Artisan AI raises $7.3M to develop autonomous AI employees

UK-founded Artisan AI, a startup building AI employees and software for enterprise companies, has raised $7.3 million in funding.

The YC-backed company is founded by 22-year-old Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (CEO), Oxford PhD Graduate Dr Rupert Dodkins (CTO), and IBM product and engineering veteran Samantha Stallings (CPO). 

The company is now based in San Francisco and is building Artisans, fully autonomous AI employees, and a unified platform to replace the entire SaaS stack so that humans and AI can work together seamlessly and enterprise teams can stop context switching. 

Artisan’s mission is to create an all-in-one platform to replace and consolidate top SaaS products in the go-to market space, where Artisans work alongside human teams to automate the majority of their work.

Artisan launched their AI BDR (Business development representative), Ava, in February 2023. Ava currently automates 80 per cent of a Business Development Representative’s (BDR) role, for example, replacing 10s of outbound sales tools into a single, consolidated platform.

From Ava to Liam, the Marketing Artisan, and James, the Customer Success Artisan

Next in their pipeline is Liam, the Marketing Artisan, and James, the Customer Success Artisan.

CEO Jaspar Carmichael-Jack says: 

“Our competitors are building solutions that sit on top of existing software stacks - that’s not the right way to go. Our vision is to become the go-to platform for GTM SaaS and digital labor. When you’re hiring AI employees, you’re not going to want to also pay for software tools for them to use. 

We’re at war against context switching, poor UX and manual workflows. And, we’re on a mission to make B2B SaaS sexy!”

6 months ago, Artisan was accepted into Y Combinator with a team of 3. Since then, they have launched V2 of their platform, onboarded 100+ companies, and have 13 employees working on their product.

AI employees that can perform better than humans — eventually 

Artisan launched V2 of their platform at the beginning of April. This release introduced Level 2 Autonomy of AI Agents, a significant improvement on Level 1, which came out in February 2023. Where Level 1 Ava required manual human review, Level 2 Ava operates on autopilot, independently crafting and sending emails in a variety of styles, without direct human input.

These ‘levels’ are based on the levels of AI agent autonomy. 

At the basic end of the spectrum, where most AI solutions today exist, Level 1 autonomy is where the agent acts upon specific instructions without deviation. Level 2, where Ava currently operates, introduces assisted autonomy, where the system can make certain decisions and perform tasks with minimal human oversight.

Artisan is currently working on Level 3 autonomy, where AI agents will not only execute tasks but also begin to manage complex decision-making processes within specified scenarios. The 

The Artisan team will continue to ascend the levels of autonomy until they achieve Level 5 Artisans – AI employees that can perform better than humans in all hard and soft skills associated with a given role.

Lead image: Artisan founders. Photo: uncredited.