11x.ai: The $350M startup killing traditional software

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Hi 👋, this is the Today in AI Newsletter: The weekly newsletter bringing you one step closer to building your own startup.

We analyze a cool, industry-shaping AI startup every week, with a full breakdown of what they do, how they make money, how much they’ve raised, and the opportunity ahead. 

Let’s get to the good stuff in this email: 

• This startup is creating an AI workforce that automates all routine work

• They’re approaching $25M ARR with customers like Siemens, AirTable and ZoomInfo

• They’ve just raised a $50M Series B at a $350M Valuation led by Andreesen Horowitz

So what’s the startup and who are the founders behind it? Here’s the story of 11x.ai 📈

11x was founded by Hasan Sukkar in London, in September 2022, with the vision to create an AI workforce that handles routine work, freeing humans to focus on what they do best: Creating and Innovating. 🎨

At its core, 11x is an automation company that builds digital workers. 🤖 You can think of these digital workers as AI employees that have names, faces, job categories they’re trained on, and companies can hire these employees to execute tasks.

At the moment, these digital workers are focused on revenue teams and go-to-market. 💸

Right now they have 2 different “AI employees”:

• Alice: A 24/7 AI Sales Development Representative (AISDR) that creates a sales pipeline on autopilot

• Jordan: A 24/7 AI Phone Rep that can have conversations up to 30 minutes long and is super intelligent 🤓

The core model of 11x is AI workers instead of SAAS-based software. 

Traditional software was made to make employees more productive, more efficient or more collaborative, but with AI agents, the scope for what you can automate is completely different.

You can take entire processes, workflows and streams of work, and have agents execute them for you. 🧠

Hasan thinks this can create a huge shift in the way people think about software. 💾

25 years ago, Salesforce invented the cloud software model. Today, 11x is starting to kill traditional software as we know it…

Backstory 👀

Hasan’s entrepreneurial journey started way back when he was 14 years old - he’d created his first online marketplace. He grew up in Syria, so there wasn’t much tech infrastructure in place around him. 🇸🇾

By age 17, he immigrated to the UK with his family as part of the Syrian refugee crisis. There had been a huge war and hundreds of thousands of Syrians were forced to flee.

Hasan went on to study at the University of Exeter where he did a Masters in Engineering and began to explore business opportunities in the UK.

After graduation, he worked at a space-tech fund 🌌where he learned that ethnic minorities like himself were at a disadvantage, and always had to come overly prepared.

He also worked as an AI engineer and had his first attempt at building a startup. Unfortunately this didn’t work out so Hasan decided to join McKinsey in London as a consultant for the next 2 years. 🧑‍💼

While at McKinsey, Hasan along with his team had been doing a lot of mundane, boring, repetitive work that they wished a computer could do for them. 🥱

Hasan had also felt this while working in his first ever job as a student. Human potential was being wasted doing laborious tasks.

This is when he came up with the idea for 11x - a whole workforce of AI agents that automate this for you at scale, with a big focus on revenue generation. 💎

The hustle 🤑

Hasan then quit his job at McKinsey to go all in on this. He founded 11x in London and started building…

11x started out by building Alice, an AI SDR that creates sales pipelines for you all on autopilot. 

Alice can:

• Target buyers intelligently and book meetings with them at scale 📈

• Craft personalized and adaptive messages for emails that actually convert

• Improve with every single interaction 🔄

All done 24/7 and in 28 different languages!

This is when the demand for AI BDRs and SDRs started rocketing, and Alice was in demand. 🚀

By August of 2023, 11x closed a $2M pre-seed round led by Project A ventures, to scale the future of autonomous agents. 💰 

Hasan said the fundraising process was “particularly easy” as investors clearly understood the startups potential to scale, especially given the AI boom. 💥

11x then expanded their product offerings to include Jordan - the AI phone sales rep. Jordan handles both inbound and outbound calls 24/7 naturally in 28 languages.

Fast forward to September 16th, 2024, 11xAI decided to move to the Bay Area, San Francisco as it had been where the majority of where their customers were based. Investment from certain VCs was also contingent on them moving.

Timeline and Stats 📊

At this point, 11x had been approaching $10M in ARR, up 5x from the year before. 🤑 As soon as they reached the Bay Area, they’d been swarmed with investment offers.

The startup received 8 investment offers within 10 days… This is also when they raised a $24M Series A at a reportedly $90M valuation led by Benchmark. 💰Other investors included Quiet Capital, 20VC, SV Angels and Visionaries Club among many others.

Just 2 weeks later on September 30th, 11x raised another round. 💰This time, a $50M Series B at a $350M valuation led by Andreesen Horowitz.

Using this cash, 11x acquired Opkit to accelerate their AI voice capabilities for Jordan. 🗣️

According to Harry Stebbings from 20VC, an investor in 11x, they now do around $25M in ARR, a 150% increase in ARR in just 3 months… 🚀

This insane growth does complement the valuation pretty well despite still being around 14x revenue.

The startup currently has a headcount of 27 people, which they plan to expand rapidly this year.

As of today, their customers include both conglomerates and promising startups including Siemens, ZoomInfo, AirTable, Pleo and ElevenLabs.

They have quite a few competitors in the space, most notably Artisan, who are also trying to replace workers with AI to automate repetitive workflows. 🧑‍🤝‍🧑

According to Hasan, there is a misallocation of human potential which “isn’t just inefficient, it’s a tragedy.”

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