Sales Teams Are Hitting A Breaking Point With Cold Outreach

The entire outbound ecosystem is hitting a breaking point. AI tools have made it trivial to generate infinite outreach, and just as trivial for buyers to ignore it. Reply rates are collapsing across sectors, and sales teams are admitting the obvious: the volume game is over.

That is the backdrop for Homie, a Helsinki-based startup that has just received €1 million in funding to pursue a very different approach, scaling word-of-mouth instead of blasting cold messages.

Homie says its network-led approach reflects how people actually buy today. Instead of flooding inboxes with automated sequences, the platform maps existing relationship paths across employees, customers and investors and turns those routes into trackable introductions.

Automated Outreach Has Run Its Course

Outbound cold outreach was never a perfect tool. But AI tools dramatically lowered its cost, making low-quality distribution even easier and amplifying fatigue on both sides of the conversation.

“We built Homie to prove that trust scales better than noise,” says Markku Vuorinen, CEO and co-founder of Homie. “When teams use the networks they already have, growth stops feeling like a numbers game and starts feeling like a conversation.”

Despite billions poured into AI-assisted sales automation, average B2B cold email reply rates have steadily declined. Buyers and decision-makers increasingly swipe past templated messages, leaving productivity stuck at volume without quality.

Turning Relationships Into Measurable Growth Channels

Homie’s platform is designed for teams tired of being ghosted and buyers fed up with endless outreach. Instead of chasing messages, it uncovers warm paths hidden inside existing networks and helps sales teams manage introductions like a pipeline channel.

The platform is already in use at more than 250 companies globally, including Revenue Hero, Lorikeet and Circuit.ai. It helps teams identify when a colleague, customer or investor has a relevant connection and turns that into a nurtureable, trackable conversation.

Juha Ruohonen, general partner at Superhero Capital, the lead investor in the round, says this shift was overdue. “Most teams ended up automating noise instead of trust, and amplifying quantity over quality,” he says. “Homie takes a quieter, smarter approach, using technology to make real connections scalable.”

Funding And A Global Launch For A New Sales Playbook

Homie’s €1 million pre-seed funding was led by Superhero Capital with participation from Antler, and it coincides with the platform’s official launch. The startup plans to use the capital to expand across Europe and North America and deepen integrations with leading CRM and sales tools.

Founded in 2024 through Antler’s founder residency in Helsinki, Homie is built around the idea that scaling relationships should be part of sales technology, not just scaling messages.

Investors see this as part of a broader shift in how revenue teams think about growth. With automation saturating most modern channels, authenticity and trust are emerging as rare competitive advantages rather than optional extras.

Why The Shift From Volume To Trust Matters

Homie’s launch highlights a wider tension in tech today. On one side are tools designed to optimise volume and on the other are buyers increasingly immune to noise. The pushback is real. Decision makers are more likely to engage when the connection is warmed through a mutual contact than when a templated email arrives unprompted.

“Maybe it takes a few Finns to remind the world that silence can be powerful,” Vuorinen says. “You don’t have to shout to be heard.”

For sales teams that have spent years chasing ever-higher outreach numbers, that perspective feels like a reset. Instead of asking how many messages they can send, they now ask which introductions matter more.

The Next Era Of B2B Growth Will Be Less Noisy

AI-driven sales tools are not going away, but their role is shifting. The noise economy that once promised faster growth has revealed its limits. Warm introductions, trust-based referrals and network-driven paths are emerging as sustainable alternatives.

In an era where every inbox is fragmented and every sequence can be ignored, Homie’s bet is that real relationships made visible and manageable will outperform automated noise.

Whether that proves true across sectors remains to be seen. But for now, this is one of the clearest signals yet that the post-AI sales landscape is being shaped by quality of connection, not quantity of messages.