Every three months, we like to take a breath to look at the data and figure out which startup profiles published in the past 12 months have received the most attention.

So, who’s caught our readers’ eyes the most since last April? Read on to find out…

• Want the latest updates on all the startups we’ve covered? Our Startup Tracker has you covered.

– Martin

This issue of PreSeed Now is brought to you by EHE Ventures.

Known for backing high-growth tech, EHE just announced they're building a £15m AI tech fund, and have finalised their core Fund Advisory team. The fund itself seeks to support and accelerate the growth of AI technologies, empowering the brightest minds in tech at pre-seed, seed and Series A.

Learn more about their mission and the fund here

The 10 startups getting you most excited over the past 12 months

…based on reads and shares on PreSeed Now:

Clio

Generative A.I. has lots of potential, but its ability to help more business leaders publish books based on their own views and experiences particularly caught your imagination recently.

Clio uses A.I.–alongside founder Georgia Kirke’s experience working with business leaders to publish books–to help aspiring non-fiction authors compile their ideas in depth via a voice or text interface. It then structures them into a compelling tome, which A.I. drafts, based on the author’s input.

A human editor then polishes up the draft with the author’s input to ensure it’s fit to send to a publisher. For an additional fee, Clio will help you self-publish your book instead.

Location: Manchester

👉 Read more about Clio

Honu

Could A.I. run an entire economy? That’s the question underpinning Honu’s work with autonomous agents for businesses.

Honu is developing platform-as-a-service infrastructure to power autonomous A.I. agents that can help businesses make better decisions.

“We will be moving towards A.I.-first businesses, which will pave the way to A.I.-first economies… I see a world not very far from today where a non-negligible chunk of GDP is created by highly-autonomous businesses,” founder and CEO Imad Riachi told us.

Location: London

👉 Read more about Honu

Blend

We summarised Blend as “like TikTok for training deskless workers”. It’s a platform designed to let businesses in industries like hospitality train workers quickly and effectively with easy-to-consume mobile videos.

“It's notoriously difficult training these workers in what is a highly transient sector, where skills are very practical, and people need to learn things very fast. And a lot of money is wasted, repetitively onboarding these workers,” co-founder and CEO Jonah Werth told us.

Businesses using Blend create their own video content, something that would have been unthinkable a few years ago, but the rise of TikTok and Instagram Reels has turned many businesses into video producers, so it’s no big leap for them to create content for internal use.

Location: London

👉 Read more about Blend

GambitBio

One startup that says it’s found a particularly promising route to a future where people can check themselves for signs of cancer is GambitBio.

The startup is developing a home self-test kit for early cancer detection. Following in the wake of home fertility tests, DNA tests, food sensitivity tests, and Covid tests, they want to “see a world where people aren't scared of cancer anymore,” as co-founder and CEO Tiffany Ma puts it.

The plan is to sell tests that involve users spitting into a device, which displays lines similar to a Covid test, but is designed to denote signs of specific types of cancer. The first product they intend to bring to market will be focused on prostate cancer detection. 

Location: London

👉 Read more about GambitBio

Blend (a different one!)

What are the odds of two different startups called Blend making it into this list?

This Blend is a startup with a fresh take on a familiar problem: offering personalised fashion recommendations.

In practice, that looks like “TikTok meets Lyst or Farfetch… a more social, engaging, and hyper-personalised fashion shopping experience,” as co-founder Jemima Bunbury puts it.

Rather than just link to shopping sites, Blend will incorporate content from influencers and creators, for a more organic feel.

The current Blend homepage describes it as: “Blending A.I. and human styling to curate your favourite fashion from across the internet. Discover products from 1,000+ brands, refreshed daily.”

Location: London

👉 Read more about Blend

Cambridge Future Tech

Is Cambridge Future Tech a startup? The company helps academics spin their tech out of universities and then gets really hands on with the resulting startups in their early stages.

But it’s very much at an early-stage itself, and we recently dived into its story and ambitions

“It's very difficult for the investment community to meaningfully engage in investment activities in [early-stage deep tech] because of the lack of measurable KPIs on early-stage companies,” said Cambridge Future Tech CEO and co-founder Owen Thompson, explaining the gap the company wants to fill.

Cambridge Future Tech is working towards building out eight companies per year, having already taken six companies to the pre-seed investment stage. 

Location: Cambridge

👉 Read more about Cambridge Future Tech

MOMO Biotech

Immuno-oncology is a fast-developing field that uses the body’s own immune system to recognise and fight cancer cells.

But as MOMO Biotech co-founder Elijah Mojares puts it, existing testing processes need an upgrade to make immunotherapies more effective.

And so the startup is working on a new model that takes into account the tissue that surrounds cancers and forms a defensive ‘shield’ around the tumour.

“We're recreating the surrounding tissue in cancer. And the reason why we're recreating that is because those surrounding tissues are what stops a lot of new therapies from being effective against a lot of solid cancers,” says Mojares.

Location: London

👉 Read more about MOMO Biotech

Radar

Radar has the goal of becoming ‘Skyscanner for fashion’. And while they’re not the first startup with this particular aim, the approach here is different from others on the market.

Rather than present a list of fashion items from around the internet and offer an aggregated shop itself, Radar is first and foremost a tool for shoppers. 

Radar users browse shopping websites and apps on their phones as they always have. When they spot something they’re interested in, they go to the native iOS or Android share sheet, and share the item into the Radar app.

They “put it on their Radar”, so to speak. The mobile app then acts as a central hub to keep tabs on current pricing of all the fashion items they’re interested in, sending alerts when an item drops in price.

Location: London

👉 Read more about Radar

Aligned AI

For all the talk of the importance of A.I. safety, most of today’s A.I. isn’t built with a ‘safety first’ mindset.

Aligned AI’s co-founders have long worked in the fields of A.I. safety and ethics, and now they’re building fundamental A.I. tech with the aim of being inherently safer than the competition.

“If you want to tell a robot not to harm a human being, you have to find a way to be able to communicate to it what a human is and what harm is, in pretty much the same way that a human understands those concepts,” co-founder Rebecca Gorman told me.

“With traditional machine learning, we're nowhere near communicating that. With the concept extrapolation that we've been developing at Aligned AI, we're getting closer, and we'll continue to get closer with our research.”

Aligned AI’s website now pitches its offering as helping you “stay informed on the level of bias in your foundation models”.

Location: Oxford

👉 Read more about Aligned AI

Contxt Media

Contxt Media’s product is aimed at publishers looking to maximise the ad revenue from their content.

It uses natural language processing and computer vision to analyse publishers’ videos. This analysis then powers contextual targeting, sentiment analysis, brand safety and suitability, and the ability to make sure content is rated correctly as suitable for the right audiences.

“In order for a publisher to truly understand their content, there's a lot of manual work that goes on by humans in verifying and tagging the content. So the ability to automate this is a huge cost saving for the publisher and it gives advertisers trust in what they're advertising against,” says founder Ed French.

Location: London

👉 Read more about Contxt Media

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We’ll be back with a new startup for you this coming Tuesday. We’ll see you in your inbox then!