Betting that artificial intelligence has created more problems than solutions in sales automation, a London-based startup has raised $6.2 million to focus on a few of the economy's most lucrative but hard-to-reach sectors with a decidedly human-centric approach.
Throxywhich provides fully managed outbound sales services for corporations selling into traditional sectors similar to manufacturing, logistics and medical equipment, closed seed round led by Base10 partner with participation of Y combinator. The funding comes because the three-year-old company says it has generated $1.5 million in annual recurring revenue with just three employees – a rate that may make even Silicon Valley's most effective startups jealous.
The company's rise highlights the growing backlash against the proliferation of AI-powered sales tools that promise automation but often fail declining returns. While enterprise capitalists have poured billions into AI Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) and automatic outreach platforms, Throxy's founders argue that these tools have fundamentally missed their mark.
“AI-generated messaging doesn’t resonate much available in the market and isn’t very effective,” Throxy co-founder Pablo Jiménez de Parga Ramos said in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. “We hardly use AI there. We consider that the perfect news, a minimum of like today, is generated by people.”
Why manufacturers and logistics corporations cannot find good sales contacts
The challenge Throxy The problem to be solved stems from a fundamental mismatch between modern distribution technology and traditional industries that form the backbone of the worldwide economy. Companies that sell software or services to manufacturers, retailers, healthcare providers and logistics corporations struggle to search out and reach decision makers, who often have a minimal digital footprint.
“One of the largest problems for sales teams is that individuals don’t have enough pipeline,” explained Jiménez de Parga. After working at three business-to-business software corporations from seed to Series D, he witnessed the identical problem time and time again: sales teams spend as much as 70% of their time acquiring latest customers moderately than closing deals.
The basic problem is data scarcity. While LinkedIn has 1.1 billion users worldwide, Throxy has built a database of over 4 billion contacts by searching public business registries, government databases and other sources that traditional sales tools ignore. In the UK alone Company constructing accommodates information on 6 million businesses, most of which never appear on traditional lead generation platforms.
“Every single country has company registers,” noted Jiménez de Parga. “Every single company also has directors and all of this information is publicly available and downloadable. However, at my previous corporations we didn't use this.”
This data advantage is especially priceless in traditional industries where worker tenure spans many years moderately than years. “In traditional spaces, people stay — for those who find details about an individual in 2011, they’re probably still there,” he said.
How Throxy beats AI tools by utilizing real people
Caroline Brodera partner at Base10 Partners who led the investment said Throxy's give attention to underserved industries represents an enormous market opportunity that established players have largely ignored.
“The market is ridiculously large – just the concentration of US and EU corporations in some traditional industries like manufacturing, logistics and distribution ends in a whole lot of 1000’s of corporations showing real willingness to purchase,” Broder told VentureBeat.
What sets Throxy apart just isn’t only its data sources, but in addition its business model. Instead of selling software licenses or charging monthly fees, the corporate works on a pay-for-result basis. Customers only pay when Throxy books qualified meetings with real prospects.
“What is a professional meeting to you? Forget what we expect. What is that this to you?” Jiménez de Parga explained. “Whatever that qualified meeting could also be for you, we’ll abide by it, and that’s the reason we never have any problems.”
This approach addresses a long-standing mismatch in sales organizations where marketing-qualified leads often fail to convert and sales development reps argue with account managers over lead quality. By directly tying payment to results, Throxy forces itself to keep up rigorous standards while providing its customers with predictable returns on investment.
The model appears to be working. Imnoowhich makes AI-powered quoting software for numerical computer control manufacturers, reported that after partnering with Throxy, it recurrently has three to 5 qualified meetings per week. “Manufacturing is one of the difficult markets to overcome – it’s complex and relationship-driven,” said Niklas Gerlach, Chief Operating Officer of Imnoo. “With Throxy as our partner, we start real conversations with prospects who we all know can be interested.”
Small startup takes over Salesforce and HubSpot
Throxy's approach puts the corporate in direct competition with established giants like Salesforce, HubSpot and newer AI-powered entrants which have raised a whole lot of tens of millions in enterprise funding. However, Broder argues that incumbents face structural disadvantages in tackling traditional industries.
“Incumbents like Salesforce and HubSpot are locked into their space-based pricing model, each in how they bill customers and in how they construct products,” she said. “From a technical perspective, they’re constructing AI capabilities on top of their core, but haven’t built the product to support this from the bottom up.”
The founders' contrarian stance extends to their view of the broader AI sales automation trend. In a blog post titled “AI SDRs kill sales“Jiménez de Parga argued that almost all AI sales tools create more noise than value, contributing to email saturation that makes it difficult for legitimate outreach to get through.
“The rise of AI tools has unleashed a flood of content, automation and accessibility, saturating every digital space with limitless streams of knowledge,” he wrote. “The industry, sarcastically, could possibly be making the very problem it was trying to unravel worse.”
This philosophy is reflected in Throxy's operational approach. While the corporate uses artificial intelligence for data processing and lead qualification, human experts create all outreach messages and manage customer relationships. The company describes itself as a provider of “Service as a software” as an alternative of traditional software-as-a-service.
Can a human-first sales model actually scale?
The challenge we face Throxy is whether or not its high-touch, people-focused approach can scale efficiently enough to justify enterprise capital investment. Traditional software corporations can serve 1000’s of consumers with relatively small teams, but service corporations typically require linear scaling of human resources.
Jiménez de Parga addresses these concerns by pointing to the corporate's track record of achieving $1.5 million in sales with three employees – a feat achieved by leveraging its proprietary platform to generate the corporate's entire sales pipeline.
“We use our own product extensively. We have never spent money on promoting because we consider that our entire pipeline must be generated by our own product,” he said. “If we will’t generate leads ourselves, how can we do it well for our customers?”
The company plans to make use of the brand new funding to extend headcount by nearly fivefold, with a give attention to hiring additional human experts who can manage larger customer portfolios while maintaining personalization quality.
Base10's Broder said she isn't anxious about scalability issues. “This is a compelling capability for the corporate to search out product-market fit and construct something people want faster,” she explained. “Linking sales to results creates great trust within the team and within the product.”
Results-based pricing is transforming sales software
Throxy's success could signal a broader shift in enterprise sales technology, one by which the pendulum swings back toward human expertise complemented by artificial intelligence, moderately than AI attempting to completely replace human judgment.
This trend goes hand in hand with increasing customer fatigue towards automated contact. Research suggests that cold email response rates are positive have rejected This is critical because AI-powered tools flood inboxes with generic messages that recipients can easily discover as automated.
“I feel we’re seeing numerous AI agents, but there aren’t numerous AI agents responding,” Jiménez de Parga predicted. “I feel there can be some sort of AI negotiation sooner or later.”
The impact could possibly be profound, particularly for traditional industries. Manufacturing, logistics, healthcare and other sectors have historically lagged in technology adoption, creating opportunities for corporations to bridge the digital divide with human expertise.
The pay-for-results model could also gain traction more broadly as corporations face pressure to show clear returns on marketing and sales investments. In an economic environment where customer acquisition costs proceed to rise, outcome-based pricing offers a option to align provider incentives with customer success.
Throxy has graduated Y Combinators Spring 2025 Cohort alongside corporations like 11xwhich raised $50 million for AI sales development staff – which represents the precise opposite approach to sales automation. As each corporations grow, they are going to test competing visions for the long run of enterprise sales.
The winner will get to make a decision whether the following generation of sales technology augments human capabilities or attempts to switch them entirely. If Throxy succeeds, it could prove that essentially the most disruptive innovation within the age of artificial intelligence is putting people back in charge.
