Latest news with #Carmichael-Jack
Straits Times
05-08-2025
- Business
- Straits Times
The 20-somethings are swarming San Francisco's AI boom
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox The entrepreneurs are part of a fast-growing cohort of chief executives in their 20s who have flocked to San Francisco's AI boom. SAN FRANCISCO – Mr Brendan Foody had just finished his sophomore year at Georgetown University in 2023 when he dropped out to jump into the artificial intelligence fray in San Francisco. Mr Karun Kaushik dropped out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that year to move to California after constructing an AI tool in his dorm room. And Mr Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, who was traveling the world after high school, had the same idea in 2022. Now Mr Foody, 22, Mr Kaushik, 21, and Mr Carmichael-Jack, 23, are each running AI startups within a 30-minute walk of one another in San Francisco. They have raised millions of dollars for their businesses and are supervising dozens of employees. They all have a dream that their companies will make it big. 'When ChatGPT came out, it was so clear to me that this is obviously going to be a paradigm shift,' said Mr Carmichael-Jack, the chief executive of Artisan, which makes an AI sales assistant and has raised more than US$35 million (S$45 million) in funding. 'I knew I wanted to be involved in that.' The entrepreneurs are part of a fast-growing cohort of chief executives in their 20s who have flocked to San Francisco's AI boom. Among others, there are also Mr Scott Wu, 28, of Cognition AI, which makes a software coding assistant; Mr Michael Truell, 24, of Cursor, which sells an AI code editor; and Mr Roy Lee, 21, of Cluely, an AI software startup. Perhaps the most prominent is Mr Alexandr Wang, 28, who led the startup Scale AI before Meta tapped him in June to run its new superintelligence lab. Their growing ranks have injected a dose of youthful elan to the AI frenzy, which has been dominated by longtime tech giants like Google and Nvidia and decade-old startups like OpenAI. Top stories Swipe. Select. Stay informed. Asia What's it like to deal with brutal US tariffs? Ask Malaysia Singapore Singapore launches review of economic strategy to stay ahead of global shifts Singapore A look at the five committees reviewing Singapore's economic strategy Opinion Keeping it alive: How Chinese opera in Singapore is adapting to the age of TikTok Life Glamping in Mandai: Is a luxury stay at Colugo Camp worth the $550 price tag? Sport World Aquatics C'ships in S'pore deemed a success by athletes, fans and officials Singapore Strong S'pore-Australia ties underpinned by bonds that are continually renewed: President Tharman Many of the entrepreneurs know one another from college or startup incubators like Y Combinator. Work is often at the centre of their lives – founders have to grind, after all – but they also host ping-pong nights, play poker together and meet up at networking events in the city. Venture capitalists are adding to the new blood with intensive startup programs geared to high school and college students. It's part of a well-worn pattern in which droves of young hopefuls are drawn to the nation's tech capital by a promising technology, much as 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg and his friends did in the mid-2000s when they showed up in Silicon Valley with Facebook. Mr Zuckerberg, now 41, dropped out of Harvard. 'When you have these big technology waves, the whole chessboard changes and everything is up for grabs,' said Mr Saam Motamedi, an investor at the venture capital firm Greylock Partners. Greylock's San Francisco office recently hosted four 19-year-olds who are working on a 'stealth' artificial intelligence startup, he said, though the teenagers have since moved into their own space. Mr Pete Koomen, a general partner at Y Combinator, said the median age of the San Francisco incubator's most recent cohort of participants this year was 24, down from 30 in 2022. 'This is a group of largely young founders that have picked up everything and moved and gone all in on a crazy dream,' he said. 'They're all in close proximity with each other. They're helping each other out. They're competing with each other. It just creates this incredible energy.' Mr Foody runs Mercor, which provides automatic screening of resumes and AI job interviews. He established the company with two high school friends from San Jose, California, Mr Surya Midha and Adarsh Hiremath. Mr Midha, 22, is Mercor's chief operating officer and Mr Hiremath, 22, the chief technology officer. In February, they raised US$100 million, bringing Mercor's total funding to more than US$132 million and valuing the startup at US$2 billion. Investors include the venture capital firms General Catalyst and Benchmark. As Mercor flourished, it hired 150 employees in San Francisco and India. The startup is outgrowing its current space, which has a ping-pong table and dog cages dedicated to office pets, and is preparing to move into a bigger office nearby. Mr Midha said there was a sense of 'extreme urgency' and 'existential dread' among his peers who felt that now was the time to start an AI company. It 'just felt crazy not to go all in' on Mercor, he added. Mercor has already spawned other young chief executives. Ms Rithika Kacham, 22, who dropped out of Stanford during her senior year in 2024 to join Mercor as Foody's executive assistant, started her own company, Verita AI, in May. Her company hires professionals in various fields to help train AI models to recognise images more accurately, such as an intellectual property expert to help AI determine whether a Mickey Mouse cartoon is real. 'It's kind of this AI inflection point where it felt like almost everyone I knew at Stanford was dropping out to cofound a company,' said Ms Kacham, who was majoring in computer science and product design and is trying to raise money for Verita. To cut through the crowd, some of the young leaders have tried to go viral. In November, Mr Carmichael-Jack's Artisan plastered ads across bus stops in San Francisco with the outrage-inducing directive to 'stop hiring humans' and instead 'hire' the startup's AI sales agent, Ava. People were 'shocked' by the marketing campaign because it tapped into fears that AI would replace humans, Mr Carmichael-Jack said, but it also 'made them intrigued about what we were doing'. Mr Kaushik, the chief executive of Delve, a startup that automates the compliance busywork for businesses dealing with sensitive data, founded the company with his MIT classmate Selin Kocalar, 21. 