11x Has Been Claiming Customers It Doesn’t Have

TechCrunch, March 24, 2025, by Dominic-Madori Davis and Marina Temkin.

The findings

11x — founded 2022 by Hasan Sukkar, selling AI “digital workers” for outbound sales — was reported to have displayed customer logos without permission, inflated revenue through contracts carrying break clauses, and run a high-pressure workplace.

• ZoomInfo, shown as a customer, was not one. On the pilot: “11x’s product performed significantly worse than our SDR employees.” Their lawyer threatened action over the unauthorised logo and false customer claims.
• Airtable, also displayed, ran a brief trial and “ultimately decided that it wasn’t a fit for our business.”
• Product complaints included hallucinations, poor email deliverability and weak lead generation — less effective and more expensive than competitors.

The numbers: $24m Series A (Benchmark), $50m Series B (a16z); ~$10m claimed ARR in late 2024; 70–80% of early customers did not renew, against a claimed 79% current retention; ~50 employees after relocating from London to Silicon Valley.

Why it is worth a page rather than a link

The gap between “claimed 79% retention” and “70–80% of early customers didn’t renew” is the whole story, and it is not a lie so much as a definitional choice — retention measured over a window that excludes the churn. Combined with break clauses inflating booked revenue, it describes metrics that are technically defensible and substantively false.

⚠️ This is reporting on a private company from sources with interests. The customer statements are on the record and specific; the internal metrics are attributed to sources. Cite what the named customers said with more confidence than the ARR figures.

Connections

• The source for What The Fck TechCrunch. The draft’s target is presumably the press cycle rather than 11x itself — a company whose logos and metrics were reported as false was funded by two of the most respected firms in venture, which makes it a diligence story as much as a fraud story.
• Connects to SaaS Metrics on retention definitions, and to Venture Capital Exceptions on what diligence actually verifies.