These ventures have just started at Accelerate Cambridge. They are at various stages of development, with some having already raised their first seed round.
AClosure
AClosure aims to develop a vascular closure device that can rapidly and reliably seal arteriotomy sites to reduce bleeding and complications in minimally-invasive surgeries. Composed of six Cambridge students coming from diverse disciplines, AClosure first started in the Cambridge MedTech Foundation (MTF) Innovation Programme where we were presented with a clinical problem to tackle. Among the more than 150,000 transcatheter aortic valve implantations (TAVI) procedures performed annually worldwide, 6-8% suffer major complications that triple patient mortality. In the UK, complications cost the NHS an extra £1,500 per incident. We believe that our product, HydraDisc, can overcome limitations of existing devices which cause major complications, thus improving patient outcomes and reducing financial cost.
With our idea, we have won first place in the Cambridge MTF Innovation Programme, and were later invited to present it at the Association of Surgeons in Training (ASiT) International Surgical Conference 2021, where we were crowned winners as well. We are now moving to develop a prototype and bring our product to market.
Advanced Infrastructure
Our mission is to build powerful data platforms that help corporations emit less carbon. We collect, clean, and analyse cross-sector energy data with unrivalled granularity and resolution. This means we can link renewable energy generation to renewable consumption. Our services inform businesses and grid operators of their carbon emissions in real-time with hyper-local precision. Our target customers are corporate consumers, power exchanges, network operators, and energy suppliers through fast and better data visibility with a core focus on carbon signalling. The market for digitised carbon data services is £1.5billion growing at 20% year on year due to strong and irreversible market drivers from governmental and consumer pressure.
BioMavericks
Cancer is ranked at the top of global burden of disease, impelling the growth of the global oncology therapeutics market to a size of $250 billion by 2025. Upon pandemic, the liquid biopsy sub-sector has come to the spotlight with a compound annual growth rate of 38.5% for the next four years, paving the way for business development in early cancer diagnosis. While current cancer diagnostics relies on canonical cancer markers that are hardly expressed at early stages, we have leveraged the most advanced technology along with our proprietary pipelines to detect early cancers. Unlike our competitors who selectively capture a subset of cells from peripheral blood, we have developed new testing products to detect and profile all critical cell types in the blood with high sensitivity and specificity. Our products can provide new information on the molecular characteristics of cancer cells and infer tumour locations and metastasis sites. These unique features revolutionise the concept of early cancer diagnosis and are critical for both patients and doctors for personalised medicine. So far, we have a team of six people with diverse backgrounds and expertise and incorporate a new company named BioMavericks.
Corvus Technologies
Corvus Technologies produces AI guided investment research reports about the biotech industry for customers in the financial community. Our company’s mission is simple: To build intelligent systems that better bridge the world’s knowledge resource gaps. Through innovation and expertise, Corvus has created a system that generates reports with premium, easy to use biotech investment insights at lightning speeds. By delivering on our unique value proposition as “The Automated Analyst for Biotech”, we help to ensure that the world’s best ideas have the best opportunity to thrive.
EyeSea
Digitalisation increases business productivity and competitiveness through improved system optimisation and decision making by using the latest IoT technologies. Currently, digitalisation requires the installation of new, invasive, and extensive systems and as a result, mature industries, such as Oil and Gas, Maritime, Mining and Brewing which widely use analogue (manual) gauges to display critical information, have been slow to adopt. The lack of digitalisation in the Oil and Gas industry alone increases costs by $73 billion per year. EyeSea is a small, wireless, cost-effective, and green powered device which reads analogue (manual) gauges in real-time using a camera and image-processing to replace the manual logging of data. By using existing analogue gauges there is zero process disruption, no change to current methods and ease of verification, which removes major barriers to adoption of digitalisation into industries that until now have remained detached from the latest digitalisation methods.
Foodiano
Our product helps people run a food business from their home kitchen and enable branding themselves in their local communities. Vendors get an app and a website that makes running their service and finding customers easy. The consumers get convenient access to locally sourced, niche, and authentic dishes with excellent value for money. We are calling this product Foodiano. It is a product of our company Pioseer Ltd.
Lumino
Lumino is on a mission to bring better mental health to everyone. Right now, one in five people are experiencing a mental health problem. However, most will have not have access to effective treatment. Our goal is to reinvent how mental health treatment is delivered, through developing truly scalable, world-leading digital therapeutic programmes. We combine a strong focus on clinical outcomes with great design. Lumino is supported by Innovate UK and the Eastern Academic Health Science Network.
