- Artisan AI has raised $46 million in total funding, including a $25 million Series A led by Glade Brook Capital, and counts 250 companies as customers.
- Jaspar Carmichael-Jack started his first business at age 7, founded a branding agency as a teenager, and launched Artisan at 21 from Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch.
- Artisan’s flagship product Ava, an AI-powered sales agent, automates 80% of a business development representative’s workflow and has driven the company to $5 million in annual recurring revenue.
- The company’s “Stop Hiring Humans” billboard campaign in San Francisco generated over one billion impressions, thousands of death threats, and $2 million in new ARR.
88 Employees, 250 Customers, and a 24-Year-Old Running It All
Artisan AI builds digital workers. Not chatbots, not copilots — full AI employees designed to replace repetitive human labor across sales, marketing, and operations. The company’s lead product, an AI sales agent named Ava, prospects leads, researches them, writes hyper-personalized outreach emails, and books meetings without a human touching the keyboard.
As of early 2026, the company employs 88 people, serves 250 customers, and has hit $5 million in ARR. It has raised $46 million across five rounds, backed by Y Combinator, HubSpot Ventures, Glade Brook Capital, and Sequoia Scout. At the helm is Jaspar Carmichael-Jack — British, 24 years old, and already one of the most polarizing founders in AI.
A Candy Store in Surrey at Age 7
Carmichael-Jack grew up in Surrey, England. His entrepreneurial instincts surfaced absurdly early. At seven, he opened a candy store out of his bedroom — buying sweets in bulk and selling them to neighborhood kids at a markup. By the time most children discover pocket money, he was already optimizing margins.
The pattern never stopped. Throughout his teens, he was building things, selling things, figuring out how commerce worked. He didn’t wait for university to validate his instincts. He didn’t need a degree to know he wanted to build companies.
Burst Digital: A Branding Agency at 17, Clients by 19
Before he turned 18, Carmichael-Jack founded Burst Digital, a creative branding agency based in London and New York. He scaled it to 15 employees and landed contracts with globally recognized brands. For a teenager, this was not a side project. It was a real company with real revenue and real clients.
He also launched Assist, an on-demand services platform in London — an Uber-for-everything play that taught him how to build consumer products, manage logistics, and burn through the kind of problems that only marketplaces generate. Neither venture made him rich. Both made him dangerous.
”I’ve always been obsessed with companies. I started my first business when I was 7 — a candy store in my bedroom. Since then it’s just been startups nonstop.” — Jaspar Carmichael-Jack
The Realization That Most Work Shouldn’t Be Done by Humans
By 2023, Carmichael-Jack had spent years watching sales teams drown in repetitive tasks — prospecting, data entry, cold email sequences. The explosion of large language models convinced him that 80% of a business development representative’s job could be automated entirely. Not augmented. Replaced.
He co-founded Artisan in July 2023 with Dr. Rupert Dodkins, an Oxford-trained astrophysicist. Their thesis was blunt: build AI employees — called Artisans — that work alongside human teams but handle the grunt work no one wants to do. They named the first one Ava and pointed her at outbound sales.
The timing was surgical. Y Combinator accepted them into the Winter 2024 batch. Within three months of launch, Artisan hit $1 million in ARR.
From $0 to $5 Million ARR — and One Billion Angry Impressions
Growth came fast, but Carmichael-Jack wanted faster. In late 2024, Artisan plastered San Francisco with billboards reading “Stop Hiring Humans,” “Artisans Won’t Complain About Work-Life Balance,” and “Humans Are So 2023.” The city lost its mind.
The campaign was pure rage-bait by design. It generated over one billion impressions, hundreds of press articles, a Reddit AMA that went spectacularly wrong, and thousands of death threats. It also drove $2 million in new annual recurring revenue directly attributable to the controversy.
”No, I don’t believe AI will replace people — which is ironic, because we did the billboards that said ‘stop hiring humans.’ That was mostly just for attention. Human labor becomes more valuable when you have the AI complement.” — Jaspar Carmichael-Jack
In April 2025, Artisan closed a $25 million Series A led by Glade Brook Capital, with participation from Y Combinator, HubSpot Ventures, Day One Ventures, BOND, and Soma Capital. Total funding reached $46 million. The company that told San Francisco to stop hiring humans was, ironically, hiring aggressively.
88 People, One AI CEO Prank, and a Product That Keeps Shipping
On April 1, 2025, Carmichael-Jack announced he was stepping down as CEO and replacing himself with an AI version called “Jaspar 2.0.” The internet took the bait again. It was an April Fools’ joke — but one that perfectly matched the company’s brand of provocation.
Behind the stunts, the product kept improving. Ava now handles lead discovery, research, personalized email sequences, and meeting scheduling across hundreds of customer accounts. The company expanded from a single AI sales agent into a broader platform of digital workers targeting marketing, operations, and customer success.
”In this space, you can’t build a differentiated product in six months. The only edge you can build fast is distribution.” — Jaspar Carmichael-Jack
What’s Next for Artisan and Its Youngest Employee
Carmichael-Jack — still the youngest person on Artisan’s payroll — is focused on earning the right to go multi-product. His philosophy is simple: ship better outcomes for the existing AI sales agent before expanding to new verticals. Every incremental release, he says, makes customer results “explode.”
Artisan is sponsoring HumanX 2026 in San Francisco this April. The company is scaling toward a future where teams of AI Artisans work integrated within human organizations — not as replacements, but as the colleagues who handle everything nobody wants to do. Whether that vision calms the billboard critics or infuriates them further is, by now, beside the point. Carmichael-Jack built a $46 million company on the bet that outrage converts. So far, the numbers agree.
