Artisan: The $1.5M ARR startup creating AI employees

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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 AI startup is creating Ava, the first AI BDR that automates cold email for you

• They’ve scaled from $0 to $1.4M in ARR with over 120 companies on board in just 8 months from launch

• They’ve just raised an $11.5M seed led by Oliver Jung, with participation from YC, HubSpot Ventures, and others

So what’s the startup and who are the founders behind it? Here’s the story of Artisan AI 📈

Artisan AI was founded by Jaspar Carmichael-Jack in July 2023 with the mission to automate boring, manual and repetitive workflows using AI. 🤖 

Artisan is creating AI employees, called Artisans, that automate these workflows for you.

Artisan has 2 missions:

1. Consolidation: Trying to replace legacy software tools with one better, easier to use platform.

2. Automation: Once the software is consolidated, Artisan builds these Artisans into the platform that automate different workflows for people.

They’ve already started with their first Artisan “Ava”, who automates the whole outbound sales workflow including everything from finding leads, writing hyper-personalized emails, sending LinkedIn messages etc. 📬

📈 Ava has access to over 300M B2B contacts and 10s of data sources. 

Once a lead engages positively, Ava even helps give you suggestions about what to say and how to respond effectively. 

Artisan also already has a fully consolidated outbound sales ecosystem, which includes everything from B2B data to email warm up. 🧾

Currently, Artisan is being used by startups and enterprises:

1. With Startups, they use Artisan instead of hiring a BDR 🚀 

2. With Enterprises, they use Artisan alongside hiring a BDR so they can reduce headcount ☄️

Backstory 👀

Before Artisan, at age 18, Jaspar started an app for booking cleaners and on-demand services, but it didn’t work out because of the terrible unit economics involved.

He then also started a creative agency doing go-to-market branding and adjacent services based between London and New York. 🏙️

He ran the agency for about 3 years, attracting clients like Vivienne Westwood and other international conglomerates. 👗 This went relatively well for Jasper.

While working on his agency, he’d been doing a lot of outbound and go-to-market sales and wondered if this could be automated. This was at the same time AI was on the rise…

💡 Jaspar came up with the idea for Artisan - AI employees that automated boring, manual and highly repetitive workflows.

The Hustle 🤑

💰 By October 2023, Artisan raised a $1.5M pre-seed round at a $15M valuation with no product, no team and no revenue. Just an idea.

Jaspar decided to use this as “rage bait” on Reddit 😈, where he made a post with a waitlist for Artisan emphasizing they’d raised funding with no product, knowing people would be angry.

Jaspar posted a ton of these as well as some LinkedIn posts until he got a couple thousand sign ups to the waitlist. This continued to piss people off but attracted a lot more attention.

This is when they also got into Y Combinator’s 2024 winter batch, helping them build and scale even faster. 💨

They kept adding to the waitlist until February, when Jasper finally launched a beta version of Artisan. The beta was a cheap, scrappy, self-serve MVP and worked on a free trial, in other words it didn’t work that well. 😑

Y Combinator pushed them to launch fast and get something out there as soon as possible. 🤔 Jaspar wondered if this was the right call to make…

Although the product experience wasn’t good for the user, it forced Artisan to launch faster, and actually build something people want.

When there’s a bug on a live app people are using, engineers will fix it a lot faster than if it’s an app that no one’s using. It makes everyone have a sense of urgency and a higher velocity. 💫

From February to May, Artisan scaled from $0 to around $200K in ARR, which was cool, but not up to YC standard - they wanted to scale even faster.

This is when they switched their go-to-market strategy from product-led to sales-led.

👬 With a sales-led approach, they were able to speak to customers more closely when selling to them which helps them make more of a decision because they’re able to give you feedback on what they like/don’t like.

Customers are also a lot more invested in using the product because they’re putting a more sizable amount of money into using it. 💸 

Initially, Jaspar and Tina (Chief of Staff at Artisan) were doing all of the sales calls and had back-to-back calls every single day doing about 20 demos a day.

Eventually they started hiring Account Executives to do this for them, which were ridiculously hard to hire for some reason. They’d only hire one AE for every 50-100 they interviewed.

Jaspar was very good at go-to-market sales from his agency, so this wasn’t a problem for them at Artisan. 📈 Artisan had really good SEO - if you searched “ASDR” or “AI BDR”, Artisan would always come up first or second.

Stats 📊

🚀 According to Jaspar’s latest LinkedIn post, they’re “days away from crossing $1.5M ARR and are preparing to raise a Series A very soon”.

💲 This means that they’ve scaled from $0 to $1.5M in ARR in just 8 months with over 120 companies using their platform.

🧑 Artisan has a combined house office in SF, where 4 people currently live, and other employees fly in to stay. In total they have 25 employees right now with the majority being remote.

💰 On September 30th 2024, Artisan AI raised an $11.5M seed led by Oliver Jung, with participation from Y Combinator, HubSpot Ventures, Day One Ventures and others, bringing their total raised to $21.1M.

📈 According to Jaspar, he wants to be building Artisan for the next 20 years and he has his eyes on an IPO.

Before you go 👋

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