I evaluated legacy sales engagement platforms like Apollo alongside modern point solutions and internal custom scripting setups built around LLM scraping workflows. Traditional database tools remain highly static, requiring manual export pipelines, separate enrichment scripts, and continuous human validation to avoid deliverability decay. Point tools often fail to handle complex inbound response reasoning or multi turn objection handling seamlessly. I chose Artisan because it closes the operational loop completely, handling ingestion, execution, and calendar synchronization within one system.
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.
Is this only for B2B ? Also, whats the source of the 300M+ contacts ? Is it across the globe or specific to geography ?
Ava 2.0
@vinitvr not just B2B, we also have a local business database (200M+ businesses). We waterfall-enrich across 15+ providers
@lucas_moeller Thanks, but is it based on geography ? Like can I find prospective leads in Asia / Europe etc ?
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!
Wanted to try out, still wasn’t able to pass onboarding page. After feeling all info, didn’t see next step (on mobile)
Ava 2.0
@avrutova sorry, onboarding needs to be on computer!
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"
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.)