Artisan, an innovative startup focused on artificial intelligence sales agents, has secured $25 million in Series A funding. Branch Technology, founded in 2017, was represented in this exciting investment by Glade Brook Capital. Artisan founders Jaspar Carmichael-Jack and Sam Stallings started Artisan with this fearless premise. Their flagship product, Ava, is an AI sales development representative (SDR) system touted as the Outbound Sales Reimagined. This development is significant as the company is quickly distinguishing itself in the rapidly emerging AI SDR market. It uses a proprietary database of brick-and-mortar businesses to identify and generate qualified leads.
Artisan created Ava to help businesses cut through the noise in the outbound sales process and generate quality leads faster and more efficiently. The AI system analyzes various signals, including social media posts, fundraising data, and news stories, to identify potential customers effectively. This capability enables Ava to improve targeting precision, which according to some sources has shown tremendous improvement since its inception. According to Carmichael-Jack, the system today “hallucinates” on only one out of 10,000 emails. This is despite a big jump in accuracy and reliability.
Since its launch, Artisan has gained 250 companies to its customer base. It has crossed the $5 million mark in annual recurring revenue. The smartness of its founders has made it one of the clear standouts among the winter 2024 class of Y Combinator graduates. People stand in line clamoring for their revolutionary answers. In September 2023, Artisan completed a $12 million round, putting even more distance between them and the competition in the hyper-competitive world of AI-driven sales solutions.
Despite its focus on AI technology, Artisan continues to value human contributions within its workforce. Now employing 35 people, the company is looking to hire another 22 employees in manufacturing, project management and even sales. Carmichael-Jack emphasized the importance of human labor in our current society. As he put it, “the human labor contribution is actually more valuable when you have the AI content. This method reflects Artisan’s commitment to combining creative intelligence with technological innovation to drive results in the most efficient way possible.
Artisan’s resolve to return maximum value to its customers is best understood by examining their sales approach. Carmichael-Jack addressed the company’s previous missteps in pursuing the wrong customers. In his own words, he confessed, “We’ve historically been a company that has sold to a lot of the wrong customers.” Most importantly, he focused on understanding customer needs. He preached, “Let us only sell to the people when they actually get value from the product.” This philosophy drives Artisan’s development and outreach work.
The first-time founder’s startup is rapidly growing its product line. Artisan is currently working on two additional AI agent products: Aaron, which will manage inbound messages, and Aria, a meeting manager assistant. Innovation like these are designed to deepen customer relationships and improve business efficiency.
Artisan’s secret sauce proprietary database of brick-and-mortar businesses that Ava uses to find the best prospects and customers for effective targeting. This targeted approach helps them steer clear of the outreach gone awry that becomes much more likely when wielded indiscriminately. As Carmichael-Jack also noticed, “some customers will just totally tank” with agentic outbound sales if their leads aren’t well qualified.
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