Artisan, the ‘stop hiring humans’ AI agent startup, raises $25M – and is still hiring humans

Summary

It’s been a tough but exciting year for 23-year-old Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, founder and CEO of AI sales agent startup Artisan. Artisan just raised a $25 million Series A led by Glade Brook Capital, Carmichael-Jack exclusively tells TechCrunch. Y Combinator, Day One Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, Oliver Jung, Fellows Fund, and others participated as well. A year ago, Artisan was one of the most sought-after grads from the winter 2024 Y Combinator class, raising $12 million in September, one of the biggest rounds of the cohort. In between, Carmichael-Jack and his co-founder, 30-year-old Sam Stallings (a former IBM product manager), have experienced plenty of early-stage chaos. Artisan is one of a bevy of fast-growing startups in the highly watched AI sales development representative (AI SDR) market. It’s probably best known for its “Stop Hiring Humans” marketing campaign that has generated many news articles, social media posts, comments, and a few death threats, says the company. On April 1, Carmichael-Jack even announced his “resignation” in response to the backlash, saying he was being replaced by an “AI CEO.” It was an April’s Fool joke and Carmichael-Jack is still very much CEO. More seriously, when asked if he truly believes that AI will replace people, Carmichael-Jack says, “No, which is ironic, because we did the billboards that said, ‘stop hiring humans’ but that was mostly just for attention.”“Human labor becomes more valuable when you have the AI content,” he says. In fact, his company employs 35 humans and is looking to hire another 22, including in sales, he says. It also just hired a new CTO, Ming Li, who came by way of Deel, Rippling, TikTok, and Google. Image Credits:Artisan Churning customers Artisan, like others in the AI SDR market, also experienced its fair share of customers quitting the product, Carmichael-Jack admits. Entry-level sales seems like an obvious use for AI agents: replacing humans cranking out cold emails. But this is a very young indus...