11xAI closes a $2M pre-seed round to create autonomous AI workers

11xAI announced the closing of a $2 million pre-seed round led by Project A Ventures today. In conjunction with its fundraise, the company also launched its service.

The London-based company builds automated digital workers that can be used in lieu of human employees. It has built an AI sales development representative called Alice and plans to create James, focused on automated talent acquisition and Bob, targeting automated human resources work in the upcoming years.

Speaking to TechCrunch, co-founder and CEO Hasan Sukkar believes autonomous agents are the future of the workforce and specifically designed 11xAI to help smaller businesses increase their productivity to better compete with larger companies.

The goal is that businesses hire autonomous workers for all parts of their business, creating an AI-powered workforce that runs on autopilot. 

“Our mission is to help people rise above mundane, repetitive tasks, and that way, we can focus on the more creative and more human-driven tasks,” Sukkar told TechCrunch, adding that he hopes to also develop a monetized infrastructure platform that would allow anyone to build an autonomous worker.

While generative AI techniques have found lots of market interest in recent quarters, the technology remains a work in progress. Sukkar told TechCrunch that his company has a product strategy to prevent bias in the AI models, one that includes audits and monitoring, regular bias testings, and a diverse data set.

Sukkar called his startup’s recent fundraising journey relatively easy, as investors understood 11xAI had much potential to scale, especially given the current artificial intelligence boom.

Mila Cramer, a principal at Project A Ventures, said recent AI advancements allowed her and her team to imagine a future with automated end-to-end processes carried out by digital workers. “We are very excited to support 11x in bringing us that future today,” she told TechCrunch. “Hasan has an incredible, unique level of dedication and conviction, which made us immediately believe that he will do something special.”

No Label Ventures, Tiny Ventures, and angel investors Felipe Navio and Mandeep Singh also participated in the round.

Sukkar plans to expand his current team of six by hiring more engineers; he also hopes to expand more into the U.S. market and, of course, is planning to launch two other digital workers.

This company launch comes full circle for Sukkar, who remembers creating his first online marketplace when he was just 14 years old.

In 2015 at the age of 17, he immigrated as part of the Syrian Refugee Crisis to the U.K. He studied engineering at the University of Exeter and began navigating the British business landscape. He worked in venture capital, where he learned ethnic minorities like himself always have to come overly prepared. That journey has led him here with 11xAI.

“In two years, we believe that Digital Workers will be a regular part of how companies around the world work,” Sukkar said. “And we want to enable this outcome.”

This piece was updated to clarify the year Sukkar came to the U.K.