# Artisan AI BDR named "Ava" for outbound sales, now rebuilt as Ava 2.0 with a native dialer ## About Artisan Artisan's defining moat is its built-in B2B contact database, which the company now states as 250M+ verified contacts enriched from 22+ sources. Ava sources leads from that database, personalizes outreach across email, social and a native dialer, handles replies and books meetings. Buyers who want one product that owns prospect data and outbound execution end-to-end will find Artisan a tight fit. Sistava does not ship a contact database. Where Artisan runs the outbound motion, Sistava staffs a department: marketing, sales, support, and ops as a coordinated team that uses your existing data sources. ## Platform details - Pricing: Sales-led. No public prices. The pricing page scopes Team, Scale and Enterprise plans by monthly lead volume, mailbox seats and dialer seats, and sends every tier to sales. - Founded: 2023, San Francisco - Funding: Around $48M raised across 5 rounds (YC W24, $25M Series A in 2025 led by Glade Brook Capital) - Last reviewed: 2026-08-14 ## Official website - [Visit Artisan](https://artisan.co) ## What does Artisan actually do? Artisan sells an AI BDR branded as Ava. In May 2026 the company shipped Ava 2.0, described as a ground-up rebuild. The current product covers prospect research, multi-channel campaigns, AI-written personalized outreach, autonomous reply handling, meeting booking, ML-based lead scoring, website visitor identification and a native dialer with parallel calling, on top of a contact database the company states as 250M+ verified contacts from 22+ sources. Ava researches by analyzing social profiles, company websites, funding announcements, technology stacks and industry news, then writes outreach that references specific company initiatives, recent achievements or relevant pain points. The promise is highly personalized cold outreach at scale without adding an SDR seat. Operationally this means: ingest your ICP, point Ava at the database, pick a campaign type (cold outbound, warm outbound, cross-sell and upsell, or signal-triggered), set approval and escalation rules, and let the system run. Cost scales with contacted lead volume, mailboxes and dialer seats. Sistava covers the same outbound pattern (research, personalize, sequence, reply) as one AI Employee role among many, priced for founders who are not yet running a BDR org. Different stage of buyer, same job to be done. ## How much does Artisan cost and what do you get for the price? Artisan still does not publish prices. Its pricing page lists three tiers, Team for a first serious outbound motion at roughly 2,500 leads contacted per month, Scale for outbound across reps and segments at roughly 6,000 leads per month, and Enterprise for custom volume, security and rollout support. Every tier says pricing is scoped to your plan and sends you to sales, and the Ava 2.0 announcement repeats that pricing is custom to your team, motion and volume. Cost therefore scales with the lead volume Ava contacts, plus mailbox and dialer seats and campaign credit usage. That is friendly for buyers who already know their target outbound volume and want a predictable per-lead cost. It is unfriendly for buyers who want to start small and find out. Third-party review sites publish widely different estimates, from a few hundred dollars a month up to several thousand. We could not verify any of them against an Artisan page, so treat every circulating figure as unconfirmed and get your own quote. Contract length is also not published, so ask about it directly. Sistava publishes its plan pricing because the buyer is a founder watching every euro, and signup is self-serve rather than demo-gated. Same outbound capability as one role inside a workforce, without a sales call to find out what it costs. ## When does Artisan beat the alternatives? Artisan wins when you need a mid-market outbound machine with a built-in database. The 250M+ contact pool means you can stay inside the platform for sourcing rather than juggling Apollo, ZoomInfo and enrichment APIs, and Ava 2.0 adds dialing and website visitor identification to the same surface. For teams that hate stitching the data layer themselves, that is a real time saver. It also wins for buyers with a defined volume target and a budget already approved. If you know you want thousands of personalized touches a month across email and phone, and your ICP is stable, Ava is a serious answer and the company has real customers running exactly that motion. It fits less well for founders running small experiments. Volume-based pricing behind a sales call assumes you already have an outbound program to scale. Pre-PMF founders rarely do. Sistava is the better fit there: experiment with an AI SDR alongside an AI marketer and ops role, ramp up only the functions that produce results. Decision rule: Artisan if outbound is the priority, the volume is known and the budget is committed. Sistava if you are still figuring out which function deserves to grow. ## Where does Artisan fall short for bootstrapped founders? Lead quality is the most common complaint. Reviewers including founders who booked meetings via Ava report that the meetings often turned out to be poorly qualified: no budget, no authority, no genuine pain. Booking a calendar slot is not the same as creating a pipeline. That gap shows up across multiple review sites, and Ava 2.0 answers part of it with ML-based lead scoring and qualification before booking, which is worth testing rather than assuming. The second issue is that you cannot size the bet before talking to sales. No price is published, cost tracks lead volume and seats, and contract terms are not stated anywhere public. For a bootstrapped founder, an unknown floor is itself a blocker. The third issue is scope. Like 11x, Artisan focuses on the outbound motion and prices accordingly. A founder paying Artisan still needs to solve marketing, support, ops and content, usually with the budget left over. Sistava bundles those functions as AI Employees on one platform, so the same monthly spend covers more of the company. If outbound is your one bottleneck and you have capital, Artisan can earn its price. If outbound is one of five gaps, you want a workforce rather than a single outbound platform. ## How does Artisan handle data quality and deliverability? Artisan's contact database, stated on its own site as 250M+ verified contacts drawn from 22+ data sources, is built through standard enrichment patterns (social profiles, public web, partner data) and is refreshed continuously. Note that the headline number has been stated differently over time, so confirm the current figure and the coverage for your segment during evaluation. Reviewers generally rate accuracy as competitive with Apollo and ZoomInfo at the mid-market level, with the usual caveats: better in NA/EU than emerging markets, better at tech than at traditional industries, better at director+ titles than at frontline roles. Deliverability is handled inside the platform with warm-up, sending domain rotation and volume throttling. That is necessary because the personalization-at-scale model only works if emails actually land. Reviewers flag deliverability as one of Artisan's stronger operational pieces, especially compared to DIY stacks. Where data quality cracks: niche segments, smaller geographies, and contact data accuracy for individual phone numbers and personal emails. Those gaps mirror the wider enrichment market and are not unique to Artisan. Sistava lets you bring your own data source or pair an AI SDR with a tool like Apollo, which means you pay for the database separately from the worker. Trade-off is more setup; benefit is no lock-in on database quality. Worth weighing if your ICP is non-standard. ## Comparison - [Compare Artisan with Sistava](/en/compare/ai-sales/artisan) — See the two platforms side by side when you are ready to evaluate them.