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A London-based startup is betting that artificial intelligence has created more problems than solutions in sales automation, raising $6.2 million to target some of the economy's most lucrative but hard-to-reach industries with a decidedly human-first approach.

Throxy, which provides fully managed outbound sales services for companies selling into traditional sectors like manufacturing, logistics and medical equipment, closed the seed round led by Base10 Partners with participation from Y Combinator. The funding comes as the three-year-old company claims to have reached $1.5 million in annual recurring revenue with just three employees — a ratio that would make even Silicon Valley's most efficient startups envious.

The company's emergence highlights a growing backlash against the proliferation of AI-powered sales tools that promise automation but often deliver diminishing returns. While venture capitalists have poured billions into AI sales development representatives (SDRs) and automated outreach platforms, Throxy's founders argue these tools have fundamentally missed their mark.

"AI-generated messaging does not resonate a lot with the market, and it's not very effective," said Pablo Jiménez de Parga Ramos, Throxy's co-founder, in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. "We barely use AI there. We think the best messages, at least as in today, are generated by humans."

Why manufacturers and logistics firms can't find good sales leads

The challenge Throxy aims to solve stems from a fundamental mismatch between modern sales technology and traditional industries that form the backbone of the global economy. Companies selling software or services to manufacturers, distributors, healthcare providers and logistics firms struggle to find and reach decision makers who often have minimal digital footprints.

"One of the biggest issues for sales teams is people don't have enough pipeline," Jiménez de Parga explained. Having worked at three business-to-business software companies from seed stage to Series D, he witnessed the same problem repeatedly: sales teams spending up to 70% of their time on prospecting rather than closing deals.

The root issue is data scarcity. While LinkedIn boasts 1.1 billion users globally, Throxy has built a database of over 4 billion contacts by mining public company registries, government databases and other sources that traditional sales tools ignore. In the United Kingdom alone, Companies House contains information on 6 million businesses, most of which never appear in conventional lead generation platforms.

"Every single country has company registers," Jiménez de Parga noted. "Every single company also has directors, and all that information is publicly available and you can download it. Yet at my previous companies, we were not using that."

This data advantage becomes particularly valuable in traditional industries where employee tenure spans decades rather than years. "In traditional spaces, people stay — if you find information about a person in 2011, they're probably still there," he said.

How Throxy beats AI tools by using real humans

Caroline Broder, a partner at Base10 Partners who led the investment, said Throxy's focus on underserved industries represents a massive market opportunity that established players have largely ignored.

"The market is almost laughably large — even just focusing on US and EU businesses in a couple of traditional industries like manufacturing, logistics, and distribution results in hundreds of thousands of companies with a real willingness to buy," Broder told VentureBeat.

What sets Throxy apart is not just its data sources but its business model. Rather than selling software licenses or charging monthly fees, the company operates on a pay-for-results basis. Clients only pay when Throxy books qualified meetings with genuine prospects.

"What is a qualified meeting for you? Forget what we think. What is it for you?" Jiménez de Parga explained. "Whatever that qualified meeting is for you is what we'll adhere to, and that's why we never have problems."

This approach addresses a longstanding misalignment in sales organizations, where marketing-qualified leads often fail to convert and sales development representatives clash with account executives over lead quality. By tying payment directly to outcomes, Throxy forces itself to maintain rigorous standards while giving clients predictable returns on investment.

The model appears to be working. Imnoo, which makes AI-powered quoting software for computer numerical control manufacturers, reported generating three to five qualified meetings per week consistently after partnering with Throxy. "The manufacturing industry is one of the toughest markets to crack — it's complex and relationship driven," said Niklas Gerlach, Imnoo's chief operating officer. "With Throxy as our partner, we're starting real conversations with prospects we know will be interested."

Small startup takes on Salesforce and HubSpot

Throxy's approach puts it in direct competition with established giants like Salesforce, HubSpot and newer AI-powered entrants that have raised hundreds of millions in venture funding. But Broder argues that incumbents face structural disadvantages in addressing traditional industries.

"Incumbents like Salesforce and HubSpot are wed to their seat-based pricing model, both in how they charge customers, but also in how they build product," she said. "From a technical perspective, they are building AI features on top of their core, but have not built the product to support that from the ground up."

The founders' contrarian stance extends to their view of the broader AI sales automation trend. In a blog post titled "AI SDRs Are Killing Sales," Jiménez de Parga argued that most AI sales tools create more noise than value, contributing to email saturation that makes it harder for legitimate outreach to break through.

"The rise of AI tools has unleashed a flood of content, automation, and accessibility, saturating every digital space with endless streams of information," he wrote. "The industry may, ironically, be worsening the very problem it set out to solve."

This philosophy translates into Throxy's operational approach. While the company uses artificial intelligence for data processing and lead qualification, human experts craft all outreach messages and manage client relationships. The company describes itself as providing "Service-as-a-Software" rather than traditional Software-as-a-Service.

Can a human-first sales model actually scale?

The challenge facing Throxy is whether its high-touch, human-centric approach can scale efficiently enough to justify venture capital investment. Traditional software companies can serve thousands of customers with relatively small teams, but service businesses typically require linear scaling of human resources.

Jiménez de Parga addresses this concern by pointing to the company's track record of reaching $1.5 million in revenue with three people — a feat accomplished by using their own platform to generate all of the company's sales pipeline.

"We use our own product extensively. We have never spent money on ads because we believe all of our pipeline should be generated by our own product," he said. "If we can't generate leads for ourselves, how can we do it well for our customers?"

The company plans to use its new funding to expand headcount by nearly five times, focusing on hiring additional human experts who can manage larger portfolios of clients while maintaining personalization quality.

Base10's Broder said she's not concerned about scalability challenges. "This is a forcing function for the business to find product-market fit and build something people want faster," she explained. "Tying revenue to results puts a lot of confidence in the team and in the product."

Pay-for-results pricing shakes up sales software

Throxy's success could signal a broader shift in enterprise sales technology, where the pendulum swings back toward human expertise augmented by artificial intelligence rather than AI attempting to replace human judgment entirely.

This trend aligns with growing customer fatigue over automated outreach. Research suggests that positive reply rates for cold emails have declined significantly as AI-powered tools flood inboxes with generic messages that recipients can easily identify as automated.

"I think we're seeing a lot of AI agents, but there's not a lot of AI agents replying to these," Jiménez de Parga predicted. "I think there's going to start becoming, at some point, that there's going to be some sort of AI negotiation."

For traditional industries specifically, the implications could be profound. Manufacturing, logistics, healthcare and other sectors have historically lagged in technology adoption, creating opportunities for companies that can bridge the digital divide with human expertise.

The pay-for-results model may also gain traction more broadly as companies face pressure to demonstrate clear returns on marketing and sales investments. In an economic environment where customer acquisition costs continue rising, outcome-based pricing offers a way to align vendor incentives with customer success.

Throxy graduated from Y Combinator's Spring 2025 cohort alongside companies like 11x, which raised $50 million for AI sales development representatives — representing the exact opposite approach to sales automation. As both companies scale, they'll test competing visions for the future of enterprise sales.

The winner may determine whether the next generation of sales technology amplifies human capabilities or attempts to replace them entirely. If Throxy succeeds, it could prove that in the age of artificial intelligence, the most disruptive innovation is putting humans back in charge.