Inside Look - Sure Valley’s Latest Fund
In 2022, we launched a new fund with the British Business Bank to target the innovation clusters developing around AI in the UK. We also saw huge potential in the Irish ecosystem and so over the last year, have put together a new fund with private investors and Enterprise Ireland, who has been a huge supporter of our team since they first invested in us in 2017.
Fund III Snapshot
We are delighted to launch our third fund and now have around £110m to invest across the UK and Ireland in ground-breaking AI companies. This is the favourite part of my job — working closely with exceptional founders to give them access to the supports they need to grow their business. As a founder turned investor myself, I understand too well the challenges founders face whether it be product, technology, financial or talent related. At Sure Valley, we pride ourselves on constantly improving our platform offering and have grown our team as part of this new fund to provide our companies with hands on technical support whenever they need it.
Why Now?
Fundraising in the current environment is undoubtedly challenging for start-ups, but we still believe it is a great time to build a business with lots of opportunities available for companies with ground-breaking ideas. Out of difficult times often comes great innovation, and as seed stage investors we have a much longer vision for our companies — we are just at the start of a 10-year fund cycle.
There is a lot of excitement around AI and as someone deeply interested in this sector, I feel strongly that we have only seen the tip of the iceberg in terms of the roll-out. AI will start to have much more of a pervasive, system level impact that will force organisations to reconfigure their entire operating model. There is a huge opportunity right now for software start-ups to disrupt the current status quo and for us to find new unicorns.
I believe we are at a similar point to the introduction of the World Wide Web and have 10 years of massive industry innovation in front of us. Our focus at Sure Valley is to be at the forefront of this transformation and these new funds will allow us to capture this huge opportunity.
The global AI software market is expected to reach a staggering $1.095 trillion by 2032[1] and we believe our chosen sub-sectors — Enterprise, Immersive Tech & Security — will be a significant portion of this. We have already backed many exciting companies in these sectors, such as Jaid in Enterprise AI, Volograms in Immersive Tech & Smarttech247 in AI Cybersecurity (IPOed on AIM in December last year), to name just a few.
Why Sure Valley?
We have made a deliberate effort to create a regional presence across the UK and Ireland and now have a strong base in London, Cambridge, Manchester, Dublin and Waterford. In-person origination is important to us and as part of this new fund, we have plans to expand even further in Ireland. This is key to getting the best visibility on deal flow as approx. more than half of Ireland’s new start-ups are based outside of Dublin. We also take a non-traditional approach to origination and are always happy to travel to meet exceptional founders if we don’t have a local presence.
Finally
I want to thank Enterprise Ireland, the British Business Bank and all our fantastic partners and investors for continuing to support our growth journey. We can’t wait to back and support disruptive new software companies.
If you are a UK or Irish founder that is building a disruptive AI business and would like to have an early conversation, please get in touch.
