One of the most talked about European AI startups, which specialises in developing autonomous AI-powered sales agents, is set to launch up to 20 AI agents next year and is on the hunt for “killer engineering teams” as it targets acqui-hires.

11x was founded in London in 2022 but relocated to San Francisco’s Bay Area earlier this year, amid investor demand for the move as well as proximity to talent and the big AI frontier players.

The startup, which has bagged around $76m of investment, is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Benchmark, 20VC, and Lux Capital.

Earlier this year, it secured $50m in a Series B funding, led by Andreessen Horowitz, valuing it at around $320m.

11x’s agents, or what 11x calls “digital workers”, are designed to replace or enhance human sales reps, or sales development representatives (SDRs) as they are formally called, which are mainly tasked with generating sales leads.

11x has two digital workers, Alice, who handles sales lead-generation, research and customer outreach and Jordan, a voice-enabled agent who speaks over 30 languages and handles inbound and outbound calls.

In January, 11x will unveil Alice 2.0, a souped-up version of its flagship AI agent, according to its head of growth Keith Fearon, and is planning to launch up to 20 different agents next year.

Fearon says:

“We have rebuilt our core product Alice from scratch. When we built Alice a year and a half ago, the technology was so much more limited with what you can do with agentic stuff.”

Alice 2.0 is built on top of LLMs from the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic, and others.

Describing Alice 2.0, Fearon says it will be a “totally autonomous, self-learning AI agent”.

He said:

“It’s going to be an overachiever on the team. It is going to start teaching you about your own business. For example, what messaging is resonating with what different personas.”

For instance, Alice 2.0 will now have the facility to reconnect with a sales lead at a rearranged time, after the lead was unavailable the first time around.

The rebuild means there will also be a Jordan 2.0.

Furthermore, Fearon says: “We are trying to launch at least eight workers, upwards of 20 if we get it right.”

The new agents will run across areas including revenue operations, sales enablement, customer success, solution engineering and marketing.

11x competes against the likes of Salesforce and startups like Artisan.

11x, which still has a London office, now has a staff headcount of around 50, having grown by 4x in the past three months, primarily recruiting engineers.

11x recently acquired Y Combinator-backed voice AI startup Opkit, which was essentially an acqui-hire, meaning it was purchased for human talent.

On further acquisitions, Fearon says:

“The biggest thing we are looking for is killer engineering teams ideally in the AI space.

“Forget about revenues, forget about numbers, if they are a killer engineering team and they do AI we want you.”

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