11xAI raises $24M led by Benchmark to build AI digital employees

11xAI, a startup that builds AI bots for process automation, aka automating end-to-end workflows, just raised a fresh $24 million Series A led by Benchmark. It also one of the growing crowd of AI startups relocating its headquarters to San Francisco, Hasan Sukkar, the company’s founder and CEO, told us. It was founded in London.

The Series A comes about a year after 11xAI raised a $2 million seed round led by Project A Ventures. Founded in 2022, the company calls its AI agents “automated digital workers” and like others in this field, its pitch is that its software can handle repetitive tasks, allowing human employees to focus on more strategic work. 

The company focuses on go-to-market teams, like sales, marketing, and revenue operations. It started out with Alice, an AI sales representative, and has now launched Jordan, which serves as an AI phone representative. “He sounds like a real human. He can have conversations up to 30 minutes in real-time in a way that’s really intelligent,” Sukkar said. 

He says the company is also approaching $10 million in annual recurring revenue and says it counts companies like Brex, Datastax, and Otter as customers, according to its website. 

“Thinking ahead, there will be two additional digital workers that we are launching in the coming months,” Sukkar continued. “All of this is part of our plan to build a suit of deeply integrated agents” — or virtual employees, he added, that have names and faces with job categories they are trained on. 

The 11xAI digital workers are currently trained on 25 languages, including Swedish, Italian, German, and Hebrew. Sukkar previously told TechCrunch that he was working on a bot named James and one named Bob trained to do talent acquisition and human resources tasks, but Sukkar said the company decided to release Jordan, the phone representative, first. 

While Sukkar obviously believes that autonomous agents are the future of the workforce, he also says that such agents are in the very early days of innovation.ow

“Instead of traditional software, which is tools and workflows that make people slightly more productive or efficient, agents enable us to automate activities in a way that operates on autopilot, in a way that requires no humanity, in a way that is extremely high skill,” he says of his vision of a highly proficient, no-human-required workforce.

When AI agents can reliably replace humans in manual processes, “it would be a shift almost as big as the internet or the cloud,” he said. But 11xAI is not without competition in this area. Large established competitors include companies like UiPath, ServiceNow, and even Salesforce. Plus, as we previously reported, AI sales bots are such a fast-growing AI market that there are a good dozen of them beyond 11xAI that are growing quickly, VCs have told TechCrunch. Some of the others include Docket, Regie.ai, AiSDR, and Artisan.  

Investors, like Sarah Tavel, a general partner at Benchmark, who led the $24 million Series A, is quite bullish on 11xAI, though. Tavel, who also wrote a thesis on the importance of AI in work software, now joins the board at 11xAI. 

Sukkar said that the company received about eight investment offers within ten days. “It was a really fast process,” he said. “We leaned into partnering with the team at Benchmark because of the alignment on the thesis 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 will use the money to further product development and expand its team, which currently has a headcount of 27. The company will retain an office in London, though most key staff will be relocated to SF. 

“I started 11x out of an experience where, in one of my first-ever jobs I did back when I was a student, a lot of work that was monotonous and repetitive,” he said, adding that he recalls wishing there was a computer that would do it for him and how much human potential is wasted every day doing such laborious tasks. “Agents enable us to automate in a way that redefines what’s possible.”