Bounti, an autonomous AI platform for sales, has secured $16M in funding in a round led by Google Ventures. The funding round also saw participation from Floodgate, Bloomberg Beta, Haystack, Octave Ventures, and MS&AD.

The company's AI platform is designed to expedite research and personalisation in sales, enabling sales teams to focus on meaningful customer interactions.

Co-founded by Matt Cooley and Ashar Rizqi, the Bounti leadership's will be supported by Lew Cirne, founder of New Relic who is joining Bounti as its first independent board member. Bounti's AI technology is designed to support humans in sales, not replace them. The company's AI platform specialises in prospecting, automating research and personalisation work at a large scale.

"We’re going to fix something that is broken about sales and customer engagement today. At Bounti, we're creating technology that empowers sales, marketing, and customer success teams to focus on meaningful human work, and this investment shows that our vision is one that the industry believes in. Let’s create AI-powered tools that enhance our people, not replace them," said Matt Cooley, Bounti co-founder.

Bounti's AI platform can research hundreds of companies for a single sales rep within 5 minutes, identifying buyers and generating personalised emails. Bounti's customers have the option to hand off the entire prospecting function to the company's highly trained sales professionals.

"Turning human-led services into AI-augmented software is the future of how businesses can use AI effectively. We are far away from AGI, and the problems in using AI to make sales autonomous are sophisticated and require deep expertise that comes from real, trained humans. With a Bounti engagement, you get paired with cutting-edge software and a highly trained professional in the latest sales methodologies to accelerate your revenue goals - focusing on outcomes and not just software usage. We will use our funding to invest aggressively in expanding capabilities across both the software platform and human-in-the-loop services component," added Ashar Rizqi, Bounti co-founder.

Bounti's customers have already seen the benefits of the platform. "Bounti is an incredible time saver. We couldn’t enable people fast enough or expect our sales team to produce this level of insight in days, let alone minutes. Bounti allows for intelligent conversations to happen much faster by removing the mundane work that bogs everyone down. You only get one chance to make a first impression," said Bernie Kassar, Bounti customer and founder and CEO of Latitude 39.