Artisan, the YC-backed startup behind viral campaigns and AI-powered employees known as Artisans, today announced a $25 million Series A led by Glade Brook Capital, a $2 billion global growth equity firm with a portfolio that includes xAI, Perplexity, Stripe, Revolut, SpaceX, Airbnb, and Uber. The funding follows the breakout success of its “Stop Hiring Humans” billboard campaign, which generated over 1 billion online impressions and introduced the world to Ava—the company’s flagship AI BDR now hired by more than 250 organizations. Additional investors in the round include Y Combinator, Day One Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, Oliver Jung, Fellows Fund, and others.

A Waste Of Human Potential

Founded in 2023 by Jaspar Carmichael-Jack and Samantha Stallings, Artisan is building the next paradigm of software: a sleek, unified platform powered by AI employees, Artisans. Its flagship Artisan, Ava, automates outbound sales, replacing repetitive prospecting work with a smarter, fully autonomous system.

The company is focused on two core goals:

- Advancing AI employees from human-assisted to fully autonomous, capable of managing complex workflows with minimal oversight.

- Consolidating the fragmented SaaS landscape into one intuitive platform, starting with outbound sales.

“Let’s be honest, most companies waste millions paying talented people to do repetitive work that AI can handle better.” said Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, the 23-year-old co-founder and CEO of Artisan. “Having brilliant minds stuck prospecting, personalizing emails, and tracking deliverability is a waste of human potential.”

Meet Ava, The AI BDR

Ava is powered by Artisan’s proprietary AI infrastructure: a model-agnostic, multi-agent system that handles each stage of outbound—from targeting and researching to writing and sending. Her real-time context engine scrapes the web for buying signals such as leadership changes, job postings, and funding announcements to ensure outreach is perfectly timed.

Enterprise fintech company SumUp is one of hundreds of customers using Ava to scale outreach. By leveraging Artisan’s unique local business targeting, integrating data from Google Maps, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Google Reviews, SumUp receives 8–15 positive responses per week from previously unreachable local SMBs.

“At SumUp, we prioritize efficient and scalable growth,” said Karlo Biuk, Growth Lead at SumUp. “Artisan’s platform streamlines our outreach and gives us the insights we need to reach the right businesses in meaningful ways.”

Results-Driven Pricing

As part of its mission to create real value—not vanity metrics—Artisan is piloting a new success-based pricing model through a partnership with Paid.ai, the platform founded by Manny Medina, co-founder and former CEO of Outreach.

“We don’t want to charge customers unless we’re actually creating outcomes,” said Carmichael-Jack. “Our north star is impact. If Ava is generating real conversations, booked meetings, or pipeline—that’s when we should get paid.”

“Outbound The Way It’s Done Today Is Going To Stop Working”

Unlike traditional tools, Artisan is pioneering intent-driven outbound with advanced capabilities that allow Ava to engage prospects at exactly the right moment:

  • Web Visitor Identification tracks anonymous website visitors and enables proactive outreach to high-intent prospects who haven’t submitted a form.
  • Watchtower Campaigns monitor the web for key buying signals—like job changes, funding events, or news—and trigger personalized outreach via email and LinkedIn in real time.
  • CRM Nurture revives dormant leads by syncing with CRM data and past conversations to send contextually aware, hyper-personalized messages at the perfect time.

“Outbound the way it’s done today is going to stop working,” said Carmichael-Jack. “We’re building products that make AI more intent-driven and, ironically, more human—so humans can focus on the things they’re uniquely great at.”

Expanding the Team

To accelerate product development, Artisan has appointed Ming Li as Chief Technology Officer. Li previously served as VP of Technology at unicorn Deel, and has led engineering teams at Rippling, TikTok, and Google.

He joins alongside four senior engineers from Rippling, significantly expanding Artisan’s technical depth as it scales its platform and expands into new product categories.

Building the Full GTM Stack

Following Ava’s success, Artisan plans to launch two new AI employees by the end of 2025: Aaron, an Inbound SDR Artisan, and Aria, a Meeting Assistant Artisan. Both will operate within the Artisan Sales ecosystem.

“We’re building the full go-to-market ecosystem,” said Jaspar. “One platform with every core product across sales, marketing, and customer success–powered by Artisans doing the work AI does best, and seamless software enabling humans to do theirs. Moving chronologically down the sales cycle, we’re taking on each legacy category-leading SaaS player one by one.”

As AI continues to reshape the future of work, Artisan is betting that the next generation of enterprise software won’t just support human workflows—it will replace them where it makes sense. By automating the most repetitive, time-consuming tasks with intelligent, autonomous AI employees, Artisan is redefining what productivity looks like for go-to-market teams.