A London-based startup building “AI digital workers” to automate business functions such as sales and recruitment has raised $2m (£1.58m) in pre-seed funding.
The startup, called 11x.ai, said its goal is to “automate everything” and has launched its first service – an AI sales associate – to coincide with the funding announcement.
The company says its AI sales development representative, called “Alice”, can identify prospects, research leads by pulling information from the internet, create personalised outreach, and autonomously book meetings.
It plans to launch a customer success specialist called “Bob” and a junior recruiter called “James”.
Founded by Hasan Sukkar, who is also CEO, 11x.ai said it sees a future where AI tools like the ones it is developing free up more time for human staff, rather than replace them.
It is also developing a platform it says will let others create bespoke AI digital workers using no code in as little time as 15 minutes. The company is so named because it believes its AI digital workers can “11x” the productivity of teams.
The funding round, led by Project A Ventures, will go towards building the underlying infrastructure for this service, called Platform X.
The pre-seed round also attracted participation from the scout funds of Sequoia, Accel, and Atomico, in addition to NoLabel Ventures and Tiny VC.
The startup added that 32 “esteemed” founders and operators in Europe provided capital.
Other use cases for the “custom AI-powered workflows” could include human resources, public relations, and fundraising.
The startup is targeting small businesses in addition to larger corporations and says its AI digital workers can integrate with existing software products such as Slack, Salesforce and Outlook.
Sukkar told UKTN that the company sees its competitors as UIPath, Celonis, Automation Anywhere, and Zapier. The startup has five people in its core team, and plans to grow headcount “substantially in the coming months”, Sukkar said.
The company is riding a wave of AI developments – notably large language models like ChatGPT – that have fuelled a funding boom for startups in the space.
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