Barry Downes

Managing Partner, Sure Valley Ventures | Founder, AgenticInvestor | Executive Chair, Alludium | VC investor focused on AI, agentic systems, capital and governance

📍 Ireland, Ireland🔄 Updated September 2026💼 38 investments📅 11 years investing🗓 Last invested Sep 2024𝕏 @upgrade_to_unlock
VC🌍 Ireland20+ investments
38
Total investments
18
Early stage
14
Mid stage
1
Late stage
11y
Years active

Portfolio

37 investments · sorted by recency
All investments
Early stage
Mid stage
Late stage
Investor for Sure valley Ventures
Sep 2024
Purple Transform is an innovative technology company that exists to create better human outcomes, by unlocking the full potential of ethical AI. #AIForGood 🦋💜
Investor for Sure Valley Ventures
Sep 2024
We help schools leverage the power of AI to reduce teacher workload, through a combination of school-specialised AI training and our AI-powered marking service. Find out about our AI training: stylus.education/cpd-training Get sample test papers marked with a free trial: stylus.education/ai-marking
Investor for Sure valley Ventures
Aug 2024
We aims to enable autonomous mobile robotics automation to warehouses of any size. Our platform integrates any type of autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) and covers services like goods to person, material handling and parcel sorting. Our proprietary cutting-edge technology enables quick ROI (<1 year), fast and flexible deployment along with high efficiency and accuracy. Thanks to our unique decentralised edge computing technology, we can run the platform on the cloud and ensure unprecedented levels of reliability, whilst enabling ultra simplified deployments that require minimal IT infrastructure cost and provide the flexibility to easily scale up and down as needed.
Investor for Sure Valley Ventures
Jul 2024
At VortexIQ, we are driven by a fundamental belief in the transformative power of technology to enhance the lives of e-commerce retailers and their dedicated teams. We recognise these individuals pivotal role in the global digital marketplace, and our mission is to empower them with innovative solutions that save time and resources and mitigate potential risks. By providing solutions to address e-commerce retailers challenges, we aim to enable them to improve operational efficiency, grow profitability and scale up in an ever-evolving online landscape. Read about our rebrand, here https://saasvortex.vortexiq.ai
Investor for Sure Valley Ventures
Jun 2024
Add video, images, and audio to your app ... without the time suck, crazy costs, and non-stop headaches of doing it all yourself. Ittybit provides everything developers need to upload, store, extract rich data, convert, compress, and deliver media. Provide a great user experience, no matter the filetype.
Investor for Sure valley Ventures
May 2024
Inspeq AI is an enterprise-grade RAIops platform to govern & guardrail Gen AI applications with new GRC standards underpinned by AI regulations. Inspeqs RAIops platform can generate compliance reports, detect biases and validate outputs against 5 principles of Responsible AI. This translates to upto 90% more accurate AI solutions being developed at 70% lower cost and 4x faster speed.  Inspeq has been named #1 software in the responsible & AI safety space by reputed firms like Tracxn. It is also the winner of the startup world cup at the prestigious Dublin Tech Summit.  Inspeq is an Irish HQed company backed by leading AI funds of the world and is founded by industry veterans who previously worked at Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and LinkedIn.
Member of the Board and investor for Sure Valley Ventures
Apr 2024
Captur is a quality control automation platform that helps supply chains reduce the risk of churn as they scale. By using visual AI to verify compliance in real-time, Captur ensures every operation meets the highest standards. Founded by Charlotte Bax in 2021, Captur has been deployed in companies across the micro-mobility, delivery and vehicle inspection space within the US, European and APAC markets.
Investor for Sure Valley Ventures
Feb 2023
Jaid is an AI-powered platform that identifies and extracts critical data from across diverse company and customer communications. We organize that data into meaningful, actionable insights, which integrate seamlessly into existing workflows. Jaid enables companies and teams to focus on what matters most. We service our global clients through offices in London and New York.
Investor for Sure Valley Ventures
Oct 2022
Our Computer Vision solutions help Retailers, Hospitality Providers and Convenience Station operators gain rich in-store customer insights, reduce loss and optimise their operations.
Board Member and Investor for Sure Valley Ventures
Mar 2022
RETìníZE is one of the world’s leading immersive-tech studios, working across AR, VR, multi-screen installations and software development. For the past few years we’ve been in stealth mode, developing Animotive - an innovative VR SaaS product set to disrupt the 3D animation production pipeline, making it completely intuitive. Animotive allows anyone to be an animator. We built our global reputation creating immersive experiences for major brands, collecting several international awards along the way. Our roots and reputations lie in high-end global film & television. At heart, we’re experienced creatives with an intimate knowledge of the techniques required to harness immersive-tech to liberate the creative process.
