Hasan Sukkar and the trouble with moving fast

Hasan Sukkar gave his early digital employee a name, a face and a job. Alice would find prospects, contact them and help arrange sales meetings. Her human founder would do the rather less tidy work of starting a company: choosing a market, convincing investors, moving countries and eventually deciding who should run it. Software could take a place on the sales team. Succession remained a conversation between people.

He founded 11x to remove repetitive labour from the working day. He became known for his appetite for speed. Yet the company he built brought him to a familiar management problem: how to move from creating something to making it dependable. In May 2025, he handed the CEO role to Prabhav Jain and became non-executive chairman. By then, 11x had travelled from London to San Francisco and attracted two substantial funding rounds.

The door that was supposed to stay shut

Sukkar’s route into that world began well before Alice. He grew up in Syria and created an online marketplace at fourteen. At seventeen, he moved to Britain during the Syrian refugee crisis. He went on to study engineering at the University of Exeter. At Exeter, he acquired the engineering qualification that would take him into his first venture capital internship.

In July 2019, the newly graduated mechanical engineer wrote about a summer spent exploring technology businesses from several angles. His plan took in a property startup before launch, a venture capital internship and Huawei’s Seeds for the Future programme in Shenzhen. He was looking across the machinery of the industry: the people building companies, the people financing them and the technologies they hoped to use.

The internship came through Future VC, a programme intended to broaden access to venture capital. Its first cohort selected twenty people from more than 850 applicants. Sukkar had been told his background would make entering the industry impossible. He applied, got in and spent his time at Seraphim Capital examining investments, doing due diligence, attending board meetings and helping portfolio companies.

His account of that summer has the enthusiasm of someone discovering what happens behind a previously closed door. He called himself the happiest intern ever. The phrase is especially pleasing in an industry where happiness usually arrives wrapped in a slide deck.

A name, a face, a job description

McKinsey came next. Sukkar worked in the firm’s London office from 2020 to 2022. By 2024, his old employer was celebrating his inclusion in Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe. The consulting years sit between his first exposure to venture capital and the business he would put in front of investors himself.

One irritation in his early working life stayed with him: moving information between spreadsheets. There is a special indignity in being employed as the cable between two files. Sukkar’s interest in automation grew from that kind of task, the useful but monotonous labour that fills a working day without asking much of the person doing it.

He founded 11x in London in 2022. The public launch followed in 2023. His launch announcement set out an expansive aim: digital workers handling complete business processes, with humans spending more of their time on work they valued. He also predicted that these workers would become commonplace within two years. That was an aspiration with a deadline, rather than an established description of the world.

The early product gave the ambition a manageable shape. Alice had a particular job in sales development. Buyers could picture the part of their organisation she was meant to occupy. A broad argument about the future of labour now came with something resembling a job description.

The branding mattered. A digital worker with a name asks a different question from a new feature inside an existing application. The buyer starts thinking about responsibilities, supervision and output. Giving software a face does not settle those questions. It makes them easier to ask.

The budget hiding in the job advert

Sales was also a practical place to make the argument. A company advertising for sales development representatives was already showing a willingness to spend money on the work. Sukkar’s early pitch positioned Alice in that conversation. A vacancy became a clue to demand, rather than simply a notice for applicants.

His early account of building 11x described a team studying the routines of human sales representatives before the launch. The target was a recognisable sequence of work: identify suitable accounts, research them, prepare outreach and arrange meetings when prospects responded. The premise depended on understanding what people actually did during the day.

“Velocity defies gravity.”

Hasan Sukkar, 2024

The commercial model followed the same logic. In the approach he described, customers paid for completed tasks. The unit of value could be research on an account or a meeting arranged, rather than another person’s login. His task-based pricing approach tried to bring the purchase closer to the work the buyer wanted done.

That is a consequential choice for a founder. Selling a tool leaves some responsibility for its usefulness with the person operating it. Selling completed work invites a more direct assessment. Did the research help? Was the prospect relevant? Did the meeting lead anywhere? The pitch may be easier to understand, while the standard of proof becomes more demanding.

