Souk raises $1.6M to make B2B partner programmes stop leaking revenue

Souk (London) has raised $1.6 million (approximately €1.47 million) in a pre-seed round led by Sure Valley Ventures, with participation from Antler and Fuel Ventures, alongside strategic angel investors from the B2B software industry. The capital funds the ML architecture of Coco, Souk's autonomous partner-management agent, and the development of predictive partner-reactivation models.

Souk was founded in July 2025 by Leo Crowe (formerly Deel), Sofia Hamilton (formerly BlackRock), and Ayo Alfonso (formerly GitHub). The company's product, Coco, is an autonomous AI agent designed to manage the full B2B partnership lifecycle for channel-heavy software companies — the resellers, referral partners, and integration partners that represent a theoretically large revenue source most companies have never fully activated.

The dormant partner problem

A B2B software company with 200 registered partners typically generates 80% of its partner-sourced revenue from fewer than 20 of them. The rest exist on a list: they completed onboarding, received credentials, attended a webinar, and have not engaged since. This is not a selection failure — dormant partners were selected because they fit the profile. It is a capacity failure: partner success is a relationship function that does not scale with headcount.

Coco monitors the signals that distinguish a dormant partner close to reactivation — login patterns, deal activity, co-marketing behaviour — from one that has moved on. It initiates engagement sequences, maintains the cadence across the full portfolio, tracks performance against agreed quotas, and clears payouts when deals close. The autonomous framing matters: the value proposition is not a better CRM for a partner manager; it is the ability to maintain active relationships across a partner portfolio an order of magnitude larger than a human team could manage.

Three founders, three adjacent gaps

The founding team covers the product's three functional domains deliberately. Crowe's Deel background spans international commercial and partner operations in a company that built channel distribution from zero. Hamilton's BlackRock background covers the financial operations — payment calculation, payout clearing — that partner programmes mishandle at scale. Alfonso's GitHub background covers developer-adjacent tooling and the integration patterns that partner programmes in B2B software actually rely on.

At $1.6M and founded in mid-2025, Souk is building its first reference cases. The commercial question is not whether the product works — it is whether partner reactivation revenue is attributable clearly enough to justify the recurring cost of an autonomous agent, in a category where attribution has traditionally been disputed between partner teams and direct sales.