Artisan AI

Claims

• [verified]

  Artisan raised $11.5M in a seed round (uncapped 20% discount SAFE) on September 30, 2024, led by Oliver Jung with HubSpot Ventures, Y Combinator, Sequoia Scout, Day One Ventures, BOND, Fellows Fund and others participating

  Primary source, company's own funding announcement.

  artisan.co

• [verified]

  Artisan raised a $25M Series A in April 2025 led by Glade Brook Capital, with Y Combinator, Day One Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, Oliver Jung and Fellows Fund also participating

  Valuation was not disclosed in the article.

  techcrunch.com

• [verified]

  At seed stage (within ~3 months of the September 2024 launch), Artisan had reached $1M ARR with 120+ customers, including Treatwell, Fondo and Rho

  Self-reported by the company but specific and dated.

  artisan.co

• [verified]

  By the April 2025 Series A, Artisan had reached roughly $5M ARR with about 250 customer companies

  TechCrunch reporting, independent of company blog.

  techcrunch.com

• [verified]

  The 'Stop Hiring Humans' billboard and bus-stop campaign (with slogans like 'Artisans Won't Complain About Work-Life Balance') ran across San Francisco, New York/Times Square and other US cities starting October 2024, and generated viral backlash including death threats

  Multiple independent outlets confirm the campaign and reaction; CEO Carmichael-Jack has publicly called it 'shock value' for attention.

  kron4.comibtimes.co.uktechcrunch.com

• [contradicted]

  Despite the 'Stop Hiring Humans' messaging, Artisan itself employed 35 people as of April 2025 and was actively recruiting 22 more across sales and other functions

  Marked contradicted against the campaign's literal message, not against Artisan's own stated intent. CEO confirmed the slogan was 'mostly just for attention' and that AI complements rather than replaces human staff, an admission that undercuts the billboard's premise.

  techcrunch.com

• [plausible]

  Ava 2.0, launched May 26, 2026, is billed as 'the first AI BDR to run the full outbound workflow end to end,' fully autonomous, with named enterprise customers SumUp, CookUnity, Quora and Informa, and deployment across 1,000+ reps at its largest customer

  Company's own launch post. The same post describes 'approval gates and escalation rules... at every stage,' which is a human-in-the-loop control that qualifies the 'fully autonomous' framing. No independent confirmation of the named customers' deployment scale or the 1,000+ reps figure was found.

  artisan.co

• [thin]

  Artisan's ARR reached $9M+ by April 1, 2026 (following $6M at end of June 2025 and $7M at start of September 2025)

  Only source found was the third-party tracker arr.club, which returned HTTP 403 and could not be fetched to check its methodology or underlying source. No press release or company blog post for this milestone was located.

• [thin]

  Artisan's current (2026) headcount and total funding raised

  Third-party aggregators disagree sharply and none were independently verifiable: Latka cites ~35 employees (May 2026), Tracxn cites 168 (March 2026), PitchBook cites 190, and a separate secondary summary cites 37 with $6M ARR. Total funding is cited as $36M by one source and $48.3M across 5 rounds by another (Tracxn-derived), neither confirmed by a primary company statement. Confirmed primary-source total is $36.5M ($11.5M seed + $25M Series A).

• [thin]

  Ava's real-world outbound performance and user satisfaction

  Multiple review/comparison sites (not independently verified, several appear to be competitor content) describe complaints of near-zero reply rates (one user cited 0.07% positive response after 1,000+ emails), 'AI slop'-quality email copy, data-accuracy issues and cancellation friction, alongside some reports of positive results. Could not fetch Trustpilot directly (403) to get an aggregate rating.