Insurance has always been the business of predicting the cost of future events. But in a world where some people are predicting the end of humanity within a decade, has pricing risk ever been harder?

AI disruption has reached insurance faster than most people expected. In the past 6 months we have seen insurers race to launch ChatGPT apps, an AI native MGA that’s also an insurer and a re-insurer, and an asset manager and a cafe franchise raise hundreds of millions and reach a £5BN valuation. More recently CEOs have been confronted with the decision to block or not block Muse (Autonomous Digital Agent).

As AI changes the world we live in, Fintech Director, Olly Betts, writes that it’s reshaping what risks people and corporations want to protect against and what data is available to price these risks, assuming there is any relevant data at all.

Also in the Bulletin:

• Venture Studio: Call for builders

• Critical nature for critical industry - leaning in to the interdependence

• Turning a wastestream into a second business with North Australian SeaCulture

• Valarian and Uncovr in Sifted AI100

• Marrow raise $2M pre-seed

• Events

• Jobs

How insurance will change after a decade of AI

So how do you “win” in insurance now we operate in a reality that keeps rewriting itself?

Time for a “4 box” to bring clarity to the madness. At Founders Factory we are forecasting future scenarios by mapping ‘speed of adoption’ vs ‘endurance of trust’ of AI.

Using this framework I have identified ten new realities that will emerge over the next decade and have been asking myself, what will I want to protect in these realities and what startup sized opportunities might emerge in response?

I don’t like to think about this stuff in isolation for too long, so my takes are inspired by insights from Founders Factory portfolio founders building at the bleeding edge of insurance including Marrow, Mama Insurance, Meshed.

Read full piece

Venture Studio: Healthcare Sprint 2

The Founders Factory Venture Studio is building a new generation of healthcare companies in partnership with one of the world’s leading industrial healthcare groups.

Sprint 2 is now open. We’re looking for founders to build with us.

Healthcare is under pressure from every direction: ageing populations, chronic disease, stretched hospitals and rising cost. The opportunities aren’t confined to one corner of the system anymore. They run from the first steps of drug development to how care reaches people at home.

We’re backing founders building in:

→ Drug development
→ Cancer diagnosis and treatment
→ Uterine health
→ Pregnancy and early parenthood
→ Brain and mental health
→ Hospital operations and automation
→ Preventive health and longevity
→ Ageing at home
→ Health records and clinical AI
→ Wildcards: problems that sit between categories, or outside them

We’re looking for founders who know the customer, the workflow or the technology from the inside, want to lead full time, and have an idea or thesis in one of these spaces.

Founders receive pre-seed investment, a dedicated studio team across product, design, engineering and GTM from day one, and access to our partner’s experts, technology and customers.

If you’re building in any of these spaces, or thinking about your next venture, we want to hear from you.

Build with us

Critical nature for critical industry - leaning in to interdependence

‘Double materiality’, a term at the heart of EU emissions reporting a few years ago, explains that businesses impact the environment while simultaneously encountering risks and opportunities from their dependence on it. A mine needs a stable water table to dig, a port needs a stable coastline to sustain years of activity.

Within industrial sectors opportunity lies for tech that leans into interdependence rather than builds around it. This is what we term ‘nature tech’, pioneering startups building in the ‘double materiality’ of venture and nature. If a port uses concrete infrastructure, why shouldn’t that concrete provide a home for marine life which in turn benefits fishing and farming communities? The supportive loop starts to close.

Read the full piece

Turning a wastestream into a second business with North Australian SeaCulture

“I’m an engineer by training. Before North Australian SeaCulture, I spent years assessing emerging technologies for mining, oil and gas, and industrial decarbonisation. This meant everything from nuclear power to electrification to niche technologies like turquoise hydrogen. So when people hear I’ve built a seaweed company, they usually assume the hard part was the biology and the interesting part was the engineering. It’s actually the other way around, but it took building a whole second product line out of what the rest of the industry throws away for me to really understand why.”

Read Alison's piece in full

Valarian and Uncovr in Sifted AI100

Congratulations to Valarian and Uncovr on featuring in the Sifted AI 100.

They feature because of the size of the opportunity they’re chasing, the defensibility of their tech and the speed at which they’re moving.

Valarian builds sovereign AI and high-consequence infrastructure for government, defence, and enterprise organizations

Uncovr builds video-understanding foundation models that analyse live surgical video from robotic, endoscopic, and laparoscopic procedures in real-time.

Marrow raises $2M to connect insurers’ pricing and underwriting systems to AI agents

Marrow, spun out of our venture studio with Aviva, has raised $2m pre-seed led by Insurtech Gateway.

Its platform lets insurers sell to AI shopping agents through a single connection, while keeping control of products, disclosures and transaction records. Live with Aviva since March, it will scale its London team.

Events

🇦🇺 Founders Factory at International Mining and Resources Conference Sydney | October 28th

Founders Factory and Unearthed hosted Funding the Future of Mining Tech, bringing together public capital, corporate venture, founders and miners to tackle why the companies finding deposits, unlocking stranded resources and recovering metal from waste still struggle to reach industrial scale.

Across three panels moderated by Unearthed’s Holly Bridgwater, speakers from the National Reconstruction Fund, Orion Industrial Ventures, Novalith Technologies, Terra AI, Banksia Minerals, BHP Ventures, BHP, IMDEX and Founders Factory Mining Director Tamryn Barker explored where the capital gap lies, who should carry the risk, and what it takes to move from technology development to commercialisation.

🇸🇬 Founders Factory at close-out drinks for SWITCH & Energy Week | October 29th 5.30pm

​Following a week of panels, booths and badge scans, ​Founders Factory is hosting informal drinks on the last night of SWITCH and Singapore International Energy Week, for the founders, investors and corporate innovation teams we’ve met along the way.

This is an opportunity to share what you’ve learned from the week and hear from others on what they’re working on.

Register your interest here

🇦🇺 Perth Residency Week | November 2nd-6th

Next week Founders Factory team, founders and partners come together for our bi-annual residency week, for pitches, commercialisation, pilots and networking.

Welcome to our Mining Tech Cohort 5 with Rio Tinto: Cascade Geomatics, Determinant Materials, Inc., blueprint, NanduX, Fieldstone Bio

Welcome to our Nature Tech Cohort 5 with the Government of Western Australia: Byssal, Myco Metals, PROXGRID, Living Oceans, Rare Flora, Clear Carbon

Job Openings

Founder & CEO, Project Amber (Bangkok) | Apply here

With ExpresSo NB, the innovation arm of Thai national energy company PTT, we’re building clean energy startups out of Bangkok. Project Amber turns Thailand’s burned rice straw into verified carbon removal.

Tech Co-Founder / CTO, FaiSabai | Bangkok | Apply here

Also from our venture studio with PTT’s ExpresSo NB, FaiSabai is building the operating system for residential solar as Thailand’s rooftop boom takes off.

As initial research funding and resources diminish, the gap to commercialisation and repeat revenue can be fatal. A gap often aptly referred to as the ‘The Valley of Death’.

For startups in heavy industry, bridging that gap comes with the understanding that the desires of investors and customers come from opposite places. Investors buy a story about the future. Be it a market that’s about to open up, a cost curve that’s about to bend, a team that can execute fast and realise that future faster.

Customers buy a solution to a problem they already have, on a budget, timeline and risk tolerance that has little to do with fundraising dynamics.

These two fronts require different literacies and a founder can be genuinely excellent at one while being dangerously naive about the other – and in heavy industry, there’s fewer opportunities to pivot.

Through our Future Industry Partnership work commercialising climate solutions in heavy industry, we look at how founders in this space can prepare effectively for winning customers and investors alike.

