Ava 2.0 - Your AI BDR that runs outbound sales autonomously
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Ava is an AI BDR that runs your entire outbound on autopilot. She sources leads from 250M+ professionals, runs multi-channel outreach, and books qualified meetings. Fully autonomously.
I'm Jaspar, co-founder and CEO of Artisan. I started my first business at 7, selling candy from my bedroom. Since then I've raised $36M+ to build AI employees and we're currently at ~$10M ARR.
Some of you might remember our first PH launch in February 2024 when we first launched Ava the AI BDR.
Today we're releasing Ava 2.0. We rebuilt her from the ground up and she is now fully autonomous and she runs your entire outbound on autopilot. She finds leads, sends personalized outreach, handles objections, and books meetings on your calendar. No human in the loop.
She searches through 300M+ contacts, enriches every lead, and watches for intent signals like funding rounds and leadership changes. She launches personalized multi-channel campaigns, runs continuous multi-variate tests, and auto-optimizes toward what converts. When a prospect replies, Ava reads the response, handles objections, answers questions, and books the meeting.
With Artisan, the entire sales stack lives in one place. Lead discovery, enrichment, signals, sequencing, a dialer, and deliverability infrastructure. All in one platform.
She's already running outbound for thousands of reps at companies like Corgi, SaaStr, Quora, and CookUnity.
🎁 For the PH community: new users get $300 in free credits. No credit card required. artisan.co
Jaspar
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@jasparcj Very cool concept but I have to be honest - I have some reservations about the fully autonomous part. As others have mentioned, will this feel like spray and pray outreach, or will Ava understand the nuances of the buyer journey?
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The hard part with an autonomous BDR is not “can it send more?” It is whether the system knows when not to send.
For a tool like Ava, I’d want the review layer to make a few things very visible before outreach goes out: why this account, why now, what evidence supports the angle, what would make this a bad fit, and what the fallback is if confidence is low. Learning from ignores and bad-fit replies matters as much as learning from booked meetings.
That’s the line between useful outbound automation and just scaling the same spray-and-pray problem with better copy.
@jim_jeffers you can set qualification criteria and Ava checks each lead with an AI research agent. She filters out hard disqualifiers before they enroll, and for anything she can't verify upfront, she just asks the lead directly before booking!
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That’s a good safeguard, especially the hard-disqualifier layer before enrollment.
One thing I’d make really explicit in the product is the “why not enrolled” history too. For autonomous outbound, the skipped accounts are part of the learning loop: which assumptions were too strict, which signals predicted bad fit, and which unsure cases should have gone to a human earlier. That would make the automation feel much more accountable.
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Looks interesting. The data with Eva covers for niche industries like local small businesses as well or its more relevant for B2B startups and the likes??
@ankur_jeswani we have a professional database and a local business database!
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with ava running fully autonomous multi channel campaigns on autopilot, how are you guys managing local domain safety under the hood? sending huge volumes of automated personalizations can flag spam filters fast if the inbox infrastructure isn't airtight. good job team
@iamanantgupta thank you! Ava is now fully autonomous and books meetings with no human in the loop. It's a ground-up rebuild from our v1. New on top: a built-in dialer, chat to run her in plain language, ML lead scoring, dedicated campaign types (cold, warm, cross-sell/upsell, signals), and a lot more. Plus self-serve at $250/mo (down 10x from $2.5k)!
fully autonomous outbound with no human in the loop is bold. the personalization has to be genuinely good or you're just automating spam at scale. curious what the reply rates look like vs a human SDR running the same list
Congrats on the launch! A few questions: - How does she learn about my ICP, the different segments, and their specificities (buying journey, pain, etc.) - Is Ava improving over time? - What kind of outreach volume does she handle (via email & LinkedIn)? How does she ensure great deliverability? - Is phone call on the roadmap? - Among the 300M+ contacts database, what's most represented? (B2B? US?, etc.)
Report
Over the last 3 months, I’ve tested 8–9 similar services. All of them had the same problem — the credits disappear within a few days, and the cost per contact ends up being quite high. Have you calculated the average cost per contact or other metrics?
Congrats on the launch! Going from AI-assisted outbound to fully autonomous outbound is a pretty big leap. Curious to see how Ava handles the messy real-world objections that make human reps earn their coffee.
@alina_tyslenok_ thank you! Ava handles objections autonomously based on a knowledge base you set, and anything she's unsure on escalates to a human. You can also set plain-text escalation rules, e.g. "escalate if they bring up pricing"
Replies
Ava 2.0
Hey PH 👋
I'm Jaspar, co-founder and CEO of Artisan. I started my first business at 7, selling candy from my bedroom. Since then I've raised $36M+ to build AI employees and we're currently at ~$10M ARR.
