Artisan (company)
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Last reviewed
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Artisan is an American artificial-intelligence company based in San Francisco that builds autonomous "AI employees," which it markets as Artisans, for go-to-market and sales work. Founded in 2023 and backed by Y Combinator, the company's flagship product is Ava, an AI business development representative (BDR) that automates outbound prospecting end to end: it sources leads from a large B2B contact database, researches each prospect, writes and sends personalized email and social outreach, and books meetings. Artisan became widely known less for its product than for a deliberately provocative out-of-home advertising campaign, "Stop Hiring Humans," that ran on billboards and bus shelters in San Francisco and later New York from late 2024 onward, drawing national attention, heavy backlash, and commentary from figures including Senator Bernie Sanders. The company is led by founder and chief executive Jaspar Carmichael-Jack.
Artisan was founded in 2023 by Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, a British entrepreneur from Surrey who was in his early twenties at the time, alongside two co-founders: Dr. Rupert Dodkins, an Oxford PhD graduate who served as chief technology officer, and Samantha "Sam" Stallings, a former senior product manager at IBM who took a product leadership role. The company set out to build what it calls "digital workers" or Artisans, software agents intended to take over an entire job rather than serve as a copilot or assistant. Each Artisan is given a human name and a defined role, with the long-term goal of consolidating the separate point tools that a function such as sales typically relies on into a single AI-driven platform.
The company was accepted into Y Combinator's Winter 2024 (W24) batch. By May 2024, roughly six months after joining the accelerator, Artisan had grown to about 13 employees and had onboarded more than 100 companies onto its sales product. Press coverage frequently noted the founder's youth, describing Carmichael-Jack as 22 or 23 years old across 2024 and 2025.
Artisan raised capital in a sequence of rounds beginning in late 2023. Figures reported by the company and by funding trackers are summarized below. Note that the September 2024 round, which the company itself titled an "$11.5M Seed round," has been rounded to "$12 million" in some coverage, including by TechCrunch.
| Round | Date | Amount | Lead investor | Selected other investors |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pre-seed | November 2023 | $2.3M | Y Combinator / Oliver Jung | Bayhouse Capital |
| Seed | May 2024 | $7.3M | Oliver Jung | Sequoia Scout, Y Combinator, Soma Capital, BOND, Fellows Fund, Mento VC, Anu Hariharan, Paul Daversa |
| Seed (extension) | September 2024 | $11.5M | Oliver Jung | HubSpot Ventures, Y Combinator, Day One Ventures, Sequoia Scout, Soma Capital, BOND, Fellows Fund, 10X Founders Fund |
| Series A | April 2025 | $25M | Glade Brook Capital | HubSpot Ventures, Oliver Jung, Day One Ventures, BOND, Soma Capital, Sequoia Scout, Y Combinator |
Oliver Jung, an angel investor known for early stakes in Airbnb, Rippling, Revolut, Robinhood, and Brex, led the early rounds. The May 2024 seed was structured as an uncapped SAFE with a 20% discount. By the time of the Series A in April 2025, the company reported cumulative funding of roughly $21 million before that round closed; Y Combinator's profile later listed total funding above $35 million.
The $25 million Series A was announced on April 9, 2025, and was led by Glade Brook Capital with participation from HubSpot Ventures, Day One Ventures, BOND, Soma Capital, Sequoia Scout, Oliver Jung, and Y Combinator. At the time of the round, Artisan said Ava served around 250 companies and that the company had reached approximately $5 million in annual recurring revenue. No valuation was disclosed publicly for any of the rounds.
Artisan's product line is organized around named AI agents, each meant to own a role end to end. The first and central product is Ava; the company has announced or shipped several others.
| Artisan | Role | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Ava | AI BDR / outbound sales agent | Flagship, in production |
| Aaron | Inbound SDR (lead qualification and routing) | Announced for end of 2025 |
| Aria | Meeting assistant (scheduling, reminders, post-call summaries) | Announced for end of 2025 |
| Liam | Marketing Artisan | Announced (early roadmap) |
| James | Customer Success Artisan | Announced (early roadmap) |
Ava is positioned as an autonomous AI business development representative that handles the outbound prospecting workflow with minimal human supervision. The company says Ava automates roughly 80% of a human BDR's tasks. Its workflow runs in several stages:
Artisan describes Ava as operating by default at what it calls "Level 2 autonomy," running independently without constant human oversight, while letting customers require approvals at chosen stages until they build trust in the system. The company markets Ava as generating pipeline at roughly one-fifth the cost of a human BDR. Notably, Artisan has said Ava does not place phone calls, both for legal reasons and because the company argues cold calling should remain a human task; instead, Ava can hand reps a list of qualified prospects to dial.
The underlying system is built on large language model technology, part of the broader wave of generative AI tools, and Artisan presents Ava as an example of agentic AI rather than a chat assistant. Carmichael-Jack has claimed a very low hallucination rate for Ava's outreach, on the order of "maybe one in 10,000 emails, if that," a self-reported figure that has not been independently verified.