Also in the Bulletin:

• Winning customers and capital as a startup in heavy industry

• Notes from New York Climate Week

• Aviva and Founders Factory extend partnership

• NetworkOcean becomes first company to run AI models off-grid at sea

• Future Industries Partnership Commercialisation Bootcamp launch

• GeoAgni: Why medium temperature geothermal is an overlooked opportunity

• Investing in finQbit

• North Australian SeaCulture win Croc 26

• Raises

• Events

• Jobs

Winning customers and capital as a startup in heavy industry

In heavy industry, ‘ready’ is a moving target set by the buyer. Founders who wait to be ready before talking to customers usually find out too late that ‘ready’ means something different to the person writing the cheque.

If a founder has a strong lab result and zero commercial conversations, we tell them to find three people who’d actually have to approve a purchase, inside three different organisations with different roles, and ask a series of structured questions on what would have to be in place for them to take a new product or service seriously. A general direction of travel should lie in where answers overlap and contradict. Overlap is the spec to build toward while contradiction usually means the founder’s targeting the wrong buyer, or the product needs to satisfy two different bars at once.

Read full feature

Notes from New York Climate Week, with Head of Investments Olivia Brooks

I’ve just got back from a packed week at NYC Climate Week. Highlights included Newlab’s New Climate Futures at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, sessions on the ocean’s role in American re-industrialisation, on critical minerals (co-hosted by our portfolio company Material Difference), startup showcases, and a ride on Vessev’s hydrofoil on the East River with the Rypples team.

Some of my main takeaways are:

1. New technologies need new ecosystems

Conversations discussed new industries as whole ecosystems of innovation. Supply chain electrification is one example. Trucks, trains, and boats are obviously central but also the robotics, charging and physical infrastructure around them. Electrifying the economy was framed as a $2 trillion opportunity, and most of it sits in those surrounding layers.

2. Critical minerals are moving closer to home

In discussions of critical minerals, attention was on processing as much as extraction. The question is how to refine and process critical minerals at lower cost, more domestically and with less dependence on concentrated global supply chains.

3. Capital is following durability

Investors are moving money toward durable, essential industries and away from narrative-driven bets. One line at Newlab’s New Climate Futures summed up the mood: “Mission meets measure, meets market.” Impact still matters but it has to come with measurable results and real commercial demand.

4. We’re in a nuclear renaissance

Nuclear came up again and again as a strong option for dense, high-capacity, emission-free power. Scaling it depends on financing, trained people, an efficient global supply chain and communities that support new projects. Opportunity for startups also lies in the enabling-work behind the scenes.

5. Modular is how you scale fast

Modularising factories and production came up repeatedly as the fastest route to scale. For hardware founders, designing for repeatable, modular deployment from day one is becoming a real advantage.

6. The workforce has to move with the infrastructure

As energy infrastructure changes, the recurring question was how the workforce adapts. That means re-skilling existing workers and building pipelines for skills these industries will need, from automation to advanced manufacturing.

Aviva and Founders Factory extend partnership

Aviva and Founders Factory are extending our partnership to build the next generation of fintech and health startups.

One of the longest-standing corporate venture partnerships in the UK. Since 2016 the programme has supported 60+ startups, which have gone on to raise more than £500 million in investment.

The programme now tackles insurance, wealth, property, asset management and cybersecurity.

Built with AI and frontier technology at their core, this next generation of startups will change how people manage and protect their money, health and family.

Portfolio companies like Tembo (mortgage lending, now reaching more people through Aviva’s workplace pension proposition) and Marrow (connecting AI agents like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini directly to insurers’ pricing, underwriting and policy admin systems) stand as examples of what the studio partnership has produced. Along with a list of other successes including Acre (exited to ClearScore), Valarian, Scan.com and Xapien.

We’re just getting started, building three new ventures every year.

Read more about the partnership

NetworkOcean becomes first company to run AI models off-grid at sea

Last week, NetworkOcean made history. It became the first company to run AI models from the ocean entirely off-grid, and the first to run a customer AI workload at sea, powered by solar. The team went from design to deployment in just 53 days.

NetworkOcean builds floating data-centre barges and underwater data-centre capsules that cost less than land-based facilities. It doesn’t use freshwater for evaporative cooling. Instead it cools high-density servers directly with seawater, which cuts power use for heavy GPU clusters by up to 40% and uses no water at all. The servers also sit in sealed spaces with no oxygen, humidity or dust, so they run more efficiently.

Future Industries Partnership Commercialisation Bootcamp launch

This month Founders Factory kicked off the Future Industries Partnership Commercialisation Bootcamp.

The six-week commercialisation intensive for the FIP cohort is built to tackle moving from pilot to scale, often the hardest transition in industrial climate tech.

The format is three-sided:

• Investor side: sharpening the narrative, numbers and readiness that gets deep tech funded in markets where capital is cautious and cycles are long.

• Customer side: pressure-testing commercial models against what heavy industry actually buys.

• Showcase: closing the programme by putting founders directly in front of the investors and corporates who can move them forward.

The Future Industries Partnership is a philanthropic programme supported by HSBC and delivered by Founders Factory and Third Derivative, RMI’s global climate tech accelerator, supporting startups scaling industrial climate solutions across Southeast Asia, India and the Middle East.

Read more about the programme

GeoAgni: Why medium temperature geothermal is an overlooked opportunity

The geothermal industry has always focused on high-temperature hydrothermal resources in volcanic regions. However, many non-volcanic sedimentary basins contain substantial subsurface heat at approximately 140–180°C. Until now, these resources have been considered technically difficult or commercially unattractive. In reality, this mid-temperature heat is the perfect clean energy to power your local grid or data centre. That is how I came to found GeoAgni.

Read Mongkhol's feature

Investing in finQbit

We’re excited to announce our investment with Mediobanca in finQbit, a quantum computing platform that delivers 10–300x faster and more precise financial risk calculations without requiring quant analysts to understand quantum physics.

With roughly $5 trillion of OTC derivatives traded daily, banks are relying on classical-computing approximations that introduce model risk, while Basel IV and FRTB demand ever more granular, higher-frequency risk calculations from infrastructure that’s already at its limit.

finQbit’s hardware-agnostic platform runs on classical infrastructure today, benchmarking across IBM, Rigetti, IonQ and IQM, with quantum processing units as the upgrade path as hardware matures – meaning revenue doesn’t wait on the hardware roadmap.

North Australian SeaCulture wins Croc Pitch 26

North Australian SeaCulture has won Croc Pitch 2026, Northern Australia’s premier pitching competition.

Hosted by the Darwin Innovation Hub and backed by Paspalis Capital, the Northern Territory Government, Business Enterprise Centre NT and Charles Darwin University, it connects ambitious founders with investors and industry leaders to win up to $1 million in venture capital.

North Australian SeaCulture, founded by Alison Duguid and an alum of Founders Factory’s Nature Tech Accelerator with the Government of Western Australia, was named the winner.

Growing and processing native tropical seaweed into soil products, NASC help mine sites meet rehabilitation targets current methods cannot achieve. Lab trials show up to 75% higher seed germination against a 50% regulatory benchmark, with paid trials already underway with a major miner.

Raises

Scan.com – $220m
Scan.com is fixing the massive inefficiency in the US’s 600M-scan-a-year medical imaging market by matching patients to the right scanner, price and subspecialist through AI. Backed early by Founders Factory and Aviva, the UK’s largest medical imaging network has now supported over 900,000 patients globally.

Xapien – $56m
Xapien uses AI to automate third-party due diligence, and its annual recurring revenue has grown more than 350% in two years. The Spectrum Equity-led round will fund hiring and a bigger push into the US, where it already makes half its revenue.

Ki 13 – $5m seed
London-based Ki 13 turns plant biomass into green hydrogen and biogenic CO₂, cutting the cost of making synthetic fuels. The HICO Investment Group-led round will build an industrial pilot plant to test the technology at larger scale.

