Doris Labs, a startup building the semantic layer for go-to-market teams, has raised £450,000 in pre-seed funding. The round is led by Fuel Ventures, with participation from Manchester Angels and a group of other angels from across the B2B software industry.
Doris Labs builds what founders describe as a GTM AI semantic layer that captures everything a sales team learns across calls, emails and documents, then uses agents to drive deals forward. CRM systems typically store fields such as stage and amount, but not the detailed context from conversations, email threads and documents that often determines whether a deal is won or lost. That knowledge often sits in call recordings, scattered tools and in sales representatives’ heads, and when a rep leaves, that knowledge goes with them. Doris Labs converts this unstructured information into a clean, typed structure, or ontology, that both people and AI agents can work from.
On top of this foundation, Doris Labs is launching Sidekicks, described as always-on partners for every deal with their own memory and routines. Each Sidekick draws on everything an organisation has previously learned from past deals and works alongside sales teams to get deals over the line. The platform is designed to sit underneath the entire go-to-market stack rather than as a single-call assistant or a dashboard bolted onto a CRM. Founders position this semantic layer as the GTM memory layer that underpins existing CRMs and sales tools, rather than another point solution.
Early customer data is included in the announcement. In initial deployments, Doris Labs reports saving sales representatives 6 hours of admin per week and increasing deal velocity by 72% for first customers. Patently, an AI patent platform used by more than 1,000 teams in 40 countries, uses Doris Labs’ product and compared deals created before and after adoption. Patently found that deals closing within the forecasted timeline increased by 165% and its deal qualification score rose 64%. Patently’s chief revenue officer describes how being told what is missing in a deal has highlighted gaps in sales strategy.
Founders Hayden Munt, formerly at Vertice, and Frazer Kearl, formerly at Patsnap, state that go-to-market teams already want AI to handle parts of their sales process and provide a clearer view of pipeline, but are held back by data scattered across multiple tools. Investors at Fuel Ventures and Manchester Angels highlight the founders’ direct experience of the problem and describe seeing clear moments in portfolio companies where Doris Labs’ approach would have made a difference.
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.
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.
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.
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,
