In November 2024, when VC giant Andreessen Horowitz announced it had led a $50m funding round into 11x — a small but rapidly growing AI startup from London — few were surprised.
Promising to revolutionise clients’ operations with AI, 11x had enjoyed a meteoric rise just two years after launching in London, winning tens of millions of dollars in investment from high-profile investors like Silicon Valley stalwart Benchmark and Berlin’s Project A. Announcing its own investment, a16z described 11x’s tech as “magical”.
The company is building a set of agentic AI tools or “automated digital workers”, which it said could take on repetitive tasks, like scheduling emails or even taking phone calls with customers, en masse — freeing up humans to focus on more strategic work.
But behind the flashy exterior, 11x struggled to retain both customers and employees, with a “toxic” workplace culture that encouraged 80-hour weeks, saw some sleep in the office overnight and dozens of workers at all levels leave the company.
Insiders say the company’s relentless approach compounded performance issues, with sources telling Sifted at one point more than 70% of customers closed or paused their accounts.
“The company was chaotic,” says one former employee. “The product was very buggy, there was a lot of pressure from customers and it was a toxic environment.”
Founder and CEO Hasan Sukkar disputed the accuracy of the numbers quoted. In a statement, he added: “We work with urgency and hold ourselves to a high bar — because the mission demands it.” Investors including A16z, Benchmark and Project A have all affirmed their support for 11x on social media.
Better than human workers?
Founded in late 2022 in London, 11x rose to prominence by promising to deliver “digital workers” that could automate sales functions like emails and phone calls.
The startup released its first product, an AI agent email bot called Alice, in late 2023. A few months later, Sukkar told Sifted that Alice was already outperforming humans, convincing companies’ prospective clients to take meetings with ease.
“It’s not actually difficult to be better than the average worker,” he said. “The early feedback from customers is that this has tremendous ROI.”
But multiple sources close to the company tell Sifted the product didn’t work as well as the company said and customers often churned off the platform.
“The product was barely functional,” says one former employee. “I couldn’t do my job, everyday was constant fire-fighting.”
By the summer of that year, there were still “lots of issues” with Alice’s cold email outbound, says another former employee. “Some emails were not sent, some went to spam.”
Sometimes automated emails were sent to the wrong customers, leading some 11x clients to immediately terminate their contracts, one former employee said. A report published by TechCrunch on Monday said many companies canceled after their trial because they were not happy with the product, citing one current and four former employees. The company denied these claims, saying such figures were “inaccurate and misleading”.
In a Slack message from July, seen by Sifted, CEO Sukkar warned employees that given the “urgency of the bug situation” and the company “falling way behind plan”, there was a need for a “big short term crunch”.
“We need you to work nights and weekends and will pay bonuses for it…if you are not willing to push hard in this really critical phase you don’t deserve to be at 11x,” he wrote.
Despite such pressures, growth remained high at 11x, a number of insiders tells Sifted. In September 2024, Sukkar said annual recurring revenue had hit nearly $10m, a figure corroborated by another former employee.
But while 11x was acquiring new customers at pace, churn also remained very high. Sources say that at one time at least 70% of customers did not continue their subscriptions after three months in the summer of 2024, meaning those customers either closed or paused their accounts. One employee told TechCrunch that 70-80% of customers were lost, claims the company rejected.
Internal Slack messages from the summer of 2024, seen by Sifted, discuss customer retention sitting at around 20-30%.
One former employee says they were told customer churn was 5% when they were recruited for the role. They quit after finding out it was significantly higher.
In a statement, Sukkar said 11x had “hundreds of happy customers” and the company’s product delivered “real value”. He said: “Every company we’ve referenced was a paying customer that used our product under contract for months. Some later churned—as is normal in any early-stage product cycle.”
A ‘toxic’ work culture
11x has also struggled to retain employees.
Of the startup’s five-strong founding team, only Sukkar remains. At least 34 people have left 11x in the past two and a half years, with at least six departures in 2024, according to LinkedIn. The company currently has 50 employees.
Sukkar said the company works with urgency and that employees “hold [themselves] to a high bar”. He said: “That’s not for everyone, and that’s okay. But the people here now? They’ve chosen this. And they’re building something that matters.”
Speaking to Sifted on condition of anonymity, however, insiders described a “toxic” work culture that demanded long hours from employees, with workers routinely publicly criticised in the office and via Slack.
“On team meetings, people were often called out for not meeting deadlines or targets,” says one former employee.
Employees were often expected to stick to a gruelling work schedule, sources told Sifted, with some encouraged to work up to 80 hours in a week. Some employees worked on Christmas day in 2024 and some have taken to sleeping in the San Francisco office.
One former employee says someone hung a punching bag in the middle of the office, which was used multiple times a day. Another insider tells Sifted they occasionally saw male colleagues doing pullups from a girder in the office.
They add that they overheard coworkers laughing about an interview with a candidate who mentioned work-life balance. “It was very much full-blown hustle, tech bro culture.”
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/11x-toxic-culture-ceo-working-nights-a16z/
