.0?
Crono 2.0 represents everything we’ve built over the last two years, reimagined through a completely new interface designed specifically for sales teams in startups, scaleups, and SMBs.
Over the past 18 months, we observed, and this is supported by sources like Gartner, that roughly 83% of sales teams in these companies lack the minimum skills required to be effective in modern outbound sales. Many don’t know how to build a proper sequence or how to use LinkedIn strategically.
Crono 2.0 allows teams to operate the platform using natural language, through a chat-based interface similar to tools like ChatGPT or Lovable, to find leads, emails, create templates and sequences simply by writing.
What started as a conversational interface evolved into much more. Today, Crono 2.0 acts as an AI orchestrator for the entire sales stack, enabling complex queries across CRM data, deal pipelines, and integrated systems, all in one place.
5. What do most people get wrong about AI in sales?
They try to replace humans with AI, and that’s the biggest mistake.
AI is incredible. It’s everything we dreamed of for years.
But it does not replace humans, especially in domains built on human-to-human conversations, like sales.
Sales is, by definition, one of the most relational professions that exists.
There’s a reason why recent data shared by David Wilkins, founder of SDR Leaders of EMEA, shows that 55.9% of companies globally are actively hiring human SDRs right now.
Many companies experimented with replacing people using AI.
Most failed.
The real power of AI in sales isn’t substitution, it’s augmentation.
Helping humans be more relevant, faster, and more focused on what truly matters: building trust and closing meaningful relationships.
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