Autonomous artificial intelligence agent startup Bounti Labs Inc. stepped into the spotlight today, announcing it has closed on a $16 million seed funding round led by Google Ventures.

Investors including Floodgate, Bloomberg Beta, Haystack, Octave Ventures and MS&AD also participated in the round, as did Silicon Valley veteran Lew Cirne, the founder and former chief executive of New Relic Inc. The startup said Cirne will become the company’s first independent board member.

Bounti is the creator of what it describes as a “full-stack, full-funnel agentic AI teammate platform” that’s geared specifically toward sales, marketing and customer success teams. The company says that instead of replacing these professionals, it simply wants to free them up from non-revenue generating work, so they can focus on creating personal connections with sales prospects and getting their deals over the line.

The startup criticizes existing sales-based AI agents, saying that these models are “broken” because they have eroded personalization and human connections. According to Bounti co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Matt Cooley, many customers are “exhausted with outreach that doesn’t connect to their needs.”

Bounti wants to do AI agents differently, and it plans to create a series of AI teammates that specialize in various aspects of the sales business. To begin with, it’s kicking off with a Bounti teammate that specializes in prospecting, with powerful capabilities that allow it to automate research and personalized outreach. It says its agent can come up with more than 500 new sales prospects within just 10 minutes of searching for them, complete with contact information for the person responsible for buying in each organization.

In addition to this research, Bounti will also create highly personalized emails for each lead it unearths, so sales reps can avoid spammy and repetitive outreach.

Bounti’s other co-founder, CEO Ashar Rizqi, said sales professionals will feel as if they’re paired with a highly trained professional in the latest sales methodologies. As such, they’ll be able to avoid the mundane tasks involved in lead generation and focus solely on delivering outcomes.

Though Bounti’s platform is designed to keep humans in the loop, customers can also hand off the entire prospecting and outreach process to its AI models if they desire.

Bernie Kassar, founder and CEO of Latitude Ʒ9 Inc., an early adopter of Bounti’s AI agent, said it has proven to be an “incredible time saver” for his teams. “Bounti allows for intelligent conversations to happen much faster by removing the mundane work that bogs everyone down,” he said. “You only get one chance to make a first impression.”

Bounti said the funds from today’s round will be used to invest aggressively in expanding the capabilities of its AI agents, and especially the human-in-the-loop services component.

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