SVV (Sure Valley Ventures): Exploring agentic processes in venture capital

SVV (Sure Valley Ventures) is an entrepreneur-led, UK and Ireland-focused venture capital firm that has been investing in, and supporting, high-potential AI software companies since 2017. Unusually, the partners are all exited founders from technology backgrounds, giving SVV a practical perspective on the realities of building, scaling, and funding ambitious AI companies, an approach they describe simply as founders backing founders.

As both an investor and an operator, SVV has been exploring how AI can move beyond assistive tools and into more delegated, operational roles, not as an experiment, but as part of everyday venture processes.

As a design partner, SVV has been working closely with Alludium to test whether bounded, action-taking agents could support VC operations in a way that improves consistency and execution, without sacrificing judgement or control.

The problem: high-leverage work across fragmented systems

Like most VC firms, SVV operates across a fragmented toolchain:

• Deal flow arrives through multiple channels (email, warm intros, platforms)

• Research and context live across documents, notes, inboxes, and CRM fields

• Portfolio monitoring is time-sensitive, but largely manual

• Follow-ups and internal updates can fall through the cracks

This work is high-velocity, high-context, and high-judgement, which has historically made it difficult to automate without losing signal or trust.

SVV wanted to explore three practical questions:

• Where can agents take action, not just suggest next steps?

• How much of this work can be improved without engineering effort?

• Can no-code agents fit naturally into existing VC processes rather than forcing teams to change how they work?

The approach: design partnering on real processes

Rather than testing isolated demos, SVV partnered with Alludium to work on real operational processes.

Using Alludium’s no-code Agent OS, SVV team members built and iterated agents that could:

• Monitor inbound deal flow and flag priority opportunities

• Enrich companies with relevant internal and external context

• Draft structured internal summaries for review

• Trigger reminders and follow-ups based on defined conditions

Crucially, these agents were created and refined by SVV team members themselves, without writing code, enabling rapid iteration and tight feedback loops with the Alludium product team.

SVV deliberately started with a single, clearly bounded process before expanding to adjacent processes, allowing patterns to emerge without introducing unnecessary complexity.

Example: turning inbound deal flow into a consistent internal brief

One of the first processes SVV explored focused on inbound investment opportunities.

Trigger
A new inbound deal email or forwarded introduction arrives.

Agent actions
The agent extracts key fields, creates a structured draft brief, and pulls supporting context such as previous emails, notes, and relevant links.

Human-in-the-loop
A partner reviews and edits the brief before it is shared internally.

Output
A consistent, searchable internal summary that is ready for discussion.

This pattern, humans retain judgement and agents handle repeatable execution, became central to how SVV evaluated the usefulness of agentic systems.

Governance and trust: making delegation viable

A key focus of the partnership is making delegation viable in practice, ensuring agents can take bounded action without sacrificing judgement or control.

SVV and Alludium are taking a constraints-first approach, and are actively strengthening the governance foundations required for safe delegation:

• Defaulting agents to draft outputs rather than final decisions

• Keeping partner approval gates in place for key steps

• Improving how actions and supporting source material are surfaced and reviewed

• Building towards stronger auditability over time, so teams can understand what ran and why

These guardrails are what make agent-led execution trustworthy as the processes mature.

What changed: from manual co-ordination to controlled execution

As agents were introduced into day-to-day processes, several patterns emerged:

• Less manual hand-off work once conditions were clearly defined

• More consistent internal updates, as summaries and reminders followed predictable structures

• A clearer separation between judgement and execution, with humans focusing on decisions and agents handling orchestration

Rather than replacing human judgement, agents acted as an execution layer, helping ensure important steps happened without relying on memory or ad-hoc follow-ups.

Barry Downes, Managing Partner, Sure Valley Ventures
“The real shift wasn’t using AI to help us think faster. It was designing processes where agents could execute safely, with clear constraints and visibility, so the team could focus on decisions.”

Looking ahead

SVV continues to work with Alludium to refine and expand these processes, helping inform how the platform evolves to support teams running agentic systems reliably in production, with clearer controls, better review mechanisms, and stronger foundations for trust over time.

As a design partner, SVV’s real-world use cases help ground Alludium’s product decisions in operational reality, ensuring the Agent OS is shaped by how teams actually work rather than theoretical automation.

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