Artisan - Series A, 25M

I was an early customer of Artisan, so this one is kinda/sorta personal to me.

$25 million in fresh Series A capital led by Glade Brook Capital just dropped into the war chest, joined by Y Combinator, Day One Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, Oliver Jung, and Fellows Fund. That’s not just investor FOMO; that’s a syndicate of believers who don’t need a deck to know when a storm’s coming. Artisans’s now sitting on $46.6M in total funding, and they’re spending it like operators who know what time it is.

You know the story. Salesteams are bloated, tech stacks are sometimes bowls of spaghetti, and “personalized outreach” means swapping out {FirstName} in a cold email. Artisan didn’t just spot the problem, they built Ava, an autonomous AIBDR who’s already generating 8 to 15 weekly qualified leads for companies like SumUp. Let that sink in: She’s not an assistant. She is the rep. Level 2 autonomy means she crafts her own outreach, scrapes real-time intent signals, and fills calendars while most reps are still rewriting subject lines.

And that’s just the first act. Founders Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, Rupert Dodkins, and Samantha Stallings didn’t drop into YC Winter ‘24 just to hang around the demo day buffet. They went from three co-founders to 13 employees in six months, stacked an engineering team with Rippling talent, and now have Ming Li, ex-VP of Tech at Deel and a product killer from Google to TikTok, driving the AIengine.

In a year? 250 enterprise clients. $5M ARR. 50% average MoM growth. And yes, that “Stop Hiring Humans” campaign that racked up over a billion impressions wasn’t just a headline. It was a warning shot.

So what now? The Artisan crew is building out Aaron, an inbound SDR, and Aria, a meeting assistant. Both will launch this year. They’re scaling to 57 team members, fine-tuning hallucination rates to sub-0.01% through a quiet-but-deep collab with Anthropic, and taking dead aim at Level5autonomy, where the machines don’t just sell better than humans, they run the pipeline from hello to closed-won.

Enterprise SaaS sales hasn’t seen a shakeup like this since Marc Benioff figured out how to charge you monthly. And if you think this is just automation, you’re missing the point. Artisan isn’t replacing reps, they’re replacing inefficiency. They’re freeing up brainpower. They’re moving sales from guesswork to systemized execution at machine speed.

Congrats, team, and if you’ve figured out the customization we were stuck on, then the sky is the limit, and I am glad to have met you.