INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
raised a $25 million Series A led by Glade Brook Capital, Carmichael-Jack exclusively tells A Technology News Room
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
early-stage chaos.Artisan is one of a bevy of fast-growing startups in the highly watched AI sales development representative (AI SDR)
In fact, his company employs 35 humans and is looking to hire another 22, including in sales, he says
It also just hired a new CTO, Ming Li, who came by way of Deel, Rippling, TikTok, and Google
humans cranking out cold emails
Its flagship product, Ava, only hallucinates maybe one in 10,000 emails, if that, says Carmichael-Jack
By working closely with model provider Anthropic, Artisan created tighter prompts
Companies enter information via a form into Ava and then use a set of rigid prompts
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
ImagesCarmichael-Jack recounted another hard lesson: Not every company should be using AI SDR
generate too many low-quality ones, forcing humans to spend too much effort sorting promising leads from the dead ends
The sweet spot, says Carmichael-Jack, is about a 1% response rate
been doing for over a decade, AI SDR systems like Artisan and Actively AI are starting to read and incorporate signals from social media
proprietary database of brick-and-mortar businesses
