Souk

London-based B2B software startup Souk has secured $1.6 million (£1.2 million / €1.45 million) in a Pre-Seed funding round led by Sure Valley Ventures (SVV), with participation from Antler, Fuel Ventures, and strategic B2B software angels.

Summary of transaction details:

• Value: $1.6 million (£1.2 million / €1.45 million) Pre-Seed round.
• Sector: Software & SaaS / Enterprise AI / Partner Management (PRM).
• Advisor: Not disclosed.
• Key Entities: Target: Souk (Souk AI Ltd / Souk Technologies); Lead Investor: Sure Valley Ventures (SVV); Co-Investors: Antler (founding investor), Fuel Ventures, and strategic software angel operators; Key Founders: Leo Crowe (CEO), Sofia Hamilton (COO), Ayo Alfonso (CTO).
• Location: London, UK (HQ).

Note: Founded in July 2025 by former Deel UK&I partnerships lead Leo Crowe, former BlackRock emerging markets investor Sofia Hamilton, and former GitHub/Tymbah engineer Ayo Alfonso, Souk tackles a chronic blind spot in B2B go-to-market channels: dormant partner attrition. While roughly 75% of world trade flows through indirect channels and 80% of channel revenue originates from fewer than 20% of partners, industry data shows over 70% of signed partners stop actively selling within 12 months. Companies routinely sink massive resources into recruiting new partners while managing existing ones through disconnected spreadsheets and manual email. Souk replaces this manual overhead with Coco, an autonomous AI Partner Development Manager. Coco operates end-to-end across the partner lifecycle: autonomously prospecting new channel partners, maintaining continuous relationship engagement, tracking attribution and deal progression, and managing automated commission payouts. In early enterprise deployments with tech unicorns, Coco identified high-intent partnerships contributing seven-figure pipeline additions while slashing partner acquisition and onboarding administration down to zero. This $1.6m pre-seed capital injection will be dedicated entirely to product development, expanding Coco's underlying machine learning architecture, and scaling integrations with enterprise CRM and PRM platforms.