Barry Downes, Managing Director, Sure Valley Ventures spoke to Sarah Freeman about how they are using AI to further their business processes and streamline the VC process for AI startups.
I met Barry Downes, Managing Director, Sure Valley Ventures, at AI Tribes, the one-day tech conference, focused on Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and the Data Science landscape, at Trinity College Dublin in late February.
Downes was there to moderate a panel entitled, AI’s Next Leap for Enterprise, with panelists including Kieran McCorry, National Technology Officer, Microsoft; Stephen Redmond, Director, Head of Data Analytics & AI at BearingPoint and Bronagh Riordan, Head of Data & Analytics for Primark. Downes explored how emerging AI technologies are being integrated into established businesses and asked the panel about insights into the synergies between large-scale enterprises and agile startups.
I had a chance to catch up with him after the session to ask how he was using AI to augment his business practices.
“Sure Valley Ventures is a venture capital fund, and we invest in companies across the UK and Ireland, and actually, we’re really looking for, kind of high growth, early stage start ups. We’re big investors in Irish and also UK AI start ups …We have a series of databases that we use to find companies before anybody else. We invest in early stage so we want to find the early stage AI start ups that are emerging and reach out to them proactively even before they need financing and start to build a relationship with them. It’s great for the companies as well because they’ll know because we’re happy to give general advice as well.”
Downes explained how the company had built products that went into the public domain, namely an AI that they put on the GPT store which gave pointers to founders keen to engage with VCs to think about term sheet clauses and to be able to better negotiate.
“We were actually training the founders to negotiate with with us and other VCs and get the best deal for themselves.”
Building relationships
While Downes knows the importance of face-to face interactions, he sees the value of data. “Ours is a very personal business and having people on the ground is really important. We have teams in London, Cambridge, Manchester and Dublin. We just opened up in Cork and also in Waterford as well. Start ups really like people who come in and meet them in their own environment. But we’re very data driven, and we use data across the life cycle of investing including the decision to invest, investment documents and then supporting companies along the way.”
An example of how Sure Valley Ventures is utilising tech in the last year to simplify the journey for start-ups is asking to record the meeting so the start-up does not have to repeat that initial pitch again verbatim, it’s recorded for other internal teams to watch in their own time with an accompanying transcript. This means if one of the team likes a company and suggests I meet with them, I can save the company having to do the pitch all over again. I just watch the video back and analyse any data associated with it and can come into a meeting already armed with a lot of info.”
Future of AI
I asked Downes about the future of AI and how it is likely to change society.
“Like all technologies, there are pros and cons. There have been lots of pros to social media and the internet but some cons as well. With AI, we’re moving at an incredible pace and we’re not quite sure what the next step will be. We’re moving at an enormous pace and I think AI has enormous potential for society but there are risks and dangers too. I’m not a believer, by the way, in this existential threat, that this super intelligent AI is going to kill us all, where people see advancements being made and extrapolate a Terminator robot scenario. But I do think like there are really practical issues right now.”
Downes mentioned deep fakes in elections, voice scams and other negative aspects to the technology that needs to be dealt with.
“To be fair, I think the industry is trying to deal with that in the long term. You also have alignment and bias issues. But fundamentally, I think AI is going to be a technology that really advances us as a society. We’ve got to manage the downsides better than we did with social media and I think the industry is learning from those mistakes and taking this very seriously.”
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