Artisan sells Ava, an AI "business development representative" that finds leads in a 250M-contact database, writes and sends emails from the customer's own domain, handles replies and books meetings. It is the AI SDR most people outside sales have heard of, because of its December 2024 "Stop Hiring Humans" billboards in San Francisco.
The surprising fact: its own CEO disowned the slogan. Jaspar Carmichael-Jack told TechCrunch in April 2025 the billboards were "mostly just for attention" and that "not every company should be using AI SDR" — while the company was still hiring 22 humans.
What it sells
As of October 2026, Artisan's pricing page describes Ava as an end-to-end outbound agent:
- B2B database of 250M+ contacts
- Emails sent "in representatives' names from company domains"
- Autonomous replies and meeting booking, with approval workflows, tone controls and escalation rules
- Calls queued for human reps; AI dialer as a per-seat add-on
- Bi-directional Salesforce and HubSpot sync; SOC 2 Type II, SSO/SAML
Artisan says hallucinations run at about one per 10,000 emails thanks to "rigid prompts and direct data input" (TechCrunch, April 2025) — a company claim, not an audited figure.
How it prices
No public prices as of October 2026. Tiers are defined by volume:
| Plan | Leads contacted / month | Support |
|---|---|---|
| Team | ~2,500 | CSM, onboarding |
| Scale | ~6,000 | Dedicated CSM, CRM setup |
| Enterprise | Custom | Forward-deployed strategist |
TechCrunch reported traditional contracts with break clauses plus a pilot of success-based pricing (pay per response) via Paid.ai. Contrast with Instantly, where a flat monthly plan buys a sending engine for thousands of contacts (see the pricing table) — Artisan's buyer is paying for the labour, not the pipe.
No list prices, per-lead cost or 2026 contract terms were found.
Who uses it and why
SMB and mid-market companies, typically US, who want outbound without hiring SDRs. In April 2025 it had 250 customers and about $5M ARR (TechCrunch), so roughly $20k average contract value — far above a volume sequencer and far below an enterprise suite (see In-house SDR teams and Founders and small B2B teams).
Where it is strong
- Distribution through provocation. The billboard campaign and an April Fools' 2024 stunt (Wikipedia) gave a 35-person company category-level awareness.
- Bundled data. Ava ships with its own contact database, so buyers do not need Contact data and enrichment vendors.
- Investor network. YC (W24) and HubSpot Ventures participate; useful for distribution into the HubSpot ecosystem.
Where it is weak
- Churn and hallucination, by its own account. The CEO acknowledged early churn and hallucination problems in the April 2025 interview.
- Data provenance. LinkedIn banned Artisan around 19 December 2025 for roughly two weeks, citing use of LinkedIn's name and data brokers that had scraped LinkedIn. The CEO called it "a crash course in third-party vendor verification". For an EU buyer this is a GDPR question, not just a platform one — see Data sourcing law.
- Executive churn. CTO Ming Li left after seven months in 2025 (Wikipedia).
- Brand backlash. "Stop Hiring Humans" attracts attention and repels the sales leaders whose teams it threatens; some billboards were vandalised.
A 2026 vendor blog claims Artisan "reverted to hybrid models by early 2026" (Naoma). No primary source confirms it, although the current pricing page's emphasis on approvals, escalation rules and human call queues is consistent with it.
Trajectory
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 2023 | Founded by Jaspar Carmichael-Jack and Sam Stallings; $2.3M pre-seed |
| 2024 | YC W24; $11.5M seed (Sept); "Stop Hiring Humans" billboards (Dec). Wikipedia puts total raised by end-2024 at ~$21M, more than the named rounds add up to |
| Apr 2025 | $25M Series A; ~$5M ARR, 250 customers |
| Dec 2025 – Jan 2026 | Banned from LinkedIn for ~2 weeks, then reinstated |
| Oct 2026 | Quote-only pricing; positions Ava with approvals and human handoff |
Sources disagree on who led the Series A: TechCrunch says Glade Brook Capital; Wikipedia says YC and HubSpot Ventures (see Contradictions register).
No 2026 ARR, customer count or new funding round was found.
What this means for an entrant
- Provocation works as distribution, once. Artisan shows a small team can buy category awareness with a sharp slogan; it also shows the cost when the product cannot carry the promise.
- Know where your data comes from. The LinkedIn ban is the kind of event that hits every customer at once. An EU entrant that can document data provenance has a selling point US AI SDRs lack — see GDPR and ePrivacy and Germany.
- Price the labour, not the pipe — or undercut it. Artisan's buyers pay ~$20k a year. A sequencer with approval-queue AI at a few hundred euros a month captures the buyers who want help, not replacement.
- Approvals are the product now. Even the "stop hiring humans" company leads with approval workflows and human handoff in 2026.