Souk: AI-Powered Partner Development for the $1.5 Trillion B2B Channel Market

(5 minutes)

Hey 👋, this is the Kitsune VC Newsletter: A subset of Today in AI, where we vest a $10 million early-stage fund over the next 2 years.

We make “investments” every week into early-stage startups we think will make it big in hopes to beat the returns of big funds like Sequoia and a16z 💸. 

We’ve just made another theoretical investment - this one is a SaaS + payment platform reimagining B2B partnerships through agentic AI. Meet: Souk.

The Problem: B2B Partnerships Are Broken

For the fastest-growing SaaS companies, 30-50% of revenue comes through partnerships 💸. 

But getting channel and referral partners right is hard:

• ⏰ 10+ hours/week wasted by partner managers meeting irrelevant leads.

• 🤝 Maintaining “wrong” relationships that yield little or no pipeline.

• 🔄 Endless manual prospecting around 16 hours/week scouring for potential partners.

• 🥶 90% of partnerships deliver $0.

The Solution: AI-Native End-to-End Partner Management

Souk is building an AI Partner Development Manager, named Coco, your tireless, always-on AI agent for partnerships.  

Coco will:

🔍 Find: Automatically discovers relevant partners based on real-time data, learning from every outreach.

📨 Research & Outreach: Runs tailored prospecting and even initiates first contact, optimising for reducing wasted cold calls.

🗓️ Schedule & Contract: Streamlines meetings, contracts, and progression through the partner funnel.

💸 Activate, Track, Pay: Manages onboarding, attribution, and payments – finally making partnerships measurable and scalable.

Souk’s AI “Partner Brain” aims to deliver 10x efficiency from pipeline to payment. Instead of menial tasks, partner managers can focus on high-value relationships, while routine prospecting, onboarding, and deal tracking are fully automated.

Product Traction & Early Results

With the CEO having spent 5 years as an SDR at one of the fastest growing companies globally, Souk is also growing their pipeline fast. So far they have:

Ran 60+ validation calls ✅ and onboarded 14 design partners in pilots. 

Converted 34 prospects into a $XXX,XXX sales funnel; signed 3 LOIs worth $X,XXX and secured pilot users from the UK, US, and EU 🌍🤝 . 

They already have well-known 🏆 paying customers including Deel, Vanta, wise and engine. With a pilot kicking off with Google in Q1

Their pilots had great results:

On average users saw a 35% time saving ⏰ in prospecting and at least 25%+ uplift in partner-sourced revenue over 3-6 month pilots.

On top of this their early testimonials refer to Souk a “game changer”, saving hours and surfacing leads that reps “hadn’t come across before.”

Founders & Team

I have also had the pleasure of speaking to the team in person and they clearly had really great shaped knowledge graphs!

The founding team feels like an all-star group covering sales through Leo, Ops and a VC/finance background with Sofia and technical expertise from Ayo  🙌. 

They have done a great job with early hiring and are growing fast with clear synergy between them⚡️. 

🚀 Leo Crowe (CEO): Former EMEA Partner Manager at Deel (UK) and channel sales leader. 

💼 Sofia Hamilton (COO): Partnerships operator with proven go-to-market expertise. 

🛠️ Ayo ALfonso (CTO): Technical founder driving AI and backend platform evolution. 

Investment Rationale 

$1.5 Trillion 💸 will go through partnerships every year and companies have to handle 100s of partnerships manually every week 🔥. 

The entire process is currently handled manually with very few players storming the space ⛈️. 

We have a clearly talented team with early investors, big traction early and a clear vision going forward 🌟. 

They are moving quickly, landing early design partners, and proving measurable impact. They have great timing as well as a huge early movers advantage. ⏳

Deal Structure

The investment terms for Souk are currently private, bar the terms from Antler 🏦 . We expect them to be currently trading at a £10m (~13.23m USD valuation). 📊

They will be raising a larger pre-seed 🤝in Q1 2026 but we plan to come in now with an early cheque of $400,000, giving us a 3.02% stake in the company.

Just to clarify once more, none of the investments we make as part of Kitsune VC are real - we’re only simulating what investments we’d make if we operated such a fund. 

This is NOT financial advice. ⚠️

Wail’s view 🥊

Souk AI is building a tool that could change how partnership teams operate, but the scale of spend is the main problem I have.

If you look at B2B SaaS spend on partnerships, it’s nowhere near the $1.5 trillion figure Preet was talking about. The GMV on partnerships may be there, but not direct spend.

The average B2B SaaS spend on partnerships is closer to 0.2-0.3% of their total marketing budgets…

Another thing I worry about is retention. Adjacent startups building AI SDRs like Artisan and 11x have struggled because early automation often works in pilots but breaks in real workflows.

I started off with the negatives, so let's get to the positives.

The current traction is good. Early signs of time savings and high performance will always be a bull signal.

The founding team is also strong - their GTM experience is great for this space.

IMHO, the investment is reasonable, but I would’ve waited to see retention rates, growth rates, and the real market for this product - whether it spans beyond B2B SaaS.

Before you go 👋 

Thank you for reading.

So far we’ve invested in 8 startups and have vested $3.7 million of our $10 million fund.

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