Mind Health AI
Mind Health AI is a health tech startup using evidence based psychological interventions to improve health outcomes for people with chronic physical health conditions. Like many chronic illnesses, people with diabetes often become overwhelmed by the psychological burden of their disease. As a result, almost half of diabetics will struggle to cope with the relentless challenge of controlling their blood sugar. The cost of poor mental health in diabetes is estimated to cost the NHS £2.4 billion per year.
Traditional models of delivering therapy have been proven to be effective at improving physical health outcomes in diabetes, but they are neither scalable or affordable. Through our proprietary AI, we are able to deliver personalised treatment plans using a combination of motivational interviewing techniques and cognitive behavioural therapy.
Mind Health AI aims to give users access to the most effective support whenever they need it, wherever they are. We envision a world where emotional intelligent technology allows anyone with a chronic physical health condition to think, feel and live well.
open-seneca
open-seneca is building air quality sensing networks in cities around the globe by leveraging the power of citizen science. Started in 2018 as a summer project by a group of PhD students from the University of Cambridge, the initiative now operates networks in a dozen cities in South America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. Air quality data collected is used to identify pollution hotspots within the city and to enable policymakers and urban planners to act based on evidence. open-seneca works with governmental organisations and city councils by providing tools and educational materials to create a dialogue with their citizens and involve communities in the solutions created.
Peace & Pure
Peace & Pure is a premium natural skincare brand that focuses on emotional well-being and self-love. At Peace & Pure, we understand the mind-skin connection. We want to create a brand that its products are not only potent and effective to bring visible improvement for the skin, but also a brand that creates contents, rituals and experiences that will enhance women’s emotional wellbeing. Our products are not merely serving a functional skincare need, they go much beyond that, they create an experience and ritual to connect with one’s inner being, a calming and uplifting experience that serves an essential part of a tranquil daily healing ritual of self-love by nourishing the skin, mind, and spirit. Meanwhile, through all our Marketing channels, we consistently communicate contents that are educational, inspiring for enhancing our customer/audience’s emotional wellbeing, so to fulfil our brand’s promise and mission.
PeerGrid
PeerGrid is a functional video platform that connects students on university campuses to the largest companies around the world. On our platform, channels upload inspiring and stimulating content. This content will be centred around providing in-depth information on business areas and roles within companies to provide real career insights to students. The key feature of PeerGrid occurs after live events where algorithms that we have developed will match users who are of significant value to each other for networking after the event. These users are then placed in a video chat for the networking to begin. We have had significant traction so far in building both our pre-launch user base by signing up university societies and partnering with some of the world’s biggest companies in hosting their graduate recruitment events. PeerGrid has the potential to be a global business as we help to connect companies to talent across the globe. We also believe that many of the reasons that have resulted in PeerGrid gaining so much traction in the UK are even stronger in countries like the United States and India. In terms of building a business out of the platform, there are multiple revenue streams that we will pursue. The first will be selling solutions to companies that struggle with their hiring process, either finding the best quality candidates or accessing a diverse talent pool from which they can hire. Services that PeerGrid will offer include premium events where students of certain profiles are invited to exclusive networking with the staff of that firm and advanced data analytics to improve the firm’s hiring process. Secondly, PeerGrid will offer premium memberships to our users. Premium membership will give increased control over whom the user will match with in the networking process and gives the user even more opportunities to network. As our audience increases both horizontally, in terms of numbers of users, and also vertically as we go beyond university students into young professionals and beyond this will become increasingly valuable.
QuirkyByte+
Ever gone to streaming sites like Netflix and you just couldn’t decide what to watch? And every day new streaming sites are coming up. There is a lot of content, and the user spends more time searching than watching. QuirkyByte+ is an app which aims to solve this problem, by recommending content, using a proprietary algorithm. It collects data from all streaming sites, and then recommends content to the user using our own machine learning model. It is loaded with features, which any user will require for entertainment discovery purpose. While most apps, are trying to increase usage time on their apps, we are trying to reduce it, and that is our business model. Just Netflix spends hundreds of millions of dollars for their recommendation algorithm, and yet users are still not finding content easily. With the libraries expanding daily, it is time content discovery becomes easier, and that too for a fraction of the cost for the user with multitude of benefits. All this while saving the most important resource any human has – time.
Rota Wrangler
Rota Wrangler is a tool that allows business owners or managers to forecast, schedule and share rotas in a secure and GDPR friendly way. We automatically calculate the staffing cost against the predicted sales while providing a better view of staff members availability without the need of having to leave the interface. Using the emerging technologies, we can provide business owners with an overview of their running costs and suggest changes based on historical data. Our goal is to make the rostering process smarter and more efficient while saving time for business owners so that they can focus on the important thing – running their venture.