Some of you might remember our first PH launch in February 2024 when we first launched Ava the AI BDR.
Today we're releasing Ava 2.0. We rebuilt her from the ground up and she is now fully autonomous and she runs your entire outbound on autopilot. She finds leads, sends personalized outreach, handles objections, and books meetings on your calendar. No human in the loop.
She searches through 300M+ contacts, enriches every lead, and watches for intent signals like funding rounds and leadership changes. She launches personalized multi-channel campaigns, runs continuous multi-variate tests, and auto-optimizes toward what converts. When a prospect replies, Ava reads the response, handles objections, answers questions, and books the meeting.
With Artisan, the entire sales stack lives in one place. Lead discovery, enrichment, signals, sequencing, a dialer, and deliverability infrastructure. All in one platform.
She's already running outbound for thousands of reps at companies like Corgi, SaaStr, Quora, and CookUnity.
🎁 For the PH community: new users get $300 in free credits. No credit card required. artisan.co
Jaspar
@jasparcj Very cool concept but I have to be honest - I have some reservations about the fully autonomous part. As others have mentioned, will this feel like spray and pray outreach, or will Ava understand the nuances of the buyer journey?
The hard part with an autonomous BDR is not “can it send more?” It is whether the system knows when not to send.
For a tool like Ava, I’d want the review layer to make a few things very visible before outreach goes out: why this account, why now, what evidence supports the angle, what would make this a bad fit, and what the fallback is if confidence is low. Learning from ignores and bad-fit replies matters as much as learning from booked meetings.
That’s the line between useful outbound automation and just scaling the same spray-and-pray problem with better copy.
Ava 2.0
@jim_jeffers you can set qualification criteria and Ava checks each lead with an AI research agent. She filters out hard disqualifiers before they enroll, and for anything she can't verify upfront, she just asks the lead directly before booking!
That’s a good safeguard, especially the hard-disqualifier layer before enrollment.
One thing I’d make really explicit in the product is the “why not enrolled” history too. For autonomous outbound, the skipped accounts are part of the learning loop: which assumptions were too strict, which signals predicted bad fit, and which unsure cases should have gone to a human earlier. That would make the automation feel much more accountable.
Looks interesting. The data with Eva covers for niche industries like local small businesses as well or its more relevant for B2B startups and the likes??
Ava 2.0
@ankur_jeswani we have a professional database and a local business database!
with ava running fully autonomous multi channel campaigns on autopilot, how are you guys managing local domain safety under the hood? sending huge volumes of automated personalizations can flag spam filters fast if the inbox infrastructure isn't airtight. good job team
Mailwarm
How do you keep it from burning your domain reputation or sending the same outbound style to everyone?
GrowMeOrganic
Congrats. Since Feb 2024, what has changed and what is upcoming on the roadmap?
Ava 2.0
@iamanantgupta thank you! Ava is now fully autonomous and books meetings with no human in the loop. It's a ground-up rebuild from our v1. New on top: a built-in dialer, chat to run her in plain language, ML lead scoring, dedicated campaign types (cold, warm, cross-sell/upsell, signals), and a lot more. Plus self-serve at $250/mo (down 10x from $2.5k)!
BetterClaw
fully autonomous outbound with no human in the loop is bold. the personalization has to be genuinely good or you're just automating spam at scale. curious what the reply rates look like vs a human SDR running the same list
Receiptor AI
Congrats on the launch! A few questions:
- How does she learn about my ICP, the different segments, and their specificities (buying journey, pain, etc.)
- Is Ava improving over time?
- What kind of outreach volume does she handle (via email & LinkedIn)? How does she ensure great deliverability?
- Is phone call on the roadmap?
- Among the 300M+ contacts database, what's most represented? (B2B? US?, etc.)
Over the last 3 months, I’ve tested 8–9 similar services. All of them had the same problem — the credits disappear within a few days, and the cost per contact ends up being quite high. Have you calculated the average cost per contact or other metrics?
Stripo.email
Congrats on the launch! Going from AI-assisted outbound to fully autonomous outbound is a pretty big leap. Curious to see how Ava handles the messy real-world objections that make human reps earn their coffee.
Ava 2.0
@alina_tyslenok_ thank you! Ava handles objections autonomously based on a knowledge base you set, and anything she's unsure on escalates to a human. You can also set plain-text escalation rules, e.g. "escalate if they bring up pricing"