Artisan has shifted toward a sales-led, quote-based pricing model and does not publish a simple price table, directing most prospects to "talk to sales." Coverage and the company's own pages indicate self-serve tiers have existed at the lower end (reported around $280 per month for an entry plan and several hundred dollars for a mid plan), while team and enterprise deals are quoted individually and reported to run from roughly $2,000 per month into five figures depending on volume and configuration. Contracts are typically annual and paid up front. Because most of these numbers come from third-party reviews rather than an official price list, exact figures vary by source and should be treated as approximate.
Artisan's most prominent public footprint has been a guerrilla out-of-home advertising campaign built around the slogan "Stop Hiring Humans." The campaign began in San Francisco in late 2024, after earlier, lower-key placements at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference and on a highway billboard near San Francisco International Airport drew muted responses. The breakout phase put the message on roughly 50 bus shelters across the city, alongside billboards.
The ads paired the headline with the AI worker "Ava" and a set of deliberately needling taglines, including:
The campaign later expanded to New York, with placements across Manhattan including Times Square, Midtown bus stops, and the High Line, carrying lines such as "Stop hiring humans. AI employees are here." Carmichael-Jack said the company spent under $50,000 on placements and that the real target was the internet rather than foot traffic, with the payoff coming when passersby photographed the ads and reshared them on social platforms.
The campaign provoked intense backlash. Commenters on Reddit and other platforms called for the billboards to be torn down or vandalized, some ads were defaced, and Carmichael-Jack said he received thousands of threatening messages, including death threats, severe enough that he left San Francisco for a period, traveling to Miami and London. In October 2025, after the campaign spread nationally, Senator Bernie Sanders shared a photo of one billboard and wrote: "Great idea. One simple question: How will those displaced workers survive when there are no jobs or income for them?"
Carmichael-Jack and the company have consistently framed the campaign as intentional "rage bait" and "shock value" rather than a literal policy prescription. Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2025, he characterized the campaign as shock value and said it was meant to be triggering. He has said the goal "was always to rage bait," while adding that the company "never expected the level of backlash." In a follow-up essay on its own site, Artisan argued that "'Stop hiring humans' isn't a sentence about humans at large, it's a sentence about a category of work," specifically repetitive cold-outbound tasks like list-building and template churn that it says "breaks people," citing short average BDR tenures and burnout. The company said cold calling "still belongs to humans" and that BDR work has historically been an entry rung into sales careers. Carmichael-Jack has also voiced support for a universal basic income and a shorter work week as society automates more routine labor.
A recurring point of criticism and commentary is the apparent paradox that a company telling others to "stop hiring humans" continued to hire humans aggressively itself. Around the time of its 2025 Series A, Artisan employed roughly 35 people and was advertising about 22 additional roles, including in sales. By the company's own later accounting, the campaign generated tens of millions to, by one company estimate, around a billion online impressions, hundreds of news articles, and on the order of $2 million in new annual recurring revenue, with October and November 2024 described as the company's biggest months to that point.
In May 2026, cartoonist KC Green, creator of the widely memed "This is Fine" comic (a dog seated in a burning room), said that Artisan had used his artwork in a subway advertisement without permission. The ad reportedly altered the dog's line to "[M]y pipeline is on fire" and overlaid a call to "Hire Ava the AI BDR." Green publicly objected, saying the image had been "stolen like AI steals," urged people to vandalize the ad if they saw it, and said he was looking into legal representation. Artisan responded that it had "a lot of respect for KC Green and his work" and was reaching out to him directly.
Artisan grew quickly through 2024 and 2025. The company reported reaching roughly $1 million in annual recurring revenue within about three months of its September 2024 seed announcement, with more than 120 customers at that point, including Treatwell, Fondo, and Rho. By the April 2025 Series A it cited about 250 customer companies and roughly $5 million in ARR; named customers across its materials have included SumUp, Remote, and Quora, and Y Combinator's profile later cited more than $6 million in ARR. The "AI BDR" or "AI SDR" category that Artisan helped popularize became crowded, with competitors such as 11x and others pursuing similar autonomous-sales-agent products, and Ava is frequently compared against them in third-party tool reviews.
Coverage of the company has been split between attention to its rapid fundraising and revenue growth and skepticism about both the social message of its advertising and the maturity of fully autonomous outbound sales. Reviews of Ava have ranged from positive accounts of pipeline generation to criticism around price, deliverability, and the realism of "hands-off" autonomy, reflecting broader debate about how far AI sales agents can be trusted without human oversight.
| Name | Role | Background |
|---|---|---|
| Jaspar Carmichael-Jack | Founder and CEO | British (Surrey); started Artisan in 2023 in his early twenties |
| Samantha "Sam" Stallings | Co-founder, product leadership (CPO/CPTO) | Former senior product manager at IBM; UCLA |
| Dr. Rupert Dodkins | Co-founder and CTO (founding) | Oxford PhD |
The company's engineering leadership has changed over time; reporting indicates that a separately hired chief technology officer joined and departed within a roughly seven-month span in 2025. Because executive-team details shift, current titles should be confirmed against primary sources.