'I don't think about age,' Ms Kocalar said. 'In today's day and age, the barrier to entry is so low with the help of AI.' Soon they may be mingling with an even younger crowd. A billboard in San Francisco on April 28, 2025, announcing Artisan's fund-raising this year. PHOTO: CAROLYN FONG/NYTIMES On a recent Friday in Fort Mason, a converted military hub in the city, the venture capital firm Founders Inc held a summer programme for high schoolers and college students to nurture their startup ideas. Long tables were covered in wires and open boxes of crackers, with some teenagers clustered together tweaking robots while others took a break to play videos games. Among the attendees was Mr Mizan Rupan-Tompkins, 18, a rising sophomore at San Jose State University who is studying computer science but pausing school in 2026 to build an AI-powered device to help unmanned air traffic control towers land airplanes safely. His company, Stratus AI, just got an investment from Founders Inc, which he declined to detail. Founders Inc, which also declined to share the investment amount, typically writes checks of US$100,000 to US$250,000 for startups. 'Stuff moves so quickly' that he could not wait until he'd graduate in 2028 to build a company, Mr Rupan-Tompkins said. 'It's better to be earlier than later, just in case I missed some type of wave,' he said. NYTIMES
Yahoo
09-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Artisan, the 'stop hiring humans' AI agent startup, raises $25M -- and is still hiring humans
It's been a tough but exciting year for 23-year-old Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, founder and CEO of AI sales agent startup Artisan. Artisan just raised a $25 million Series A led by Glade Brook Capital, Carmichael-Jack exclusively tells TechCrunch. Y Combinator, Day One Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, Oliver Jung, Fellows Fund, and others participated as well. A year ago, Artisan was one of the most sought-after grads from the winter 2024 Y Combinator class, raising $12 million in September, one of the biggest rounds of the cohort. In between, Carmichael-Jack and his co-founder, 30-year-old Sam Stallings (a former IBM product manager), have experienced plenty of early-stage chaos. Artisan is one of a bevy of fast-growing startups in the highly watched AI sales development representative (AI SDR) market. It's probably best known for its "Stop Hiring Humans" marketing campaign that has generated many news articles, social media posts, comments, and a few death threats, says the company. On April 1, Carmichael-Jack even announced his "resignation" in response to the backlash, saying he was being replaced by an "AI CEO." It was an April's Fool joke and Carmichael-Jack is still very much CEO. More seriously, when asked if he truly believes that AI will replace people, Carmichael-Jack says, 'No, which is ironic, because we did the billboards that said, 'stop hiring humans' but that was mostly just for attention.' 'Human labor becomes more valuable when you have the AI content,' he says. In fact, his company employs 35 humans and is looking to hire another 22, including in sales, he says. It also just hired a new CTO, Ming Li, who came by way of Deel, Rippling, TikTok, and Google. Artisan, like others in the AI SDR market, also experienced its fair share of customers quitting the product, Carmichael-Jack admits. Entry-level sales seems like an obvious use for AI agents: replacing humans cranking out cold emails. But this is a very young industry, and it has developed a reputation for products that don't work well. First-generation AI SDRs "get a pretty low response rate" and have "relatively high churn" among their customers," says Carmichael-Jack. "I just cringe in pain" when looking at the email pitches Artisan's YC-era product wrote, he said. "We had extremely bad hallucinations when we first launched." But over the past year, Artisan claims that it has (mostly) fixed that. Its flagship product, Ava, only hallucinates maybe one in 10,000 emails, if that, says Carmichael-Jack. By working closely with model provider Anthropic, Artisan created tighter prompts. Companies enter information via a form into Ava and then use a set of rigid prompts. that don't "leave room for hallucination, because it's fed all of the information directly,' he describes. Carmichael-Jack says that Ava has now improved to the point where Artisan counts 250 companies as customers, and has reached $5 million in annual recurring revenue. Artisan is also working on two new AI agent products: Aaron, which will handle inbound messages, and Aria, a meeting manager assistant. Both are scheduled to launch by the end of 2025. Carmichael-Jack recounted another hard lesson: Not every company should be using AI SDR. There are even some entire industries, like offshore development agencies, that Artisan won't take on anymore. "Some customers will just completely flop" with agentic outbound sales, says Carmichael-Jack — and he lets them walk. Like its rivals, Artisan offers contracts that include break clauses allowing customers to end early. "We've historically sold to a lot of the wrong customers, and learned the hard way that it's not just like a typical SaaS product where you can sell to everyone — you have to actually qualify pretty heavily," says Carmichael-Jack. Some customers don't generate enough responses using Artisan's agents, while others generate too many low-quality ones, forcing humans to spend too much effort sorting promising leads from the dead ends. The sweet spot, says Carmichael-Jack, is about a 1% response rate. But Artisan is also among the AI SDR vendors that are learning how to target their outreach better. As the sales automation industry has been doing for over a decade, AI SDR systems like Artisan and Actively AI are starting to read and incorporate signals from social media posts, fundraising data, news stories and the like to better know who to target at all. Carmichael-Jack says Artisan's particular edge is a proprietary database of brick-and-mortar businesses. Beyond that, Artisan is addressing the industry's shaky reputation by also piloting a new flexible "success-based pricing" option with That's the new agentic billing platform founded by Manny Medina, co-founder and former CEO of Outreach. Customers can use instead of signing a long-term contract and pay per response. "We should only really be selling to people if they get value from the product," Carmichael-Jack says. "If we don't get them value, then we shouldn't be charging them money." This article originally appeared on TechCrunch at Sign in to access your portfolio
