Why Throxy Is Betting on Humans Over AI to Win Hard-to-Reach Sales Markets

Base10-backed Throxy challenges AI sales giants with pay-per-meeting model

A London startup is betting that AI has created more problems than solutions in sales automation. Throxy recently raised $6.2 million to target traditional sectors like manufacturing, logistics, and medical equipment with a human-first sales approach. The company offers fully managed outbound sales services and claims $1.5 million in annual recurring revenue with just three employees—a rare efficiency in the sales tech space.

The problem with AI sales tools

Despite billions invested in AI sales development representatives (SDRs) and automated outreach, many tools fail to deliver meaningful results. According to Pablo Jiménez de Parga Ramos, Throxy’s co-founder, AI-generated messaging often falls flat. "We barely use AI there. We think the best messages, at least as in today, are generated by humans," he said.

Why traditional industries struggle with sales leads

Manufacturers, distributors, healthcare providers, and logistics firms face a unique challenge: decision makers often have minimal digital footprints. This makes modern sales technology less effective. Sales teams spend up to 70% of their time prospecting instead of closing deals, largely because of data scarcity.

Throxy’s advantage lies in mining over 4 billion contacts from public company registries, government databases, and other sources that traditional platforms ignore. For example, the UK’s Companies House lists 6 million businesses, most invisible to standard lead generation tools. In traditional sectors, employee tenure is long, so old data still holds value. "If you find information about a person in 2011, they're probably still there," Jiménez de Parga explained.

How Throxy’s human approach outperforms AI

Base10 Partners, which led the investment round, sees Throxy’s focus on underserved industries as a massive opportunity. Caroline Broder, a partner at Base10, noted the enormous market size in US and EU traditional industries, with hundreds of thousands of companies ready to buy.

Throxy operates on a pay-for-results basis: clients only pay when qualified meetings are booked. This model aligns incentives and ensures high lead quality. "Whatever that qualified meeting is for you is what we'll adhere to," Jiménez de Parga said. This solves a common pain point where marketing-qualified leads may not convert and sales teams clash over lead quality.

Clients like Imnoo, an AI quoting software maker for CNC manufacturers, report consistent qualified meetings weekly. "The manufacturing industry is tough and relationship-driven," said Imnoo’s COO Niklas Gerlach. "With Throxy, we're starting real conversations with prospects who are interested."

Competing with Salesforce, HubSpot, and AI startups

Throxy challenges giants like Salesforce and HubSpot, as well as newer AI-powered entrants. Broder points out that incumbents are tied to seat-based pricing and built products not designed from the ground up for AI integration. Their AI features often layer on top of legacy systems, limiting effectiveness.

Throxy’s founders take a contrarian view on AI sales automation. In a blog post titled "AI SDRs Are Killing Sales," Jiménez de Parga argues that AI tools flood inboxes with generic messages, making it harder for real outreach to succeed. The company uses AI mainly for data processing and lead qualification, while humans craft outreach messages and manage relationships.

Can a human-first sales model scale?

Service businesses usually require scaling human resources linearly. But Throxy reached $1.5 million in revenue with only three people by using its own platform to generate all sales leads. "If we can't generate leads for ourselves, how can we do it well for our customers?" Jiménez de Parga asked.

The startup plans to expand headcount nearly fivefold, hiring more human experts to maintain personalized engagement at scale. Broder sees the pay-for-results model as a forcing function for product-market fit that builds trust and confidence in the business.

Pay-for-results pricing could reshape sales software

Throxy’s success hints at a shift back to human expertise supported by AI, rather than AI replacing human judgment entirely. Research shows cold email reply rates have dropped as inboxes get flooded with generic automated messages.

Jiménez de Parga predicts AI negotiation agents may emerge, but for now, genuine human interaction remains critical.

• Traditional industries like manufacturing and healthcare often lag in tech adoption.
• Throxy bridges the digital divide with real humans backed by AI-driven data.
• Outcome-based pricing aligns vendor incentives with customer success, lowering acquisition risk.

Throxy graduated from Y Combinator’s Spring 2025 cohort alongside companies like 11x, which raised $50 million for AI SDRs—the exact opposite approach. Their competition will test whether sales technology should amplify or replace human skills.

If Throxy succeeds, it could prove that in the AI era, the most effective innovation is putting humans back in charge.