My take on 11x and other AI SDR companies

Last year, I made the claim that AI SDRs are a huge grift. That the companies offering to replace your SDR teams with AI are selling something that’s too good to be true.

Well, check out this headline from TechCrunch:

a16z- and Benchmark-backed 11x has been claiming customers it doesn’t have

And 11x wasn’t just any AI company. They were the darling of the AI SDR space, claiming to have reached over $10 million in ARR under just two years, raising a series B round of $50 million from Andreesen Horowitz at what must’ve been an eye-popping valuation.

Well, it turns out that this story was too good to be true. Their product performed so bad that 80% of their customers would churn after a few months, but with some funny accounting tricks, they were still counting those customers as part of their ARR.

What’s more, they’ve simply added fake customer testimonials from companies like Airtable or ZoomInfo to their website. As TechCrunch reports, both of them trialled the product and decided not to pursue the relationship any further, as it performed significantly worse than their own SDR teams.

Sadly, while 11x might be the first AI SDR company to go down in flames, I don’t have high hopes for the rest of them either.