11x
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11x (stylized 11x, operating from the domain 11x.ai) is a venture-backed startup that builds AI "digital workers" for go-to-market and sales teams. Founded in London in 2022 by Hasan Sukkar and later headquartered in San Francisco, the company is best known for Alice, an autonomous AI sales development representative (AI SDR) that prospects and runs outbound campaigns, and for a companion AI voice agent that has been branded over time as Jordan, Mike, and most recently Julian. 11x frames its products not as software but as autonomous "digital workers" that perform jobs traditionally done by human staff, a pitch that helped it raise a $24 million Series A led by Benchmark in 2024 and a $50 million Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz at a roughly $350 million valuation. From late 2024 into 2025 the company became a closely watched test case for the AI agents category, and the subject of detailed reporting alleging that it overstated revenue, listed companies as customers that were not customers, and suffered very high churn, allegations the company has partly disputed.
11x sits in the wave of agentic AI sales tools that emerged after the large language model boom, alongside competitors building automated SDRs and AI voice AI agents. Its trajectory, from a fast-growing, marquee-funded startup to a company facing accusations of inflated metrics, has been cited widely as a cautionary tale about how generative AI startups report annual recurring revenue (ARR).
11x was founded by Hasan Sukkar, who served as chief executive from the company's start until May 2025. According to profiles of Sukkar, he grew up in Syria, immigrated to the United Kingdom with his family as a teenager during the Syrian refugee crisis, and earned a master's degree in engineering at the University of Exeter. Before 11x he worked as an engineer, attempted an earlier startup, and spent roughly two years as a consultant at McKinsey & Company in London. Sukkar has said the idea for 11x came from the repetitive, manual work he and his McKinsey colleagues wished a computer could do, which he reframed as a vision for an "AI workforce" focused on revenue-generating tasks.
The company name reflects its core pitch: 11x has said each AI "digital worker" is meant to replace, or do the work of, roughly 11 full-time employees. Sukkar stated at the Series B that "each new digital worker will replace the work of 11 full-time employees."
11x began in London and, around its 2024 Series A, relocated its headquarters to San Francisco (an office on Harrison Street) while keeping a London presence. Company representatives said the move was effectively a condition of its US investors. Keith Fearon, 11x's head of growth, told Sifted that "the requirement from almost all of our investors was actually to relocate to the Bay Area," citing both the concentration of engineering talent and the depth of US venture funding, and noted that 70 to 80 percent of customers were US-based.
Some secondary write-ups have associated 11x with Y Combinator, but the company's publicly documented funding history traces to Project A Ventures (pre-seed), Benchmark (Series A), and Andreessen Horowitz (Series B) rather than a YC batch, and a YC affiliation could not be independently confirmed.
11x markets a set of named, role-based "digital workers" rather than a conventional SaaS feature set. The company's framing is that it sells outcomes and labor (pipeline, qualified meetings, answered calls) rather than tools.
Alice is 11x's flagship product and the company's original offering, launched as what 11x calls "the world's first AI SDR." It is positioned as an autonomous outbound sales development representative that sources leads, builds and manages multichannel campaigns, researches prospects, and personalizes outreach (primarily email and other text channels) with the goal of booking qualified meetings and generating pipeline. 11x has marketed Alice as driving response rates roughly 3x higher than traditional human SDRs, and later promoted "Alice 2.0" as fully autonomous, drawing on first-party data and improving from each interaction. These performance figures are the company's own claims.
11x's second major product is an AI phone or voice agent, built on text-to-speech AI and speech recognition, that handles inbound and outbound calls, qualifies leads, and follows up with prospects. The product has been rebranded several times. At the 2024 Series A and Series B it was called Jordan and described as a 24/7 multilingual phone representative able to handle calls in more than 30 languages and to speed inbound lead follow-up by up to 10x. The company's website later referred to the inbound voice worker as Mike, and as of 2026 the homepage presents the AI phone agent as Julian, an inbound digital worker that handles phone conversations around the clock, learns from calls, and adapts to a business's needs. Describing the voice agent at the Series A, Sukkar said "he sounds like a real human" and can hold real-time conversations of up to 30 minutes.
Beyond the individual agents, 11x describes a broader ambition to let customers create autonomous, specialized digital workers, and markets enterprise features such as deep integrations across a customer's sales and marketing stack, continuous learning, autonomous task execution, and enterprise security (it advertises SOC 2 compliance and end-to-end encryption). The company positions the platform as the engine behind its agents rather than a separate product, and by 2025 described itself as having evolved from a single-product company into a platform serving "hundreds" of go-to-market teams.
11x raised a series of rounds in 2023 and 2024 from prominent investors. Reported figures put total funding at more than $70 million.
| Round | Date | Amount | Lead investor | Reported valuation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pre-seed | August 2023 | ~$2 million | Project A Ventures | Not disclosed |
| Series A | September 2024 | $24 million | Benchmark | ~$90 million |
| Series B | Announced November 2024 (reported September 2024) | $50 million | Andreessen Horowitz | ~$350 million post-money |
The Series A, announced September 16, 2024, was led by Benchmark, with participation from a long list of investors including Quiet Capital, SV Angel, Abstract Ventures, Lux Capital, Operator Partners, Visionaries, Activant, HubSpot Ventures, Project A, and the 20VC family of funds (20VC, 20Growth, 20Sales). TechCrunch reported that the round valued 11x at about $90 million, and that Sukkar said the company was approaching $10 million in ARR.
