AI startup Doris Labs raises £450k led by Fuel Ventures with Manchester Angels
This article covers Doris Labs, an AI startup, which has raised £450k in a pre-seed funding round led by Fuel Ventures with participation from Manchester Angels and a syndicate of B2B software angels. The funding backs a product that converts scattered sales conversations, emails and documents into a structured ontology to support go-to-market and revenue teams.
Doris Labs, an AI startup building a semantic layer for go-to-market teams, has raised £450,000 in a pre-seed funding round led by Fuel Ventures, with participation from Manchester Angels and a syndicate of B2B software angels. The funding backs a product that aims to convert scattered sales conversations, emails and documents into a structured ontology that can be read by people and AI agents — a potential efficiency play for revenue teams.
Why it matters
Sales organisations rely on CRM fields and human memory, but much of the contextual knowledge that decides deals is trapped in call recordings, email threads and document repositories. By turning that unstructured material into a single, typed data layer, Doris Labs is positioning itself as an underlying memory for a company’s entire go-to-market stack rather than another bolt-on sales tool. If the early customer outcomes hold up more broadly, the approach could change how firms deploy AI agents across revenue operations.
Inside the product
Doris Labs captures conversational and document data and converts it into an ontology — a consistent, typed structure intended to be usable by both humans and AI. On top of that foundation the company has built Sidekicks, which it describes as always-on partners for each deal with individual memory and routines; each Sidekick draws on historical deal data to support ongoing transactions.
Early deployment metrics cited in the announcement include an average saving of six hours of administrative work per sales representative per week and a 72 percent increase in deal velocity for initial customers. Patently, an AI patent platform used by more than 1,000 teams in 40 countries, is named as a reference customer: after adopting Doris Labs, Patently reported a 165 percent increase in deals closing within the forecasted timeline and a 64 percent rise in its deal qualification score. Patently’s chief revenue officer said being shown what was missing in a deal helped identify gaps in sales strategy.
Who are the investors?
The round was led by Fuel Ventures, with participation from Manchester Angels and a group of angel investors from the B2B software industry. Investors point to the founders’ first-hand experience of the problem and the product’s relevance to existing portfolio companies as reasons for backing the startup.
In the announcement, Mark Pearson, Founder and Managing Partner at Fuel Ventures, said:
Hayden and Frazer have lived the problem they're solving, which has translated into how unique and grounded their approach is. Every sales team is about to put AI agents to work, and those agents are only as good as the context they can reach. Whoever owns the layer that holds that context will matter a great deal, and Doris has already built that foundation.
In the announcement, David Levine, Principal at Manchester Angels, said:
Doris caught our attention with a unique approach and credible plan for a huge market. What sealed it was that each angel in our group could point to a moment at their own company where Doris would have made a real difference. That made the investment an easy decision.
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Founder perspective
The company was founded by Hayden Munt and Frazer Kearl. Munt previously worked at Vertice and Kearl at Patsnap; both draw on that operating experience to explain the product focus on data fragmentation across sales workflows.
In the announcement, Hayden Munt, Co-founder & CEO at Doris Labs, said:
We’ve seen it so many times that each deal is treated as if it is siloed from the rest of the GTM - this doesn’t and shouldn't have to be the case. The answer to any deal is there, just no one knows how to find it - Doris does.
In the announcement, Frazer Kearl, Co-founder & CTO at Doris Labs, said:
Agents are only as good as the context they get, and today that is one call or a CRM snapshot. Doris gives them the company's whole GTM history, every deal and every conversation, as one ontology. Our platform, and any MCP-compatible agent can read it.
The founders frame Doris as a platform-level play: by owning the memory layer beneath CRMs and sales tools, they aim to make future AI agents more effective across the board rather than solving one narrow use case.
The bigger picture
The funding comes as UK and European companies ramp up experiments with AI agents in revenue functions. Tools that reduce repetitive admin work and improve pipeline hygiene are attracting attention from investors looking for clear ROI signals. Doris Labs sits at the intersection of AI infrastructure and sales enablement, a space where early wins from customers such as Patently help validate product-market fit.
This deal also illustrates ongoing appetite among UK investors to back early-stage AI infrastructure that can be integrated across existing enterprise stacks. As more sales teams deploy agents, companies that can reliably surface and structure historical deal context may become important pieces of the commercial AI stack.
They've invested in Doris Labs
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