Top AI Product

In the frenetic hum of San Francisco’s tech scene, where ambition and aud;titude collide with the regularity of fog rolling off the bay, a young startup named Artisan has stirred both intrigue and ire. The company, barely two years old, recently secured $25 million in a Series A funding round, led by Glade Brook Capital and joined by a coterie of investors including Y Combinator and HubSpot Ventures. This follows a $12 million seed round last year, bringing Artisan’s war chest to a formidable $44 million—a sum that underscores the market’s faith in its vision of reshaping sales through artificial intelligence.

At the helm is Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, a 24-year-old wunderkind whose earnest demeanor belies the audacity of his startup’s gambit. Artisan’s flagship creation, an AI sales agent named Ava, promises to liberate businesses from the drudgery of outbound sales. Ava scours a proprietary database of 270 million contacts—spanning mom-and-pop shops to corporate behemoths—crafting tailored emails and booking meetings with a precision that, Artisan claims, rivals human effort. With 250 companies now relying on Ava, generating $5 million in annual recurring revenue, the startup has moved from scrappy upstart to a player worth watching. Improvements to Ava’s algorithms, built on Anthropic’s models, have slashed errors to a near-mythical one in 10,000 emails, a feat that Carmichael-Jack recounts with the quiet pride of a craftsman.

Yet, Artisan’s ascent has not been without controversy. Last fall, the company unfurled a marketing campaign that seemed ripped from a cyberpunk novel’s pages: billboards across San Francisco proclaiming “Stop Hiring Humans” and “Humans Are So 2023.” The slogans, meant to jolt the industry into debate, did their job too well, sparking a viral maelstrom that garnered over a billion online impressions—and a deluge of vitriol, including death threats. Carmichael-Jack, reflecting on the backlash, insists the campaign was a provocation, not a manifesto. “We’re not anti-human,” he told me, leaning forward in a Mission District coffee shop. “We’re hiring engineers, marketers, strategists—humans who make the AI better.”

Indeed, Artisan’s reality is more nuanced than its billboards suggest. While Ava automates the grunt work of lead prospecting, humans remain integral, shaping strategies and forging relationships that no algorithm can replicate. The company’s recent hires, including Ming Li, a seasoned CTO from Deel and Rippling, signal a commitment to blending human ingenuity with machine efficiency. New products loom on the horizon—Aaron, for handling inbound messages, and Aria, a meeting assistant—both slated for release by year’s end. A partnership with Paid.ai introduces a novel pricing model, charging per response rather than locking clients into contracts, a nod to the skepticism that still shadows AI’s promises.

Artisan’s story is, in many ways, a microcosm of tech’s current obsession with AI agents—tools that don’t just assist but act autonomously, reshaping workflows and, perhaps, entire industries. Yet, for all its bravado, the startup treads a delicate line. Critics note that AI sales agents, Ava included, often falter in complex deals, their response rates lagging behind seasoned human reps. Carmichael-Jack acknowledges the gap but sees it as temporary, a challenge to be engineered away. His vision extends beyond sales, toward a world where AI “Artisans” streamline marketing, customer service, even recruiting—a unified tech stack powered by intelligence both artificial and human.

As Artisan navigates this uncharted terrain, it embodies a paradox: a company that champions automation while leaning on human creativity to make it real. In a city that thrives on disruption, Artisan’s wager is that the future of work isn’t human or machine—it’s both, uneasily intertwined. Whether that bet pays off may depend less on algorithms than on the very human art of persuasion.