The Series B was first reported by TechCrunch on September 30, 2024 ("sources say") at $50 million led by Andreessen Horowitz, valuing the company at roughly $350 million, about 35 times its reported ARR. 11x formally announced the round on November 11, 2024, confirming the $50 million figure and a16z as lead, with Benchmark and the earlier investors participating. a16z partner Joe Schmidt said the firm was "proud to support 11x as they reshape what's possible in sales." Individual angel backers reported across coverage have included Amjad Masad (Replit), Aaron Levie (Box), and Suhail Doshi (Playground).
Beginning in early 2025, 11x became the subject of detailed press scrutiny alleging that it had overstated revenue, falsely represented companies as customers, and experienced severe churn. The most comprehensive public account is a TechCrunch investigation published March 24, 2025 by reporter Marina Temkin, based on nearly two dozen sources including investors and current and former employees; Sifted published a parallel report on March 26, 2025. These are allegations drawn from reporting and unnamed sources, not findings proven in court, and 11x has disputed parts of them.
TechCrunch reported that several companies whose logos appeared on 11x's website were not actually customers, or had only run brief trials, and had not authorized the use of their logos. ZoomInfo, according to the report, ran a roughly one-month trial in early 2025 and concluded that 11x "performed significantly worse" than its own SDRs; a ZoomInfo spokesperson said, "We did not give them permission to use our logo in any manner, and we are not a customer," and the company's lawyer threatened legal action citing claims such as deceptive trade practices, trademark infringement, and false advertising. TechCrunch reported the ZoomInfo logo was removed only after early March 2025. Airtable was reported to have run a "very short" trial in late 2023 and said the product "was never used in production and never rolled out to our sales team," yet was still listed as a customer on 11x's site as of late March 2025. TechCrunch also reported a third company with a similar unauthorized-logo complaint, while noting that some listed customers, such as Pleo and Rho, confirmed they had genuinely used 11x's product.
Multiple former employees told TechCrunch that 11x inflated its ARR by counting one-year contracts at full annual value even when those contracts included a three-month "break clause" that functioned as a trial, and even after customers had exercised that clause and stopped paying. The report said the company might present a figure such as $14 million in ARR when the value of contracts that survived past the three-month trial threshold was closer to $3 million, and quoted one employee saying, "They absolutely massaged the numbers internally when it came to growth and churn." In response, 11x said it reported "contracted ARR" (CARR) and that its investors were aware of this metric and of the break clauses during due diligence. Benchmark told reporters it had received "transparent updates from 11x, including the break clauses."
Sources cited by TechCrunch and Sifted described very high customer churn, with figures reported in the range of roughly 70 to 80 percent of customers leaving or pausing within their first few months; Sifted cited internal Slack messages from summer 2024 indicating customer retention as low as 20 to 30 percent. Former employees described product issues including emails landing in spam or going undelivered, the tool "hallucinating" or failing to load, and automated emails occasionally being sent to the wrong recipients, in some cases prompting immediate cancellations. 11x has said that every company it referenced was a paying customer that had used its product under contract for months, and at the time of the reporting put its retention at around 79 percent.
Sifted and TechCrunch also reported allegations of a "toxic," high-pressure work culture: expectations of roughly 60 to 80 hour work weeks, employees sleeping in the San Francisco office, public criticism of staff in meetings and on Slack, and high staff turnover (Sifted reported that only Sukkar remained from the five-person founding team and that LinkedIn showed dozens of departures). Sukkar responded, "We work with urgency and hold ourselves to a high bar, because the mission demands it."
11x's lead investors publicly defended the company after the reporting. a16z partner Joe Schmidt and Benchmark partner Sarah Tavel posted in support of 11x and its team in March 2025, and Andreessen Horowitz denied it was taking legal action, with a spokesperson stating plainly, "a16z is not suing." Some founders and commentators in the venture community also pushed back on the reporting, framing it as overly harsh on an aggressive early-stage startup, while others treated the episode as emblematic of loose ARR accounting across AI startups.
On May 5, 2025, 11x announced that Hasan Sukkar was stepping down as chief executive and would become non-executive chairman. He was succeeded by Prabhav Jain, the company's chief technology officer and a former Brex executive who had joined 11x in 2024. The change was reported by TechCrunch, Bloomberg, and others. 11x framed the transition as fitting its evolution "from a single product, single use-case company to a platform that powers hundreds of the world's leading GTM teams." Sukkar said, "I love building from the ground up. It's in my bones," adding that "sometimes, loving your company means knowing when to pass the CEO baton for the next leg of the race." Coverage of the change noted that it followed the March 2025 reporting on customer and revenue allegations, though 11x did not cite that reporting as the reason. At the time of the transition, 11x was reported to have raised more than $70 million in total.
11x drew attention first as one of the most heavily funded entrants in the AI SDR and "digital worker" category, attracting two of the best-known venture firms, Benchmark and a16z, within months of each other and reaching a roughly $350 million valuation while still early. Its "sell work, not software" pitch became a frequently cited example of how agentic AI startups positioned themselves against traditional SaaS.
After the 2025 reporting, 11x became an equally cited example in debates about AI startup metrics, in particular how companies count ARR when contracts include trial periods or break clauses, and how customer logos are used in marketing. The case prompted broader commentary about due diligence, churn, and revenue recognition in the fast-moving AI sales-tools market. Independent reviews of AI SDR tools have continued to list 11x among the major products in the space.