Investor for Sure Valley Ventures
Jan 2021
As fans of Esports, we have envisioned virtual stadiums and a 3D viewing experience from the moment consumer VR arrived. With Virtex Stadium, we make that dream a reality. Esports fans are able to view gameplay live, in 3D in the centre of a virtual stadium which has not been possible before in any other medium. Partnering with publishers and organisers, we are working towards providing a virtual stadium experience for all the top Esports games. Virtex Entertainment is headquartered in London, UK with fully remote team members in various countries like Finland, Germany, Romania, Turkey and Spain.
Co-founder and Member of the Board
Jan 2021
Pluto Digital - Bringing Decentralised Technologies To The Global Economy
Board Member and Investor for Sure Valley Ventures
Jul 2020
Volograms powers user-generated 3D content creation for the Metaverse. Using the power of artificial intelligence, our mobile content creation platform, Volu, is the first to allow smartphone users to easily create, share and play with 3D volumetric holograms from one quick mobile video. Headquartered in Dublin and backed by global investors, our diverse team of passionate technologists and creatives is making the next generation of content and communications accessible for all.
Investor for Sure Valley Ventures
Apr 2020
buymie is a mobile first, on-demand grocery delivery platform enabling consumers to order any grocery or household item from local stores using their mobile device, and get them delivered in as little as 1 hour. The buymie platform connects customers, via the app, to a fully vetted and trained crowd sourced personal shopper network.
Investor for Sure Valley Ventures
Mar 2020
Getvisibility: The Leader in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for Classification, Discovery and Protection of Unstructured Data. Customers benefit from operational efficiencies, increase speed of deployment and significant cost reduction. Our machine-readable structured data can be used to create actionable insights through automatic association with information resources. The solution delivers meaningful visibility into the information assets within and across your enterprise, reducing risk, improving compliance, and enabling you to achieve optimal performance across your business. This humungous scale data processing is a unique technological breakthrough that enables to gain intelligence on all sources of unstructured data. We enable our customers to detect, classify and protect sensitive information increasing data security, governance, compliance and lowering the risk of losing valuable data
Show all 37 investments ↓
Experience · 40 entries
All (40)
Investments (37)
Founder (2)
Board (9)
2024
Investor for Sure valley Ventures
Sep 2024
Purple Transform is an innovative technology company that exists to create better human outcomes, by unlocking the full potential of ethical AI. #AIForGood 🦋💜
Investor for Sure Valley Ventures
Sep 2024
We help schools leverage the power of AI to reduce teacher workload, through a combination of school-specialised AI training and our AI-powered marking service. Find out about our AI training: stylus.education/cpd-training Get sample test papers marked with a free trial: stylus.education/ai-marking
Investor for Sure valley Ventures
Aug 2024
We aims to enable autonomous mobile robotics automation to warehouses of any size. Our platform integrates any type of autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) and covers services like goods to person, material handling and parcel sorting. Our proprietary cutting-edge technology enables quick ROI (<1 year), fast and flexible deployment along with high efficiency and accuracy. Thanks to our unique decentralised edge computing technology, we can run the platform on the cloud and ensure unprecedented levels of reliability, whilst enabling ultra simplified deployments that require minimal IT infrastructure cost and provide the flexibility to easily scale up and down as needed.
Investor for Sure Valley Ventures
Jul 2024
At VortexIQ, we are driven by a fundamental belief in the transformative power of technology to enhance the lives of e-commerce retailers and their dedicated teams. We recognise these individuals pivotal role in the global digital marketplace, and our mission is to empower them with innovative solutions that save time and resources and mitigate potential risks. By providing solutions to address e-commerce retailers challenges, we aim to enable them to improve operational efficiency, grow profitability and scale up in an ever-evolving online landscape. Read about our rebrand, here https://saasvortex.vortexiq.ai
Investor for Sure Valley Ventures
Jun 2024
Add video, images, and audio to your app ... without the time suck, crazy costs, and non-stop headaches of doing it all yourself. Ittybit provides everything developers need to upload, store, extract rich data, convert, compress, and deliver media. Provide a great user experience, no matter the filetype.
Show all 40 entries ↓
Investment activity
2015–2024 · 38 investments
201522017820187201942020420213202222023120247
Recent (last 2 years)Earlier