London, then the larger cheque

The first publicly announced financing was a $2 million pre-seed round led by Project A in August 2023. By April 2024, Sukkar had a Forbes profile. In August, 11x was included among the publication’s Cloud 100 Rising Stars. The company had become visible beyond the early customers who were willing to try an unfamiliar category.

Later that year, the business moved to San Francisco. Sukkar discussed the relocation in a television interview, describing a substantial part of the team moving with it. A change of city put the company in a different network of prospective recruits, customers and investors. It also meant that an organisation first assembled in London had to learn to work across a new geography.

On 16 September 2024, 11x announced a $24 million Series A led by Benchmark. On 11 November, it announced a $50 million Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz. Those are announcement dates, a useful distinction when funding stories make a company appear to raise money at the speed of a calendar notification.

The investor network was now part of the story. Sarah Tavel was associated with Benchmark’s Series A, while a16z’s Joe Schmidt was among the partners backing the business. The latter firm’s investment announcement described Alice and Jordan, a voice agent, as software taking on the preliminary work of finding and qualifying sales prospects.

For Sukkar, those rounds expanded the resources available to pursue the idea. They also expanded the audience waiting to see whether the idea worked. Once a company has that much attention, a pitch travels farther than the founder can personally accompany it.

When velocity meets a customer

In 2025, 11x faced public allegations about its customer claims, which Sukkar disputed. The period also brought questions about customer retention. The public disagreement became part of the company’s early history, alongside the funding announcements and the enthusiasm for digital workers.

The relevant distinction is between a promising idea and a working relationship. A buyer trying a product has a different commitment from a customer depending on it. A forecast of work saved has a different status from work consistently delivered. Those distinctions can seem fussy in a launch announcement. They become central when someone has built a budget or a sales process around the promise.

For a founder selling automation, reliability has an awkward prominence. The buyer wants to stop checking a task so closely. If the task still needs constant attention, the purchase has missed part of its purpose. The software must earn the right to disappear into the working day.

This is where Sukkar’s emphasis on speed meets the less photogenic demands of running a business. Hiring quickly, shipping quickly and winning attention quickly are visible achievements. Keeping the work useful after the excitement of adoption is a slower test, repeated by each customer. A company has to accommodate both tempos.

A different job in his own company

On 5 May 2025, Sukkar announced that Jain would become CEO. His explanation began with a preference: “I love building from the ground up.” He distinguished the fast execution required to establish a business from the operating discipline needed to serve enterprise customers.

Jain had been 11x’s chief technology officer. Sukkar described them as partners and pointed to Jain’s experience building technology and scaling organisations. The proposed division of work was clear enough: Jain would run the company; Sukkar would concentrate on direction, product vision, relationships and opportunities in new markets.

There is a personal decision inside that corporate language. The founder’s title can make every subsequent role look like a reduction. Yet the work changes as the organisation grows. The person who enjoys discovering what a company might become can find a different kind of satisfaction from the person who enjoys making it run predictably.

Sukkar’s new position kept him involved with 11x. It also changed the question his own career posed. Starting the company was already part of his record. Helping it endure would now involve another leader’s judgement as well as his own.

Another bet on the tedious bits

In March 2026, Sukkar appeared among the angel investors in Zalos’s $3.6 million seed announcement. Zalos builds computer agents for finance operations, aiming to carry out work across existing systems and spreadsheets. Its investors included finance executives and other founders, placing Sukkar on the funding side of another automation business.

There is a modest connection worth observing here. The early frustration with transferring data, the digital worker called Alice and the investment in finance automation all concern work between the interesting decisions. The repetitive steps still have to happen. Sukkar has repeatedly put his attention there.

His story remains open at that point: the engineering graduate who found a route into venture capital, the consultant who started an AI company, the founder who moved to San Francisco and then changed his place within the organisation. Alice received her job description early. Hasan Sukkar has had to keep revising his.