Artisan Raises $25M Series A
We’re excited to announce our $25M Series A, led by Glade Brook Capital, with participation from HubSpot Ventures, Oliver Jung, Day One Ventures, BOND, Soma Capital, Sequoia Scout, and others. We also appreciate Y Combinator's continued support, backing us again as we scale.
I recently spoke to TechCrunch about our plans moving forward.
This funding is a major step forward in our mission: to replace repetitive work with AI employees—and build better work software for humans in the process.
A Lot of Human Potential is Wasted
The modern workplace is broken. Across industries, talented people are bogged down by work that should no longer exist—prospecting, copy-pasting data, updating CRMs, formatting reports, rewriting the same email a hundred times.
We started Artisan to fix this.
Instead of plugging AI into a bloated tech stack, we’re rethinking work from the ground up. Our AI employees (called Artisans) are built to fully take over specific jobs, starting with outbound sales. They're not assistants. They're autonomous team members designed to actually do the work.
Our First Artisan is Ava the AI BDR
Our first Artisan, Ava, is an AI Business Development Rep (BDR). She discovers leads, researches them, writes and sends hyper-personalized messages across email and LinkedIn, and books meetings, all automatically.
But Ava is more than a point solution. She’s powered by a multi-agent system and a real-time context engine that scrapes the web for buying signals like job changes, new funding, or leadership moves, so she reaches out at the right time, with the right message.
Today, companies like SumUp use Ava to drive consistent, qualified outbound results. Through our local business targeting and social signal analysis, SumUp gets 8–15 positive replies per week from hard-to-reach SMBs, without hiring more reps.
Building Toward Full Autonomy
We believe AI employees should be held to the same standard as human ones: do the job well, or don’t do it at all.
That’s why we’ve developed a proprietary framework for AI autonomy. Our first version of Ava (Level 1) operated under human supervision. Today’s Ava (Level 2) functions independently, crafting and sending outreach without human input. We're now building toward Level 3: Ava will be able to manage multistep outbound strategies, adapt in real-time, and optimize for pipeline impact, entirely on her own.
Our long-term vision is to create Level 5 Artisans who outperform humans across all hard and soft skills associated with a role.
Pricing That Reflects Outcomes
We’re not interested in vanity metrics. That’s why we’re rolling out a success-based pricing model through a partnership with Paid.ai (founded by Outreach’s Manny Medina).
Under this model, customers only pay when Artisan actually delivers outcomes: conversations, meetings, pipeline. If Ava doesn’t drive real value, we don’t get paid. It’s simple, and it aligns everyone toward impact.
Intent is the New Outbound
Traditional outbound is dying. It’s spammy, random, and poorly timed. That’s why we’re pioneering a new, intent-driven approach.
Our latest platform capabilities include:
Web Visitor ID: Identifies anonymous website visitors and triggers outreach before they ever fill out a form.
Watchtower Campaigns: Monitors the web for buying signals (like job postings or funding) and sends dynamic outreach the moment the signal hits.
CRM Nurture: Revives cold leads by syncing with past conversations and sending context-aware follow-ups.
Outbound, as it’s been done, is on its way out. This is the future.
Expanding the Artisan Workforce
We’re not stopping at outbound.
Later this year, we’re launching:
Aaron - the Inbound SDR Artisan, who will qualify and route inbound leads
Aria - the Meeting Assistant Artisan, who will handle scheduling, reminders, and post-call summaries
Both will plug into the Artisan Sales platform, which will become the first true end-to-end AI sales system. Over time, we’ll expand beyond sales into marketing, customer success, and beyond.
Our Growing Team
To help us get there, we’ve brought in some incredible talent. We’re thrilled to welcome Ming Li as our new CTO. Ming previously served as VP of Technology at Deel, and has led engineering teams at Rippling, TikTok, and Google.
He joins alongside four senior engineers from Rippling, who will help scale our AI infrastructure, accelerate autonomy, and expand our product line.
A New Paradigm for Work
Artisan isn’t just another SaaS company. We’re building the next paradigm of work.
The old stack (point tools, fragmented workflows, manual labor) is dying. In its place will be a new way of working: AI employees that handle what machines are best at, and beautiful software that enables humans to do what only humans can.
We’re not building for the future. We’re building for right now.
If you’re excited by what we’re building:
👉 We’re hiring. Come join us.
👉 Want to hire Ava? Get in touch.
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