Artisan, the 'stop hiring humans' AI agent startup, raises $25M -- and is still hiring humans
Summary
Y Combinator, Day One Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, Oliver Jung, Fellows Fund, and others participated as well.A year ago, Artisan was one of the most sought-after grads from the winter 2024 Y Combinator class, raising $12 million in September, one of the biggest rounds of the cohort.In between, Carmichael-Jack and his co-founder, 30-year-old Sam Stallings (a former IBM product manager), have experienced plenty of early-stage chaos.Artisan is one of a bevy of fast-growing startups in the highly watched AI sales development representative (AI SDR) market. Its probably best known for its Stop Hiring Humans marketing campaign that has generated many news articles, social media posts, comments, and a few death threats, says the company.On April 1, Carmichael-Jack even announced his resignation in response to the backlash, saying he was being replaced by an AI CEO. But this is a very young industry, and it has developed a reputation for products that dont work well.First-generation AI SDRs get a pretty low response rate and have relatively high churn among their customers, says Carmichael-Jack. that dont leave room for hallucination, because its fed all of the information directly, he describes.Carmichael-Jack says that Ava has now improved to the point where Artisan counts 250 companies as customers, and has reached $5 million in annual recurring revenue.Artisan is also working on two new AI agent products: Aaron, which will handle inbound messages, and Aria, a meeting manager assistant. Thats the new agentic billing platform founded by Manny Medina, co-founder and former CEO of Outreach.Customers can use Paid.ai instead of signing a long-term contract and pay per response.We should only really be selling to people if they get value from the product, Carmichael-Jack says.