Artisan, the ‘stop hiring humans’ AI agent startup, raises $25M – and is still hiring humans

It’s been a tough but exciting year for 23-year-old Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, founder and CEO of AI sales agent startup Artisan.

Artisan just raised a $25 million Series A led by Glade Brook Capital, Carmichael-Jack exclusively tells TechCrunch. 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. It’s 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.” It was an April’s Fool joke and Carmichael-Jack is still very much CEO.

More seriously, when asked if he truly believes that AI will replace people, Carmichael-Jack says, “No, which is ironic, because we did the billboards that said, ‘stop hiring humans’ but that was mostly just for attention.”

“Human labor becomes more valuable when you have the AI content,” he says. 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.

Artisan, like others in the AI SDR market, also experienced its fair share of customers quitting the product, Carmichael-Jack admits.

Entry-level sales seems like an obvious use for AI agents: replacing humans cranking out cold emails. But this is a very young industry, and it has developed a reputation for products that don’t work well.

First-generation AI SDRs “get a pretty low response rate” and have “relatively high churn” among their customers,” says Carmichael-Jack. “I just cringe in pain” when looking at the email pitches Artisan’s YC-era product wrote, he said. “We had extremely bad hallucinations when we first launched.”

But over the past year, Artisan claims that it has (mostly) fixed that. 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. that don’t “leave room for hallucination, because it’s 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. Both are scheduled to launch by the end of 2025.

Carmichael-Jack recounted another hard lesson: not every company should be using AI SDR. There are even some entire industries, like offshore development agencies, that Artisan won’t take on anymore.

“Some customers will just completely flop” with agentic outbound sales, says Carmichael-Jack — and he lets them walk. Like its rivals, Artisan offers contracts that include break clauses allowing customers to end early.

“We’ve historically sold to a lot of the wrong customers, and learned the hard way that it’s not just like a typical SaaS product where you can sell to everyone — you have to actually qualify pretty heavily,” says Carmichael-Jack.

Some customers don’t generate enough responses using Artisan’s agents, while others 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.

But Artisan is also among the AI SDR vendors that are learning how to target their outreach better. As the sales automation industry has been doing for over a decade, AI SDR systems like Artisan and Actively AI are starting to read and incorporate signals from social media posts, fundraising data, news stories and the like to better know who to target at all.

Carmichael-Jack says Artisan’s particular edge is a proprietary database of brick-and-mortar businesses. Beyond that, Artisan is addressing the industry’s shaky reputation by also piloting a new flexible “success-based pricing” option with Paid.ai. That’s 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. “If we don’t get them value, then we shouldn’t be charging them money.”