Artisan Raises $11.5M Seed Round
We're excited to announce our $11.5M Seed round!
I recently sat down with Forbes to chat about my reasons for founding Artisan. They were to solve for two major problems:
Automation. The role of a Business Development Representative (BDR) is traditionally filled with manual tasks—building contact lists, verifying information, and updating CRMs. While automation has been introduced, no technology has fully replicated human capabilities—until now.
Consolidation. We can't build on top of other legacy software products because the stack that people use is so fragmented that nothing works properly within the workflow. Instead, we want to consolidate everything into a single platform that includes every necessary tool—from B2B data to email communications—integrating AI employees to automate various functions.
We're creating consolidated, easy-to-use software and AI Employees called Artisans to address these issues.
Our first Artisan is Ava, the AI BDR. She finds and researches leads using dozens of data sources, send them hyper-personalized messages on LinkedIn and email, manages deliverability and so much more.
We've already achieved $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) within just three months, boasting over 120 customers, including Treatwell, Fondo and Rho.
Our investors
Our round was led by Oliver Jung, an early investor in Airbnb, Rippling, Revolut, and many other unicorns. Other investors include HubSpot Ventures, Y Combinator, Olive Technology Ventures, Day One Ventures, Sequoia Scout, Soma Capital, BOND Capital, Fellow’s Fund, 10X Founder's Fund and more.
We also raised on an uncapped 20% discount SAFE – meaning the round will convert at a 20% discount to our Series A valuation.
Where we’re going
Starting with sales, we’re replacing and automating the entire GTM SaaS stack.
We launched our AI Sales Agent, Ava, in February 2023. She automates 80% of a BDR’s role. She operates within our Artisan Sales platform, which replaces 10s of outbound sales tools into a single, consolidated platform.
It’s also the only sales software to automate personalized email writing with dynamic email playbooks that can emulate any style a human BDR would write in. In the past few months, we’ve seen strong interest from large B2B SaaS companies who are ready to consolidate their complex, fragmented software stack.
Next in our pipeline is Liam, the Marketing Artisan, and James, the Customer Success Artisan.
While our competitors are building solutions that sit on top of existing software stacks, our vision is to become the go-to platform for GTM SaaS and digital labor. When you’re hiring AI employees, you’re not going to want to also pay for software tools for them to use. We’re at war against context switching, poor UX and manual workflows.
We’ve created levels of AI employee autonomy
We launched V2 of our platform at the beginning of April. This release introduced Level 2 Autonomy of AI Agents, a significant improvement on Level 1, which came out in February 2023. Where Level 1 Ava required manual human review, Level 2 Ava operates on autopilot, independently crafting and sending emails in a variety of styles, without direct human input.
These ‘levels’ are based on the levels of AI agent autonomy, which is a framework central to our vision of a future where AI employees and humans collaborate seamlessly.
At the basic end of the spectrum, where most AI solutions today exist, Level 1 autonomy is where the agent acts upon specific instructions without deviation. Level 2, where Ava currently operates, introduces assisted autonomy, where the system can make certain decisions and perform tasks with minimal human oversight.
We’re currently working on Level 3 autonomy, where AI agents will not only execute tasks but also begin to manage complex decision-making processes within specified scenarios. We will continue to ascend the levels of autonomy until we achieve Level 5 Artisans – AI employees that can perform better than humans in all hard & soft skills associated with a given role.
This is the next Industrial Revolution
The complete integration of AI in the office is quickly becoming a reality. Ava currently automates 80% of a Business Development Representative’s (BDR) role. This capability underscores the profound shift in how work is conducted and the role of human workers in the new digital economy.
Work is changing forever, and every person’s job responsibilities will change in the next few years. We are at a pivotal time in humankind, and we truly believe we are on the precipice of the next Industrial Revolution. At Artisan, we’re positioning ourselves at the forefront of this AI Renaissance. We will be the leaders in bringing AI employees to the mainstream.
Over the next few months, we’re working hard towards raising our Series A, and onboarding as many mid-market and enterprise companies as we can.
If you’re interested in hiring Ava, you can get in touch here.
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