Mama Insurance – new round, over €2m raised in total
Mama Insurance is an AI-native platform that makes home insurance in Italy easier to find and buy. Fastweb+Vodafone led the round, which will help it move into more personal insurance lines and products for Italian SMEs.

Events

🇩🇪 Berlin Healthcare Mixer | 6:30pm | October 1st

On October 1st, Founders Factory is bringing our team to Berlin for an evening with portfolio and future founders and operators from across the Berlin ecosystem.

For technical founders, commercial operators, clinicians and anyone seriously thinking about starting a company in and around healthcare.

Places are limited to keep the event intimate, register your interest here: https://luma.com/0r4e4skm

🇬🇧 London Northwestern Demo Day | 9am | October 13th

On October 13th our Northwestern Medicine Healthcare Accelerator concludes with a Demo Day in London.

If you’re investing in healthcare and looking to see what’s next, this is the final chance to meet the cohort building in this space.

Register your interest here: https://luma.com/y3ozwtt4

Job Openings

Co-Found with Founders Factory – Healthcare Studio | London (HQ) | Apply here

Co-found a healthcare venture with FF’s team of IPO-exited founders and operators — from connected skilled nursing infrastructure to cognitive decline detection — backed by €275k spin-out capital and a 6-month build programme.

Talent Investor – Venture Studio | London | Apply here

Join Founders Factory’s Venture Studio as a Talent Investor, helping source and place exceptional operators into our earliest-stage ventures.

Venture Builder | Singapore | Apply here

Take ideas from zero to venture-backable, working hands-on across product, design, growth and tech to shape strategy, build MVPs and find early product-market fit with our founders.

Deep-tech startups have crossed the threshold from academic spinout to institutional asset class and the capital confirms it. Robotics companies raised $14.1B in 2025, a figure already eclipsed by $18.8B in H1 2026 (from fewer, larger checks). The broader category has matured in lockstep, 30% of deep-tech deals went to later-stage rounds in 2024, and by 2025 deep-tech accounted for a third of all VC investment. Falling manufacturing costs and compute explain part of this. The rest comes down to a different calibre of founder.

Health is where that founder is most visible and most tested. Across our own portfolio we’re seeing what this looks like in practice. Medical-grade AI copilots are supporting radiologist MRI reads at Matricis.ai, remote-care infrastructure is being rebuilt by Origin, and sub-scalp neural interfaces are extending human capability at Fluent. The science underpinning each is distinct, drawn from years of lab and academic rigour along different technical pathways. The commercial challenge, however, is structurally the same.

Strip away the IP and the funding rounds, and the question that determines outcomes is: what does it actually take to carry a highly complex, tightly regulated product to commercial scale? In this month’s bulletin we look at what it takes to be a deep tech founder in healthcare.

Also in the Bulletin:

• The $3 trillion problem with red mud

• Tembo and Aviva announce new agreement

• Hades’ new mining licence

• Apply for Blue Earth100 with up to $10 million in investment available

• Ocean Hex up for award

• Immoly spin out of venture studio

• Job openings

What’s different about founding a deep-tech startup in health

The obvious point is that cycles are longer and harder. Regulatory pathways (be it FDA or EMA), clinical validation, and reimbursement sit between a founder and their first real customer or commercial agreement, there’s no market-ready MVP-in-six-months shortcut like unregulated software categories.

Capital intensity and patience are required on both sides. Timelines of 5–15 years from lab to market are common in deep tech generally (vs 2-5 years for a standard startup), and health is no exception once trials are involved. Hospitals use long procurement cycles by design, often around 9-15 months, so runway needs to be deployed carefully.

That timeframe is coming down, however, and we’re seeing AI accelerate modeling capability and improve the accuracy of projections. The increasing appetite of investors also means that there are more grants and capital available to founders than ever before, helping accelerate R&D and connect the right people and institutions. A benefit that has played out in Founders Factory’s programmes with Northwestern Medicine, MSWA and Innovate UK.

Read full piece

Mining investor Jack Kennedy on the $3 trillion problem with red mud

“There is an estimated $3 trillion worth of metal value sitting inside more than 4 billion tonnes of this waste, and over 150 million tonnes are added to the pile every year. Dealing with red mud, the byproduct left over from alumina production, has never been straightforward.

What’s puzzled me for some time is why more people haven’t gone after this opportunity, particularly given that it’s concentrated at a relatively small number of sites, which should make centralising and scaling a recovery effort easier. It’s a genuinely hard problem, but one I keep returning to because the status quo feels absurd: we just keep building the walls higher to hold more of it. And $3 trillion in recoverable metal is not a number worth ignoring today.”

Read Jack's piece

Tembo and Aviva Expand partnership

Aviva has expanded its partnership with Tembo, making Tembo’s mortgage support service an established part of its workplace pension proposition.

Tembo was a studio venture built with Aviva backing from its inception in April 2021 through seed and subsequent funding rounds.

What started as a concept has become the UK’s Best Mortgage Broker at the British Bank Awards for four consecutive years running, closing a £16M round earlier this year.

Employees balancing long-term retirement savings alongside the challenge of property affordability need support on both fronts.

Tembo gives Aviva’s workplace pension customers access to specialist mortgage guidance, approximately 110 lenders, and a range of family-assisted and affordability-enhancing solutions that help more people get onto the housing ladder sooner.

Read more about the partnership

Hades has secured an exploration licence for Storkwitz

Hades has secured an exploration licence for Storkwitz, the only known rare earth deposit in Germany

Granted by the Saxon Mining Authority on 31 July, the 28.4 square kilometre licence area near Delitzsch in northern Saxony hosts an estimated 38,000 tonnes of rare earth oxides and 8,000 tonnes of niobium pentoxide, materials essential for EV motors, wind turbines, defence systems and electronics.

Hades intends to evaluate Storkwitz using its proprietary Cerberus laser drilling technology alongside in-situ recovery techniques that extract minerals through injected fluids rather than open-pit excavation.

Founded just last year and having already raised €20 million across two venture rounds, Hades is moving at a pace that many mining companies take decades to match.

Read more about the exploration licence

Ocean Hex is a finalist in the WA Innovators of the Year Award.

The Great for the State Award, which Ocean Hex’s HIVE system is nominated for, is awarded to a WA innovator whose innovation showcases the State’s creativity and ingenuity, and offers clear benefits for WA’s economy, community and environment.

Ocean Hex builds regenerative solutions for coastal infrastructures and ocean ecosystems through science, technology, robotics, automations and cross-sectorial collaboration.

Their main focus is on the HIVE, a bio-engineered system that transforms coastal infrastructure into living, regenerative assets that serve both people and nature.

Apply to BE100 with up to $10 million in investment available

Founders Factory COO Damian Routely is joining Blue Earth’s BE100 as an investor judge.

Over 1,000 applications will be reviewed by Blue Earth, leading VCs and industry experts to find the top 100 companies of 2026. These will pitch live across 10 industries at Blue Earth Summit on 14–15 October, in front of leading VCs and ecosystem partners. 20 winners (one Start-Up and one Scale-Up per industry) will share the £10m BE100 Fund II (min. £100k each). Blue Earth’s Ventures Ecosystem has already helped raise £200m+ for 80+ companies.

Building the future economy? Apply by 16th September.

Apply now

Immoly spin out of Venovia Venture Studio

Immoly, the AI-native property management platform, has spun out from the Founders Factory Venture Studio in partnership with Vonovia, Europe’s largest residential real estate company

Immoly is building an AI platform that automates the administrative processes that consume time, create errors and scale poorly for private and semi-institutional landlords.

Handled autonomously, with full transparency and landlord oversight at every step: tenant communication; document management; repair coordination; rent tracking.

