Paid’s Post

I’m excited to announce that we’ve raised a $25M Series A at Artisan to make our AI BDR Ava even more effective and build 2 more AI Employees this year It was great to sit down with Julie Bort from TechCrunch to talk about what’s next for Artisan. It's refreshing how strong of an understanding Julie and the TC team have of the space. You can read the article here: https://lnkd.in/ei3gecF9 Two years ago, I was building a company I wasn’t passionate about. I was always looking for what would be next, and felt unfulfilled I knew I wanted to build a truly impactful company, and when I had the idea for Artisan, I knew it could be exactly that. There is a paradigm shift taking place in software which we are betting everything on - the move from unintelligent sprawling SaaS to AI-first, consolidated products It wasn’t smooth sailing to begin with, I was turned down by over 100 investors when I first started raising (to be fair, we didn’t have a product...) Then Oliver Jung took a bet on us and gave us our first check for $1.75M We got into Y Combinator shortly after that, and it’s been an insane journey since then In the past 12 months, we’ve: - Built Ava, the AI BDR - our flagship Artisan - Closed hundreds of customers - Reached $5M ARR - Gone viral with 1B+ online impressions on our “Stop Hiring Humans” shock marketing campaign - Hired an incredible team, including our new CTO Ming Li And we’re just getting started We’re extremely excited to have Paul Hudson from Glade Brook Capital Partners LLC joining our board. Oliver introduced me to Paul last August and he, along with the wider Glade Brook team (Isabel Swope, Linda Guo), has been an invaluable resource to us. There’s nobody we’d rather be partnering with at this stage of our growth We’re also grateful to Y Combinator for their reinvestment and continued support, and especially our group partner Pete Koomen who has been there day and night to help with whatever the issue of the hour is In our roadmap for 2025, we’re launching: - Aaron the Inbound SDR Artisan  - Aria the Meeting Assistant Artisan - + more to be announced This round brings our total funding to over $35M. Thank you to every investor who has supported us: HubSpot Ventures, Masha Bucher and Tara Harandi-Zadeh from Day One Ventures, TriplePoint Capital, Fellows Fund, BOND, Sequoia Capital Scout, 10x Founders, Aneel Ranadive from Soma Capital, Olive Technology Ventures, CoreNest Capital, Mento vc, Anu Hariharan, Paul Daversa, David J. Phillips, Teddy Nwachuku, Lawrence Lin Murata, Alumni Ventures and others We’re hiring for every role (except BDRs 😉) - come join us in SF or remote: https://lnkd.in/ePZACACq     If you want to hire Ava: https://lnkd.in/eCJXPyhp (Oh, and our AI CEO decided I should post this one since he keeps on getting banned from LinkedIn for being a bot)