A young Briton’s startup has been valued at $30 million as it begins to roll out its first AI employees – artisans – to its waitlist.
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, aged 22 and from Surrey, founded Artisan AI with CTO Dr Rupert Dodkins, who has a PhD in astrophysics from the University of Oxford and worked in machine learning for eight years.
Carmichael-Jack told BusinessCloud that he has extended its pre-seed funding round to just under $3m, at a $30m valuation, by welcoming an additional $635,000 from Sequoia Scout – the arm of Silicon Valley venture capital giant Sequoia which allows its portfolio to recommend peers for investment – and fellow US VC Fellows Fund.
The entrepreneur is currently taking part in the prestigious Y Combinator programme in San Francisco. He says Ava – a sales representative which currently automates the full outbound sales cycle – is now being rolled out to its 6,000-person waitlist.
“She will soon be able to automate the entire sales cycle, doing most things herself and acting as a co-pilot to the human when needed,” he told us late last year.
Artisans are described as human-like digital workers which automate job workflows from end to end and act as additions to teams, rather than software tools for them to use. Carmichael-Jack says this makes them notably distinct from existing solutions, which require constant management from a human.
This year the startup plans to release five further Artisans to do everything from marketing to financial analysis.
Other participants in the pre-seed round include Bayhouse Capital and Oliver Jung, who was an early investor in Revolut, Robinhood and Brex.
Carmichael-Jack previously founded Assist, a platform for booking on-demand services in London.
Y Combinator alumni include Airbnb, Stripe, Brex and many other billion-dollar startups.