Germany’s residential property market is one of the largest and most fragmented in Europe.

The collaboration with Vonovia brings a deep sector expertise from the company that knows German residential real estate better than anyone, combined with the operational insight of a landlord managing properties at genuine scale.

Congratulations to Florian and the Immoly team on this milestone.

Read more about the spin-out

Job Openings

Talent Investor – Venture Studio | London | Apply here

Join Founders Factory’s Venture Studio as a Talent Investor, helping source and place exceptional operators into our earliest-stage ventures.

Venture Builder – Industrial Shield (HealthTech) | Melbourne / Perth, Australia (6-month freelance contract, start Sept 2026) | Apply here

Take a medical-grade wearable and dashboard from zero to venture-backable, helping protect miners and construction workers from heat stress and respiratory strain on the job.

Venture Studio Tech Lead London (HQ) | Apply here

Lead technical strategy across our Studio and Accelerator portfolios, embedding AI-first thinking into new ventures from day one while building shared internal AI tooling.

There is no harder space to run logistics than a warzone – but not just because of flying shrapnel or roads disrupted by fallen concrete. Before getting to that point there’s tracking cargo without connectivity as it passes between organisations on the ground or even before that, distributing the funding to run aid to those who need it.

These are just the headline challenges while the need for aid isn’t getting smaller. An estimated 305 million people around the world required humanitarian assistance in 2025 according to OCHA’s Global Humanitarian Overview, with 120 million forcibly displaced – an increase for the 12th consecutive year.

That need isn’t being met either. Only 59% of aid reached its target destination last year, a 40% drop, the UNRIC found, between 2024 and 2025. All in the wake of mass cuts to humanitarian aid from governments and philanthropists in recent years.

In this month’s bulletin we look at the opportunity for logistics startups to deliver breakthroughs in humanitarian aid.

Also in the Bulletin:

• Building Logistics Tech For Humanitarian Aid

• Meet the Northwestern Medicine Healthcare Cohort

• Who raised in July

• Matricis.ai’s Elise Guillaume-Mekkaoui on diagnosing endometriosis

• ACUA partnership

• Programme openings

• Job openings

The humanitarian last mile

NGOs are focusing their efforts on the single most critical part of the logistics chain for aid: the last mile (the leg between the final distribution centre and the beneficiary) which is often where things go wrong or missing.

And while there are many differences between humanitarian aid and the system that moves the world’s goods (logistics), the core transport problems are the same. Route optimisation, coordination, visibility, and beneficiary identification are all tasks that need to be carried out whether you’re in South Sudan or Port Jackson Bay.

Humanitarian aid is a key theme in this year’s CMA CGM Awards - where CMA CGM is looking to give startups a live testbed inside one of the world’s largest logistics groups. As part of this year’s competition we look at one of the central themes: the opportunity for logistics startups to deliver breakthroughs in humanitarian aid. Firstly though, let’s look at the obstacles.

Read the full piece

Meet the Northwestern Medicine Accelerator Cohort

We’re proud to announce the first cohort of the Northwestern Medicine and Founders Factory healthcare accelerator, as featured in Axios.

The programme connects world-class AI, robotics and healthtech talent from the US and Europe with America’s leading academic health system.

Northwestern Medicine is one of the most respected integrated healthcare systems in the United States with 11 hospitals, over 5,400 affiliated physicians, and 200+ outpatient and diagnostic sites, anchored by Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago.

This accelerator gives founders the chance to test, deploy and scale their technology directly within that ecosystem, unlocking access to the world’s largest healthcare market.

The six companies joining the first cohort:

Uncovr: Transforming how surgery is analysed, documented, coded and learned, capturing the data needed to train models that could eventually enable autonomous procedures. Paris & New York | Founder(s): Ines Iraki | uncovr.ai

Genie Fertility: This AI discovery platform, co-founded by scientists from Cambridge, Oxford and Imperial, unlocks new molecular biomarkers to better understand reproductive health (London, UK) Founder(s): Anoushka Menon | geniefertility.com

Nucleo: Building the infrastructure layer for automated oncology diagnostics, designed to cut time from cancer diagnosis to treatment from ~10 weeks to 10 days. San Francisco | Founder(s): Angelica Iacovelli | nucleoresearch.com

Matricis: A medical-grade AI copilot supporting earlier endometriosis detection by assisting radiologists with pelvic MRI reads. Paris | Founder(s): Raphaelle Taub and Elise Guillaume-Mekkaoui | matricis.ai

Myonerv: A wearable neurotechnology device transforming stroke rehabilitation by monitoring and treating stroke-induced paralysis. Cambridge, UK | Founder(s): Sam Kourosh Kamalin, George Gryparis | myonerv.co

Aykua: Eliminating FMLA, disability and accommodation paperwork for US clinics, automating patient requests, payment processing and medical record analysis. Cambridge, UK | Founder(s): Andrew Kadis | aykua.com

From oncology and stroke rehabilitation to the administrative systems healthcare providers depend on every day, this cohort reflects how AI is beginning to reengineer the entire care continuum. Welcome to all six teams.

July portfolio raises

Valarian raises $50M series A

Valarian has closed an over-subscribed $50 million Series A, taking total funding to $70 million.

Led by New Enterprise Associates, the round was expanded to include strategic investors such as XTX Markets and Palo Alto Networks’ CEO Nikesh Arora.

Valarian’s control infrastructure lets organisations adopt AI without surrendering the data that makes them competitive – one of the most important infrastructure problems currently being solved.

Bondio raises $7.5M

Congratulations to Bondio on closing $7.5M in funding, with the latest round led by Breega alongside Kima Ventures and Motier Ventures.

Bondio connects sellers of eSIMs to mobile networks around the world, building the core infrastructure for the eSIM world.

Founded in 2023, the company is already backed by leading telecoms companies Deutsche Telekom and Telefonica which speaks to the strategic significance of what Bondio is building.

FAST Metals raises a $4.3 million pre-seed

FAST Metals closes $4.3 million in pre-seed funding and announces their first commercial customer, Metalox Mineral Corporation.

More than four billion tonnes of red mud exists globally, containing an estimated $3–4 trillion in metals crucial for defence, manufacturing and clean energy.

FAST Metals’ patented technology de-irons low-grade feedstock, recovering aluminium, scandium, titanium, rare earth elements and other critical minerals from red mud – turning what has long been both a financial burden and an environmental liability into a recoverable, saleable product.

Furbnow closes a $3.3M seed round

Furbnow has closed a $3.3M seed round, led by West Midlands Co-Investment Fund with participation from Nesta, Wrightwood Investments and SFC Capital.

Founded by Becky Lane in 2022 through the Nesta and Founders Factory Mission Studio, Furbnow makes home energy retrofit navigable and trustworthy for homeowners who want to act but don’t know where to start.

The platform acts as an independent advisor, conducting whole-house surveys and connecting homeowners with vetted contractors for heat pumps, solar panels and insulation – removing the friction and confusion that has historically made retrofit one of the hardest consumer decisions in the energy transition.

Fluent raises $2M

Congratulations to Fluent on closing a $2 million raise to bring their low-risk brain-computer interface to more people living with speech impairment.

Fellow investors include the University of Melbourne Genesis Pre-Seed Fund, Pacific Channel, Galileo Ventures, MSWA, and Jumpspace Ventures.

Fluent’s technology sits above the motor cortex, outside the skull, and uses machine learning to convert brain activity into text or audio. By avoiding the complex surgery required for traditional implanted electrodes, the team has developed an approach that matches the signal quality of more invasive methods while being significantly more accessible.

Chiron raises a $1.2M seed round

Chiron raised a $1.2M seed round, led by THENA Capital with participation from Arāya Ventures.

