Artisan announced it has raised $25 million in Series A funding led by Glade Brook Capital, with participation from HubSpot Ventures, Oliver Jung, Day One Ventures, BOND, Soma Capital, Sequoia Scout, and others. Y Combinator also continued its support.
What Artisan does: Artisan creates AI Employees (called Artisans) and software that is easy to use and replaces the endless stack of point solutions. This funding will be used to replace repetitive work with AI employees and build better work software for humans in the process.
This is essential since the modern workplace is struggling. Talented people are bogged down by work that should no longer exist, such as prospecting, copy-pasting data, updating CRMs, formatting reports, and rewriting the same email a hundred times.
The company’s first Artisan Ava is an AI Business Development Rep (BDR). And she discovers leads, researches them, writes and sends hyper-personalized messages across email and LinkedIn, and books meetings, all automatically.
However, Ava is more than a point solution. Ava is powered by a multi-agent system and a real-time context engine that scrapes the web for buying signals like job changes, new funding, or leadership moves, so it reaches out at the right time, with the right message.
The company’s latest platform capabilities include:
1.) Web Visitor ID – This ID identifies anonymous website visitors and triggers outreach before they fill out a form.
2.) Watchtower Campaigns – Monitors the web for buying signals (like job postings or funding) and sends dynamic outreach when the signal hits.
3.) CRM Nurture – Revives cold leads by syncing with past conversations and sending context-aware follow-ups.
Later this year, the company is launching:
1.) Aaron – An Inbound SDR Artisan, who will qualify and route inbound leads
2.) Aria – the Meeting Assistant Artisan, who will handle scheduling, reminders, and post-call summaries
KEY QUOTES:
“Today, companies like SumUp use Ava to drive consistent, qualified outbound results. Through our local business targeting and social signal analysis, SumUp gets 8–15 positive replies per week from hard-to-reach SMBs, without hiring more reps.”
“We believe AI employees should be held to the same standard as human ones: do the job well, or don’t do it at all.”
“That’s why we’ve developed a proprietary framework for AI autonomy. Our first version of Ava (Level 1) operated under human supervision. Today’s Ava (Level 2) functions independently, crafting and sending outreach without human input. We’re now building toward Level 3: Ava will be able to manage multistep outbound strategies, adapt in real-time, and optimize for pipeline impact, entirely on her own.”
“Our long-term vision is to create Level 5 Artisans who outperform humans across all hard and soft skills associated with a role.”
– Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, founder and CEO of Artisan
