PreSeed Now

There is no shortage of articles online offering advice about how to raise a funding round. There are also plenty about how to pitch a journalist, but there’s more to announcing a funding round than that. To find out what goes into announcing a funding round well, we spoke to to one of European tech PR’s best-known names. Cathy White is the founder and CEO of CEW Communications, a communications agency that shares the stories of emerging tech companies, VCs, and others in the industry. She told us what goes into a successful funding round announcement… and what you absolutely must avoid. 👉 https://lnkd.in/gxT_EUn6 👈

With its hectic schedules and a workforce that often ebbs and flows with the seasons, hospitality is an attractive market to startup founders looking to help bring digital order to complex workflows. Last year we covered Blend., which helps hospitality companies onboard staff in a modern way. Today, we look at aquaint. This Manchester-based startup looks to boost productivity in hospitality by providing the digital connectivity layer and task management most sectors take for granted these days through office-focused tools like Microsoft Teams or Atlassian’s Jira. “Hospitality is the third largest employer in the UK, but has the lowest labour productivity rates in the whole economy,” observes Jayden Patel, co-founder and CEO at Aquaint. So exactly what are they doing to fix the problem? Find out! 👉 https://lnkd.in/e6w9zw-b

Hydrogen is a cornerstone of clean technologies. It can avoid pollution while powering everything from vehicles to electricity generation. But hydrogen has a dirty secret: producing it often uses fossil fuels, because ‘green hydrogen’–produced without fossil fuels–is more expensive. The reason for this is the power needed to run the electrolysers that extract hydrogen from water are much cheaper to run on electricity from non-renewable sources. Looking to resolve the issue of expensive green hydrogen, and make it a truly ‘green’ power source, is Dorset-based startup Latent Drive. The team has developed SeaStack, an electrolyser designed to drive down the cost of producing hydrogen from renewable sources. To do this, the product is designed to be placed out at sea, on offshore wind farms .  Unlike traditional electrolysers, which require fresh water to operate, SeaStack can work directly with salt water from the sea, installed on existing platforms at wind farms so they can generate hydrogen alongside electricity, and pump it back to shore. We spoke to Frazer Ely and Joseph Ely to find out more...

It’s that time again - when we delve into our analytics and find out which startups have been getting the most attention on PreSeed Now over the past 12 months. As time goes on, some startups drop out of the rolling timeframe and others make their debut in the list. So which of the startups we’ve covered have made it this time? Read on to find out all about: Honu MOMO Biotech Cambridge Future Tech Arro 🎯 PhytoMines GambitBio ClioBooks.ai Ask Silver Juno AI NeuWave Technologies 👉 https://lnkd.in/ezpjUYAt 👈

Why aren’t colour X-rays a widespread reality? Traditional X-ray equipment can’t support colour imaging, but Silveray wants to make it a reality for a wide range of uses, from healthcare to pipeline inspection. On Monday, I visited a mill in Stockport to see for myself what they’re working on. I spoke to co-founder and CEO Dan Cathie about this University of Surrey spinout’s future plans. Link in the comments to read all about out what’s in the works….

Sadly, none of us have to go too far from our own lives to find someone affected by breast cancer, either directly or indirectly. While treatments and technology to achieve better outcomes for breast cancer patients have improved significantly over the years, access to these advances isn’t equally distributed around the world. With this in mind, new startup Praxium AI has developed a “copilot” to increase radiologists' accuracy, productivity, and diagnostic confidence even if they don’t happen to work in a well-resourced healthcare system. “We're trying to make it economically and technologically feasible for every country in the world to offer their citizens breast cancer screening, with a really affordable, accessible technology,” says co-founder and CEO Nelson Jordan. Read the full article - link in the comments 👇

Read our latest startup profile, as we look at Gendo AI 👇

Cloud security is a perennial problem. Even if you secure your data with the best available encryption, you don’t know when that encryption might be cracked. And even if it is secure, there’s the slight chance your cloud provider might accidentally delete all your data and backups, as Google did recently to a big Australian pension fund. Yikes. Umbra Systems Ltd has a fresh take on cloud security and data management that aims to make these risks a thing of the past. The Manchester-based startup is doing something unusual to better secure cloud data - it’s saving it in the shadows. Instead of encrypting the data in a conventional way, Umbra makes ‘shadows’ - files in which the original data has been completely replaced by a much smaller collection of other bytes using clever mathematics. The same maths can then be used to reassemble the data into its original form. The data is broken up into seven or more shadows, which are then encrypted and stored across multiple cloud providers. Interestingly, not all the shadows are needed to restore an original file. Any four of the seven shadows is required to reassemble the full data. Read on to find out more as we speak to founder Edward French...

Generative AI is gradually making a transition from free-text boxes that require you to know what you want and how to formulate a prompt, to more sophisticated implementations. See the ‘Apple Intelligence’ features coming soon to iOS for example. ZAPT wants to be part of this transition. The startup is building what co-founder David Fox describes as “a platform to allow anyone to build their own generative AI apps. “We're targeting businesses, to help them optimise their processes, their workflows. Anything that is currently a quite manual task or requires a manual process, we want to allow them to bring generative AI in to speed it up.” Fox sees Zapt as a way to make generative AI more accessible to more people. The point of it is to create a custom layer above raw large language model inputs. He says the product can work with any underlying LLMs without the end user having to worry about what’s going on under the hood. Read on for the full story.... 👉 https://lnkd.in/gH55Qm4U

If you’ve ever written a bid for a tender or contract, you’ll know how soul-crushingly boring and time consuming it can be. Even businesses with dedicated bid-writing teams can spend days or weeks pulling together a strong proposition that could be worth a huge amount of money. Bidscript is a startup that wants to lighten the load by automatically filling in the stack of forms a typical bid requires to be completed. Aged just 21, founders Henry Brogan and Tyler McCarthy want to open up the tender market by making it easier for mid-sized companies to successfully compete against big corporations and win more deals. Read my full interview. Link below 👇