Founder Carron Manning and team are building the intelligence layer for personalised self-management, enabling healthcare providers to deliver continuous, adaptive care beyond the clinic.

Their platform combines electronic health records, wearable data and patient-reported outcomes to build and refine personalised self-management programmes for every individual, giving clinicians a continuous window into what happens between appointments.

Matricis.ai’s Elise Guillaume-Mekkaoui on diagnosing endometriosis

Endometriosis affects one in 10 women worldwide, yet the average patient waits between seven and 10 years to receive a correct diagnosis.

Elise Guillaume-Medkkaoui, co-founder and COO of Matricis.ai, is a patient herself. Her own diagnostic journey is what drove her to build a company around closing the gap.

Endometriosis takes too long to diagnose

Endometriosis is a condition in which tissue similar to the lining of the uterus grows outside it causing chronic pain, heavy periods, fatigue and in many cases infertility. Its symptoms are often dismissed as normal menstrual discomfort and its presentation on imaging is easily missed.

The result is a diagnostic odyssey that affects millions of women and years of living with a condition that could have been identified and managed far earlier.

The gold standard for endometriosis diagnosis has historically been the invasive laparoscopic surgery. MRI offers a non-invasive alternative, but reading pelvic MRI for endometriosis reliably is difficult.

Meet Matricis.ai

Matricis.ai is an AI companion for radiologists reading pelvic MRI, surfacing the signs of endometriosis earlier, more consistently and with greater confidence.

The algorithm is already built. Matricis.ai is now focused on deployment - understanding how large hospital systems work, how to navigate procurement and pricing in markets like the US, and how to get the technology into the hands of the radiologists who need it.

Through the Northwestern Medicine and Founders Factory Healthcare Accelerator Matricis.ai is accessing the US hospital network it would otherwise take years to build independently.

Change is here

Endometriosis has been chronically underfunded and underresearched relative to its prevalence, but that is beginning to change

Matricis.ai is getting a validated, ready-tool into the systems and workflows that can put it in front of the patients who have been waiting decades.

ACUA Ocean partnership

ACUA has signed a memorandum of understanding with Babcock and Frankenburg Technologies to explore integrating low-cost precision missiles onto uncrewed surface vessels, creating persistent, affordable counter-drone capability for the maritime domain.

The agreement brings together Babcock’s multi-domain launcher system, Frankenburg’s mass-manufacturable interceptor missiles, and ACUA’s Pioneer-class uncrewed surface vessels.

The Pioneer recently operated 16 to 20 nautical miles offshore for more than 100 hours without hands-on intervention. This kind of seakeeping stability makes the concept viable in the rough weather conditions where conventional systems fail.

This partnership could see persistent armed pickets holding station offshore in sea states that normally defeat traditional platforms. The vehicles can be used to protect ships, ports and critical maritime infrastructure against mass drone attacks, closer to the cost of drones themselves.

Programme Openings

CMA CGM Startup Awards 2026

A live testbed inside one of the world’s largest logistics groups. 1,000 warehouses, 650+ vessels, 420 ports. Winners get funded commercial deployment, 12 months in ZEBOX, and direct access to CMA CGM decision-makers. Looking for startups with traction in smart transport, AI operations, next-gen media or the future of work.
🕒 Deadline: 7 August | 👉 Apply here

Job Openings

🛡️ IndustrialShield (UK or Australia)

Heat stress causes 277,000 injuries and 230 deaths a year in the EU alone. Silica dust kills around 500 construction workers annually in the UK. Both risks are still managed through static monitors and gut instinct.

We are building a single chest-worn clip of three sensors and one device that tracks particulate, gas, heat and physiological strain together for the first time, turning continuous worker exposure into actionable risk profiles. The partner sensor stack is an unfair advantage no rival can assemble. Early conversations with major miners: “I haven’t seen it in one unit before.”

For a founder who wants to build the workforce-risk operating system for heavy industry.

View job opening

🔬 Slidestream (Bengaluru/Bangalore, India)

Asia has 6.8 pathologists per million people. North America has 49. The blood smear frontline test for anaemia, leukaemia and infection is still read by eye in tier-2 and tier-3 India, or not read at all.

We are building a sub-€4k scanner that photographs the slide, flags abnormal cells with on-board AI and routes cases to a remote specialist (offline, no cloud dependency). The device is already built and CDSCO-cleared by our partner, with 5,000+ annotated training data points and two years of development already done. Ranked the number one concept by two independent investors.

For a founder who wants to bring diagnostic pathology to the next billion patients.

View Job Opening

🤖 NightWatch (Chiacgo, Austin, Houston, United States)

Around 80% of falls in senior living happen in the window right after a nurse’s check wakes the resident. The check causes the harm it exists to prevent.

We are building a mobile UWB-radar robot that patrols corridors at night, senses through doors and walls, and alerts staff only when a physical check is genuinely needed. No cameras. No wearables. No per-room installation. Robot-as-a-service with a two-to-three-month payback. The robotics stack, navigation software and sensing IP are already live in-market with a paying customer through our partner.

For a founder who wants to build the automation layer for how America ages.

View Job Opening

All three roles come with €275k in capital, a full-time venture builder, hands-on studio support across product, AI, fundraising and growth and warm routes into the buyers that matter most.

This is your company. We’re here to help build it.

It’s a cold dawn in the Nevada desert town of Winnemucca as Alexander ‘Al’ Strange pulls the handbrake on his 4x4. A pale sun hits the tops of a few stucco buildings.

Equally cold is the realisation that every moment over the last few months, every setback and fumble, every breakthrough on their airborne Neutron Activation Analysis system converges on this point. And there is one more setback waiting. When the team unpacks the equipment, they discover a key component of the payload is damaged from their journey to the remote town.

The hotel room becomes a workshop and they’re quietly grateful they thought to bring a 3D printer.

In this month’s bulletin we talk to Voluna’s Al Strange on the mining tech startup’s journey and how they measure the elemental composition of the ground from the air by firing neutrons into the earth and reading the gamma rays that come back.

Also in the Bulletin:

• Programme openings

• Meet the latest cohorts

• Factory activity in June

• Terra AI raise $20m Series A

• The Clinical Coding Conundrum for Hospitals

• Watergenics’ Dr. Liviu Mantescu on Measuring What Others Can’t

• Investing in Telgea

• Job openings

Measuring The Elemental Composition Of The Earth… From The Sky

Mineral exploration has changed remarkably little in the era of digital transformation. Where industries from logistics to financial services have been reshaped by real-time data, mining exploration has remained dependent on geochemical sampling, bottlenecked by manual labour and slow assay-lab turnaround times that together offer only a sparse view of the deposit. The cost of that uncertainty in failed drills, wasted capital and missed deposits runs into billions across the industry each year.

Voluna’s platform attacks that bottleneck directly. Rather than being subject to the status quo, its NAA system reads the geochemical signature of the subsurface in the field — delivering the kind of direct elemental data that exploration teams have never previously been able to access without ground disturbance and a boots-on-the-ground footprint.

The idea was straightforward. Getting there, less so.

An airborne platform had always been the goal. But before it could fly, the underlying physics had to be proven on the ground. In October 2025, Voluna deployed its alpha ground prototype, codenamed Gammine, for the first time in a live exploration environment — a proof of concept for the core neutron activation analysis technology.

“We came away accomplished but humbled,” Al says. “Deployment is where things get real. Equipment breaks, and terrain and conditions are always underestimated.”

