11X

Hasan Sukkar started 11x in London in 2022. The bet was blunt.

Why hire a junior sales rep when software could do the same grunt work around the clock? Sales development is the entry-level hustle of tech.

You find leads. You send cold emails.

You book meetings. It is repetitive and people burn out fast.

Sukkar figured AI could run the whole loop. He named the first product Alice and pitched it as a digital worker, not a tool.

The timing was perfect. ChatGPT had just made everyone believe AI could actually write.

Money followed fast and 11x moved its base to San Francisco.

Companies pay 11x a subscription to rent AI sales workers instead of hiring human ones. Alice is the outbound worker.

It finds potential customers, researches them, and sends personalized emails and messages at scale. Julian is the inbound worker.

It answers leads over voice, chat, and text 24 hours a day. The pitch to a sales boss is simple.

One AI subscription can replace a whole desk of junior reps. In plain terms, 11x sells labor, not just software.

That framing is exactly why the valuation climbed so fast and why the customer claims got scrutinized.

There are two digital workers. Alice is the outbound sales rep.

It builds lead lists, researches accounts, and sends personalized cold outreach across email and other channels without a human clicking send. Julian is the inbound rep.

It picks up leads over voice, chat, SMS, email, and WhatsApp at any hour and routes them to the right place. Both are sold as always-on employees rather than dashboards.

The whole product philosophy is to hide the software and sell the outcome, which is more booked meetings.

11x rode the AI hype wave harder than almost anyone. It branded its products as digital workers with human names, Alice and Julian, which made the pitch feel futuristic and concrete at the same time.

Top investors amplified it. When Benchmark and a16z back you, other buyers assume you must be the real deal.

The company chased fast revenue growth to justify each new round. But that growth-at-all-costs push is exactly where it got into trouble.

Reports say 11x inflated its customer list and its real revenue lagged the story it was telling investors.

In March 2025 TechCrunch reported that 11x had been claiming companies as customers that were not actually using its product. Some listed logos had already churned.

Around the same time, Sifted reported a brutal internal culture with overnight shifts and heavy burnout. For a company selling trust in autonomous AI, a trust problem is the worst possible problem.

There is also the product question. AI sales emails work until every inbox is flooded with them.

If buyers start ignoring AI outreach, the whole model weakens. 11x has to prove the workers actually work.

The backers are blue-chip, which is a big part of the story. Benchmark co-led the $24 million Series A in 2024 at a $90 million valuation.

Andreessen Horowitz then led a $50 million Series B, pushing the valuation to around $350 million. HubSpot Ventures also joined in.

That is a heavy-hitting lineup of software investors betting on AI labor. It is also why the later customer-inflation reports stung so much.

When names like these vouch for you, the scrutiny that follows is brutal.