Ex-Deel Exec Raises $1.6M for Souk, an AI Agent That Chases Down Your Dormant Sales Partners

Souk, a London based B2B software startup, has raised 1.6 million dollars in pre‑seed funding to build an autonomous AI agent designed to identify, re‑engage, and convert dormant business partnerships back into active revenue.

The round was led by Sure Valley Ventures, an AI‑focused investor with offices in London and Dublin whose portfolio includes cybersecurity firm Getvisibility, with participation from Antler, Fuel Ventures, and a strategic syndicate of angel investors drawn from across the B2B software industry.

Souk was founded in July 2025 by chief executive Leo Crowe, alongside co‑founder and chief operating officer Sofia Hamilton and co‑founder and chief technology officer Ayo Alfonso, whose backgrounds span Deel, GitHub, and BlackRock. Crowe's own experience sits at the center of Souk's founding insight: he spent two years building Deel's UK and Ireland partnerships into a revenue stream in the eight‑figure range, a role that gave him a firsthand, sustained view of exactly how partner programs actually behave once contracts are signed. What he observed was a consistent and costly pattern: a large share of partnerships go inactive shortly after signing and are then largely neglected, typically only receiving renewed attention once a company's sales pipeline has already started to shrink.

That pattern is backed by data Souk cites directly: almost 80 percent of partner‑driven revenue comes from fewer than 20 percent of a company's partners, and most partnerships stop generating meaningful activity within a year of being established. Despite that imbalance, companies frequently continue directing the bulk of their partnership resources toward recruiting new partners rather than reactivating and properly nurturing the partners they already have, a dynamic Souk's product is built specifically to correct.

The company's core product is Coco, an AI Partner Development Manager designed to function as what Souk describes as a tireless, always‑on agent for partnerships. Rather than requiring a human partner manager to track relationship status manually across spreadsheets and email threads, Coco handles the end‑to‑end task lifecycle of partner management autonomously, including sourcing new potential partners, managing personalized engagement cadences, monitoring performance in real time, and even automating payout clearing once a partnership generates revenue. That scope distinguishes Souk's positioning from most partner relationship management tools currently on the market, which largely require manual outreach and relationship upkeep even after a partnership has been logged into the system.

Sure Valley Ventures and the round's backers have pointed to the deliberately narrow scope of Souk's product as a strength rather than a limitation. Rather than attempting to replace an entire customer relationship management system, Souk is targeting one specific, chronically neglected workflow within it, partner relationship maintenance and reactivation, with a fully autonomous agent purpose‑built for that task. That focused approach reflects a broader pattern increasingly visible across early‑stage AI funding: rather than backing companies that promise to replace an entire business function outright, investors are increasingly drawn to startups that identify one narrow, measurable, revenue‑linked activity within a larger workflow and fully automate that piece first.

Souk enters a partner relationship management software market that is itself growing quickly, expected to expand from 19.45 billion dollars in 2025 to 22.2 billion dollars in 2026, and reach 37.97 billion dollars by 2030. That growth is underpinned by a broader structural shift in how global commerce happens: roughly 75 percent of international trade now flows through indirect channels such as partners, resellers, and affiliates rather than direct sales relationships, making partner network health an increasingly material factor in company revenue rather than a peripheral sales channel activity.

Souk is not alone in targeting this specific niche. Belgian startup Introw raised 3 million dollars in November 2025 for its own AI‑powered partner platform, though Souk has positioned its approach as differentiated by aiming for genuine autonomy in partner outreach and reactivation, rather than the more common model of AI‑assisted tools that still require significant manual intervention from a human partner manager to actually execute outreach and follow‑up.

The new funding will be used entirely for product development, with Souk focused specifically on building out Coco's core machine learning architecture and refining its predictive partner‑reactivation models, the systems that determine which dormant partners are most likely to generate meaningful revenue if re‑engaged, and what kind of outreach is most likely to succeed in reviving that relationship. With a founding team drawing directly on hands‑on experience scaling a major SaaS company's partner program, and a product aimed at a workflow investors and industry data alike suggest has been chronically under‑resourced relative to its revenue potential, Souk's early bet is that reactivating dormant partnerships represents a faster, more capital‑efficient path to new B2B revenue than the recruitment‑heavy playbook most partnership teams currently default to.