Read the full piece

Programme Openings

CMA CGM Startup Awards 2026

Looking for startups with traction in smart transport, AI operations, next-gen media or the future of work. Winners get funded commercial deployment, 12 months in the ZEBOX programme, and direct access to CMA CGM decision-makers.
🕒 Deadline: 7 August | 👉 Apply here

Nature Tech Accelerator Cohort 5

Applications are open for our fifth Nature Tech cohort, run from Perth with the Government of Western Australia. A four-month programme backing early-stage startups across water quality, biodiversity restoration, ocean resilience, agriculture and nature-positive finance.
🕒 Deadline: 10 July 👉 Apply here

Rio Tinto Mining Tech Accelerator Cohort 5

Applications are open for breakthrough technologies tackling mining’s biggest challenges across exploration, operations and safety. For founders building at the edge of industrial tech shaping the future of mining.
🕒 Deadline: 10 July | 👉 Apply here

SLINGSHOT 2026

Applications are open for Singapore’s premier deep tech competition, now in its 10th edition, taking place at SWITCH (27–29 Oct). Categories: Advanced Computing, Industrial Systems, Digital Security, Sustainability, Health & Biomedical. Top 50 Global Startups win a sponsored trip to pitch live in Singapore, with S$2M+ in grant prizes on offer.
🕒 Deadline: 30 June | 👉 Apply here

New Cohorts

MSWA Multiple Sclerosis & Neurological Care Accelerator Inaugural Cohort

Five ventures building the future of neurological care, delivered with MSWA and featured in the Wall Street Journal for connecting cutting-edge healthcare technology directly to the people who need it most.

Welcome: upLYFT, NeuroSonic, Fluent, Clarity, ReVimo

New Future Industries Partnership Cohort

A philanthropic programme with HSBC and Third Derivative scaling industrial climate solutions across Southeast Asia, India and the Middle East.

Welcome: Airform, BANIQL, beyond captur, Bhumi, CarbonStrong, Climitra Carbon, Conry Tech, CURA, Electrogenos, GREE Energy, Mitti Labs, Nanoweave, Neutreeno, Ossus Biorenewables, PRISTINZ, Varaha, Widuz

CODE Tech Founders Accelerator Cohort 4

Launched with Imperial College London and the MCIT Center of Digital Entrepreneurship, connecting MENA’s top entrepreneurs with the UK and European startup ecosystem.

Welcome: Qanoniah, moneymoon, SDM, Dal, jozo جزء, siolla | سيولا, TABsense, Grinta Hub, EVA, Talento | تالنتو, Limeless, Gig SA, Cashin, Resilience, Entropy Minds, Sport LOOP, Twinn Health, Mazoom, Wepay, Ojrah

Factory Activity in June

Money 20/20 — 2nd June
Sector Director Olly Betts hosted a panel at Money20/20 Amsterdam on Term Sheet Truths: What VCs Are Betting on Now, with Northzone, Experian Ventures and Thomson Reuters Ventures.

London Tech Week — 8th-10th June
Founder Brent Hoberman discussed London’s position as a global tech hub with Mayor Sir Sadiq Khan, Baroness Martha Lane Fox and Secretary of State Peter Kyle MP. Portfolio company Pyri took the Ignition Stage on wildfire resilience, while Chief People Officer Farah Kanji joined the WEALTH panel on Generosity, Power and Boundaries in Leadership.

London Climate Action Week — 20th-28th June
Head of Investments Olivia Brooks was at Kanaloa House to discuss maritime decarbonisation and joined Ocean Summit, HSBC and Earthshot Prize sessions. Deep Tech Investor Jack Kennedy attended JP Morgan’s critical minerals event, COO Damian Routley joined Node and HSBC on bridging the missing middle, and our team joined Beyond Pilots, part of our Future Industries Partnership with HSBC and Third Derivative.

Milan Demo Day — 26th June
Founders Factory hosted a breakfast and demo day with our Milan portfolio, a private showcase for corporate leaders exploring the frontier of applied AI, fintech and enterprise tech.

Terra AI raises a $20M Series A

Led by Khosla Ventures with strategic investment from BHP Ventures, and continued support from Rio Tinto, the investment goes towards the mining industry’s first AI-native subsurface modelling platform – giving mining, geothermal and carbon storage teams a fundamentally better way to understand what lies underground.

Terra AI maps uncertainty, producing continuous 3D resource models that tell teams where resources are, where confidence is high and where risk remains.

Read about the raise

The Clinical Coding Conundrum

For families and carers, when a patient is discharged from hospital that’s where the hospital’s role ends. Relief for patients and carers, knowing that things are improving or can be managed from home.

This isn’t the case for the hospital. In Germany, when a patient is discharged, a trained specialist reads 20–50 pages of clinical documentation and manually translates every diagnosis and procedure into standardised codes. These codes determine how much the hospital gets paid. Laborious, unscalable work.

As part of our Healthcare Venture Studio - we explore the open founder opportunity in Clinical Coding Revenue Intelligence.

Read the full piece

Watergenics’ Dr. Liviu Mantescu on Measuring What Others Can’t

Despite being the rails on which innovation has taken place, the industries of metal recovery, desalination and petroleum extraction have not been so ahead of the curve. Until recently they relied on chemical intuition rather than accurate, real-time process measurement.

Read how Watergenics enables industrial process optimisation in conditions where no previous technology has been able to operate reliably.

Read the full piece

Investing in Telgea

We’re excited to announce our investment in Telgea, in partnership with Vodafone + Fastweb – a platform enabling enterprises to manage mobile connectivity across borders under one agreement, one portal, and one bill.

Read about the investment

Job Openings

🛠️ Founder & CEO: MeisterMatch - AI-Native Recruiter for Skilled Trades (Germany/Hybrid)
With Vonovia we’re building MeisterMatch to solve Germany’s skilled trades labour shortage using conversational AI: a Candidate Agent onboarding tradespeople via WhatsApp/voice (no CV) and an Employer Agent delivering qualified shortlists in 48 hours, mapping 130+ crafts and international qualifications to German standards. Backed by €760k combined cash + studio support, 355 live roles from Vonovia as instant demand, and a tested acquisition motion, seeking a German-fluent founder with HR-tech/marketplace instincts and a clear vision for engaging non-desk workers.
👉 Apply here

🛠️ Co-Founder: Hospital Discharge Readiness Engine (Berlin, German Speaking)

Co-found a new venture tackling one of the most structurally expensive inefficiencies in European healthcare — delayed hospital discharge, which costs OECD health systems an estimated $120 billion per year and left 75% of German hospitals in deficit at the end of 2024. You will build a live discharge readiness dashboard that maps every task on the critical path, auto-drafts discharge letters, sends one-click GP notifications and pushes pharmacy pre-alerts — turning reactive discharge into planned, same-day execution. Germany’s KHVVG reform creates a funded procurement window right now, with 1,893 hospitals and no dominant workflow vendor. German fluency essential.
👉 Apply here

🛠️ Venture Builder: 6 Month Contract (Berlin, German Speaking) A hands-on studio role for an experienced operator who wants to work at the coalface of venture building in Germany. You will work directly with early-stage founding teams across Founders Factory’s Berlin portfolio, helping validate concepts, build product, and establish commercial traction from day one. German fluency is essential.
👉 Apply here

Despite its significance to natural and economic worlds, our seas are one of the planet’s least understood environments. Unknown and often harder to protect than land.

As of last year, just 27.3% of the world’s ocean floor had been mapped to modern standards, making the our seabeds one of the most significant data gaps in science. And that’s before we consider what’s in them; 1,550 of the 17,903 marine animals and plants assessed by the IUCN are at risk of extinction, with climate change impacting at least 41% of threatened marine species.

Illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing costs the global economy between $10 and $23 billion annually and is responsible for the loss of 11 to 26 million tonnes of fish each year, with an estimated one in every five fish caught coming from IUU fishing.

The scale of what we do not know about our oceans and the scale of what we are losing from them are directly related. You cannot protect what you cannot see. However the technology to change that at a meaningful scale, in real-time, across the full expanse of the ocean environment is becoming available.

