11xAI, a startup that builds AI bots for process automation, or end-to-end workflow automation, just raised $24 million in new Series A funding led by Benchmark. It's also one of several AI startups moving their headquarters to San Francisco, according to founder and CEO Hasan Sukkar. The company was founded in London.
The Series A comes about a year after 11xAI raised $2 million in a seed round led by Project A Ventures. Founded in 2022, the company calls its AI agents “automated digital workers,” and like others in the space, its pitch is that its software can handle repetitive tasks so human employees can focus on more strategic work.
The company is focused on go-to-market teams, including sales, marketing and revenue operations. The company started with an AI salesperson, Alice, and has now launched an AI phone representative, Jordan. “His voice sounds like a real human. He can have a conversation in real time for up to 30 minutes in a very intelligent way,” Sukkar said.
According to its website, the company is approaching $10 million in annual recurring revenue and counts companies such as Brex, Datastax and Otter as customers.
“Looking to the future, we plan to release two more digital workers in the coming months,” Sucker continued. “All of this is part of our plan to build a deeply integrated agent suite,” he added. An agent suite is a virtual employee with a name, a face and a trained role.
11xAI's digital workers are currently trained in 25 languages, including Swedish, Italian, German and Hebrew. Sucker previously told TechCrunch that the company was developing bots called James and Bob, which would be trained to handle talent acquisition and HR tasks, but Sucker said the company decided to release call representative Jordan first.
While Sukkar believes autonomous agents are the future of the workforce, he also says such agents are in the very early stages of innovation.
“Traditional software is tools and workflows that make people slightly more productive or efficient, but with agents you can automate activities in a way that runs on autopilot, doesn't require a human, and requires a very high level of skill,” he said of his vision of a highly skilled, human-less workforce.
Once AI agents can reliably replace humans in manual processes, “it will be almost as big a change as the Internet and the cloud,” he said. But 11xAI is not without competitors in the space. Major competitors include UiPath, ServiceNow, and even Salesforce. Plus, as we previously reported, AI sales bots are a fast-growing AI market, with more than a dozen other fast-growing bots outside of 11xAI, VCs told TechCrunch. Other companies include Docket, Regie.ai, AiSDR, and Artisan.
But investors like Sara Tavel, a general partner at Benchmark who led the company's $24 million Series A, are much more bullish on the company. Tavel, who also wrote a paper on the importance of AI in business software, now sits on 11xAI's board of directors.
Sukkar said the company received about eight investment proposals within 10 days. “It was a very quick process,” he said. “We decided to partner with the Benchmark team because of our fit and their track record as one of the most successful investors in the world.” Other investors in the round included 20VC, Project A, Lux Capital and SV Angel.
The company plans to use the funding to accelerate product development and expand its team, which currently has 27 employees. The company will maintain its London office, but most of its core staff will relocate to San Francisco.
“I started 11x because my first job as a student involved a lot of monotonous, repetitive tasks,” he said, adding that he wished there was a computer to do it for him, and remembered how much human potential was wasted doing such tedious tasks every day. “Agents enable automation in ways that redefine what's possible.”