FundraiseOct 7, 2026, 21:24 UTC

Doris Labs raises $600K to stop winnable deals from slipping away

What's the deal? Doris Labs, a London-based startup building a semantic layer for go-to-market (GTM) teams, has raised $600,000 in pre-seed funding. Fuel Ventures led the round, with participation from Manchester Angels and other angels.

What's the endgame? Doris converts the unstructured data scattered across a company's sales tools into a clean, typed structure — an ontology — that both people and AI agents can read. The pitch: a CRM logs the stage and amount, but not what a buyer said on the second call or why similar deals closed.

Why now? Co-founders Hayden Munt (ex-Vertice) and Frazer Kearl (ex-Patsnap) argue that GTM teams want AI across their sales process, but their data sits across eight or more tools. "Agents are only as good as the context they get, and today that is one call or a CRM snapshot," said Kearl, chief technology officer.

Unlike single-call AI assistants or dashboards bolted onto a CRM, Doris sits underneath the whole stack. Building on that, it is launching Sidekicks — always-on partners for each deal, with their own memory, drawing on a company's past deals to push the current one over the line.

What's the proof? Patently, an AI patent platform used by more than 1,000 teams in 40 countries, is an early customer. Comparing deals before and after adoption, it found deals closing within the forecasted timeline rose 165% and its deal qualification score climbed 64%.

The signal: The round is modest — in the lower half of comparable deals by size — but it reflects a broader bet that AI sales tools are only as useful as the data feeding them. Doris is wagering that the winning layer is not another assistant, but the structured memory beneath them all.