In this month’s bulletin we look at how dual-use technology can defend both the natural world, national sovereignty and commercial interests.

Also in the Bulletin:

• Setting standards over values with your first hire

• Looking back at Ecosperity Week

• Wrapping up Perth Residency week

• Job openings

• Supra’s Katie Durham on next-generation critical minerals separation

• HydraLink’s Simon Taylor on building the world’s first intelligent consumer water platform

Defending ocean environments and national sovereignty with dual-use

Ocean monitoring has often been constrained by the repeating problems of cost and coverage. Satellite observation provides surface-level data across large areas but cannot penetrate the water column. We see research vessels providing detailed data at significant cost and limited geographic reach. And fixed sensor arrays provide continuous data but only at fixed points. This all adds up to a monitoring infrastructure that is fragmentary, capturing decent snapshots, but poor at the comprehensive picture that effective conservation and security need.

Autonomous systems are beginning to close that gap in ways that fixed and crewed infrastructure cannot. Uncrewed surface vessels operating continuously across ocean monitoring zones can collect environmental, meteorological and maritime traffic data at an economy of scale that crewed vessels can’t reach and without the operational constraints of human endurance. Autonomous underwater vehicles can survey the ocean floor, inspect port and pipeline infrastructure, and detect subsurface threats in environments and depths that would require prohibitively expensive crewed operations to access.

This is where the fourth Blue Action Canada Cohort is operating. Read on to see how ventures including Whale Seeker, ACUA Ocean and Deepwater Robotics are building complementary layers of the ocean intelligence infrastructure, each addressing a different dimension of the monitoring gap.

Read the full piece

The New Talent Playbook Part 2: Set the Bar Before You Set the Culture

Part 2 of our series with Founders Factory Head of Talent, Raluca on the talent, culture and hiring practices that separate breakout startups from the rest.

Most founders I work with talk about culture in terms of values workshops and an ever-extensive Notion page on what they stand for. Useful exercises, but they’re not the thing. They’re the thing that follows the real thing: the standards you set.

Culture, in practice, is the bar you hold and what you tolerate when people miss it. You set the bar in the first conversation with hire number one and it’s reinforced (or quietly eroded) every week after that. By the time you’ve made five hires, you’ve already written your culture into the company’s nervous system, whether you realised it or not. Your next fifty hires inherit it.

The companies scaling fastest right now are extremely deliberate about setting standards rather than values.

Read Raluca's feature

Looking back at Ecosperity Week

Founders Factory team was on the ground at Ecosperity Week in Singapore, joining HSBC, Third Derivative and the Venture Climate Alliance at the Philanthropy Asia Summit sessions on accelerating climate solutions deployment across Asia.

On the Monday Founders Factory and HSBC hosted the Industrial Innovator Programme Gala, where FF CEO Henry Lane Fox moderated a discussion on catalytic capital and first-of-a-kind technology finance, joined by leaders from Rio Tinto, HSBC and ArkTerra Partners.

The night closed with an Innovator Showcase featuring three ventures: Nanoweave, Vycarb and Nandina REM, presenting to a room of founders, investors and industrial operators.

Co-Founder George Northcott then joined a panel of practitioners working across the full capital stack to address the financing gap between available capital and deployment-ready projects.

Wrapping-up Perth Residency Week

Founders Factory brought together three Western Australian programmes simultaneously for the first time this week.

The Mining Tech and Nature Tech cohorts with Rio Tinto and the Government of Western Australia joined the inaugural MS and Neurological Care Accelerator cohort with MSWA for five days of intensive programming in Perth.

The week opened with a traditional Aboriginal smoking ceremony, welcoming founders, partners and team to Country. Wednesday’s pitch day at Curtin 137 brought all seventeen founders onto the same stage in front of Western Australian investors, family offices and ecosystem leaders, followed by dedicated masterclasses on scaling on site and exploration from Rio Tinto.

Thursday began with a breakfast panel at the Chamber of Minerals and Energy WA, where Founders Factory Co-Founder George Northcott joined Rio Tinto’s Richard Cohen and WA Minister for Mines and Petroleum David Michael to discuss accelerating mining technology adoption. The week closed with a reception at the State Buildings, where Minister for Innovation and Science Stephen Dawson and Rio Tinto Iron Ore Chief Executive Matthew Holcz addressed the room as all seventeen founders took to the floor for one-minute pitches, before a final dinner brought the cohort together at Petition.

Job Openings

🛠️ Co-Founder — Clinical Coding Revenue Intelligence (Berlin, German Speaking)

Co-found a new venture building an autonomous AI coding agent that reads clinical documentation, reasons from official coding guidelines at inference time, and enters codes into existing hospital software in seconds — with every code backed by an evidence chain and audit-ready DKR citation. Every hospital in Europe loses millions to a manual, error-prone coding process that hasn’t changed in decades. US players have raised $600M+ but are built for American systems. The category leader in Germany has not yet been built. German fluency is essential.

👉 Apply here

–

🛠️ Co-Founder — Hospital Discharge Readiness Engine (Berlin, German Speaking)

Co-found a new venture tackling one of the most structurally expensive inefficiencies in European healthcare — delayed hospital discharge, which costs OECD health systems an estimated $120 billion per year and left 75% of German hospitals in deficit at the end of 2024. You will build a live discharge readiness dashboard that maps every task on the critical path, auto-drafts discharge letters, sends one-click GP notifications and pushes pharmacy pre-alerts — turning reactive discharge into planned, same-day execution. Germany’s KHVVG reform creates a funded procurement window right now, with 1,893 hospitals and no dominant workflow vendor. German fluency essential.

👉 Apply here

–

🛠️ Co-Founder — Cognitive Decline Early Detection Platform (New York)

Co-found a new venture building a continuous ambient home monitoring platform that detects the earliest behavioural and physiological signals of cognitive decline — before the patient or family notices. Over 55 million people worldwide live with dementia, and by the time most receive a diagnosis, years of irreversible decline have already occurred. The US convergence of FDA pathways, Medicare reimbursement and emerging disease-modifying treatments creates an unprecedented commercial window in a remote patient monitoring market projected to reach $88 billion by 2030.

👉 Apply here

–

🛠️ Co-Founder — ClinicalOS, Clinical Infrastructure for Field Operations (London)

Co-found a new venture building the sovereign, open-standard software layer that makes distributed clinical networks behave like one system — deployable in under four hours, connecting every device and patient across every pod and theatre in a single operating layer. The hardware to deploy clinical capacity in the field exists. The operating system that connects it does not. Ideal for a founder with experience in defence, health-tech, industrial IoT or humanitarian operations, comfortable navigating dual-use procurement and building for both military and civilian buyers.

👉 Apply here

HydraLink’s Simon Taylor on building the world’s first intelligent consumer water platform

HydraLink’s product, a design-led irrigation platform powered by wireless valves and real-time AI, eliminates the physical infrastructure and static scheduling of traditional water systems.

“We see an opportunity to fundamentally change how people interact with water and unlock meaningful efficiency gains at global scale,” Simon says. “We believe irrigation should evolve the same way lighting, security and home entertainment did. Simpler, smarter and designed around the user.”

We talked to Simon about the philosophy that runs through everything HydraLink is building and how residency week, the halfway point of the WA Nature Tech Accelerator, is the moment to pressure-test it:

Read the full piece

Supra’s Katie Ullmann Durham on next-generation critical minerals separation and refining

Supra, built with co-founder Jordan Sessler, is building a next-generation critical minerals separation and refining platform. Its initial targets of gallium and scandium are essential to semiconductors, aerospace, energy, defence and communications. The United States, their target market, is currently 100% import-dependent for both.

“Critical minerals are essential to modern life,” Katie says, “yet existing methods to produce and refine them are often expensive, difficult to deploy, and environmentally hazardous.”

China has dominated the critical minerals market for decades through capital-intensive and environmentally damaging refining processes. Meanwhile, billions of dollars worth of critical minerals sit trapped in domestic US waste streams, be it industrial byproducts, mine tailings, electronic waste. All of it going unrecovered for want of a viable extraction technology. That is the gap Supra is closing.

Read the full piece

For years, the story told about European healthtech followed a familiar arc of world-class science, exceptional clinical rigour and a talent base that could hold its own against any ecosystem globally. And then somewhere between the lab and the market a structural gap swallowed companies whole.

That story is no longer accurate and evidence from the most credible institutions tracking this space suggests it may not have been the full picture for some time.

In this month’s Bulletin we look at how the conditions that have historically constrained European health tech founders are shifting as part of our healthcare accelerator with Northwestern Medicine. The convergence of data infrastructure, regulatory environment, and clinical talent is transforming the landscape for investors and health systems.

Also in the Bulletin:

• Meet Nature Tech Cohort 4

• Meet Blue Action Canada Cohort 2

• Events: Hitachi Mining Construction Pitch Day + R3sidency Demo Day

• Myonerv founder Kourosh Sam Kamali: Why We Deliberately Jumped Into the Deep End of Stroke Rehabilitation

• RemoteSolar’s Michael Schmitz: European Energy Sovereignty Starts at the Household Level

• Dronamics and Bondio feature in Scaling Europe’s top 50 startups

• Job openings

A Profile on European Healthtech

Investment is following urgency. VC backing for EU startups combining AI with healthcare, drugs and biotechnology has accelerated sharply, doubling from $331 million in 2020 to nearly $670 million in 2024. Healthcare represented 7% of total VC investments in AI startups in the European Union in 2024 – a figure that, while still below its potential relative to the scale of the challenge, reflects a meaningful shift in investor conviction.

Today, healthcare organisations are embracing artificial intelligence technology to an unprecedented degree across a wide range of activities, from patient care to clinical workflows to drug discovery and development. Boston Consulting Group projects that the market for AI in healthcare will expand rapidly from this base, with health systems increasingly moving from being consumers of medtech solutions to becoming technology creators, developing proprietary algorithms from clinical data.

The breadth of what European founders are building across this landscape is striking. At the access and diagnostics layer, Scan.com, founded by UK radiologist Khalid Latief, has built the UK’s largest marketplace for self-pay MRI, CT, ultrasound and X-ray scans, enabling patients to book imaging appointments in minutes without a GP referral, and has since expanded into the US market after a £43m Series B.

At the frontier of drug discovery, London-based Peptone is applying computational physics and AI to intrinsically disordered proteins, a class of targets implicated in Alzheimer’s, cancer and diabetes that have historically been undruggable because their lack of fixed structure makes them impossible to model through conventional means, having raised $42 million from Bessemer Venture Partners, F-Prime Capital and Novartis.

And in the clinical capability layer, Fundamental XR is building VR haptic simulation infrastructure that allows surgeons to train on complex procedures at scale, backed by EQT Life Sciences with total funding exceeding $30 million. Three companies. Three layers of the same system. Each addressing a structural gap that the European ecosystem is uniquely positioned to solve.

Read the full profile

Announcing Nature Tech Cohort #4 with the Government of Western Australia

Meet the fourth cohort of the WA Nature Tech Accelerator, delivered in partnership with the Government of Western Australia. This time, every startup is Western Australian.

The six ventures are tackling some of the state’s most pressing environmental challenges, from soil rehabilitation and farm emissions to coral reef protection and water efficiency:

• Dura Terra: A regenerative, organic soil-implant granule that rebuilds microbial biology, improves soil structure, develops soil organic carbon, and delivers measurable yield uplift for broadacre agriculture, one granule at a time. (WA)

• HeatShield: Heat-tolerant algal probiotic protects coral reefs from bleaching. (WA)

• HydraLink: Wireless irrigation with self-powered valves and AI scheduling for homes. (WA)

• SnailCam: AI cameras map snail populations for precision pest management. (WA)

• Svanterra: AI-native developer building premium carbon and nature projects on land. (WA)

• Vernico: TGA-listed, medical-grade coconut oil skincare for premature newborns. (WA)

Since launching in 2024, the programme has backed 24 nature tech companies across four cohorts. Past graduates include SeaStock (A$3.4M raised), Fremantle Seaweed (A$2.2M community raise) and Earthly, which has since launched two nature tech funds.

See more about the programme

Announcing Blue Action Canada Cohort #2

Six ocean tech ventures are joining the programme in British Columbia, spanning autonomous ocean systems, AI-driven marine monitoring, maritime decarbonisation, electrification at port, nature-based solutions and defence technologies.

Meet the cohort:

• ACUA Ocean (Plymouth, UK): autonomous uncrewed surface vessels for full-ocean monitoring and data collection

• Armada Technologies (Liverpool, UK): next-generation hull air lubrication systems reducing fuel consumption and emissions across global shipping fleets

• Deepwater Robotics (Vancouver, Canada): long-range, low-cost autonomous underwater vehicles for ocean survey, port inspection and threat detection

• Flux Lines (Montreal, Canada): battery barges providing flexible shore power and grid-connected energy storage to accelerate maritime electrification

• PhyCo (Vancouver, Canada): industrial-scale seaweed bioplastic reducing agriculture’s reliance on petroleum-based plastics

• Whale Seeker (Montreal, Canada): AI-powered visual detection of marine mammals and birds for energy, shipping, government and conservation organisations

Now spanning both sides of the Atlantic, the expansion reflects the deepening collaboration between the UK and Canada on shared priorities in maritime security, defence and the energy transition.

As well as signalling British Columbia’s growing reputation as a global centre of excellence for maritime technology and robotics.

Canadian cohort members will access commercialisation support and global go-to-market reach through Founders Factory and Blue Action’s international network of port, shipping and government partners, including Port of San Diego, Zebox (CMA CGM), AltaSea, Grand Bahama Port Authority and the Government of Barbados.

The programme, supported in partnership with Canada’s Ocean Supercluster, culminates in Victoria and Vancouver in May 2026, coinciding with Web Summit Vancouver and MariTech Victoria.

Past cohort companies have attracted over $2M in funding, with Blue Action’s global portfolio having raised $60M to date.

See more about the programme

Events Round-Up

R[3]sidency (London, 28th April):

Earlier this week eight founders pitched their startups as part of R[3]sidency Demo Day which marked the close of one of the most focused accelerator programmes in the Web3 space and the beginning of something bigger for their exceptional founding teams.

Over 100 investors joined in-person and online to hear the pitches with strong inbound following the session.

The cohort was built for founders operating at the frontier of the Machine Economy knowing something the market doesn’t yet, and who have the conviction to act on it.

Meet the R[3]04 teams who made it:

Auto - Kash - Robin Markets - Poll - Rosetta - Unified - Web - Lexifina

Each team came through a 16-week programme backed by Coinbase, Base, Animoca Brands, Base and Founders Factory - receiving £230k investment, hands-on mentorship from top operators, tactical go-to-market and fundraising support, access to leading crypto and frontier VCs, and over $100,000 in credits and ecosystem perks.

Congratulations to the full cohort. The work starts now.

HCM Pitch Day (Brisbane, 16 April):

Together with Hitachi Construction Machinery, we launched the LANDCROS Innovation Studios Mining Challenge to identify world-leading startups building breakthrough mining technologies across three themes: smarter machines, smarter mine sites, and sustainable mining.

As well as startup pitches, the programme included a keynote from industry leader and Mining3 CEO Neville Plint, and insights from other startup collaborations and industry partners.

Congratulations to all three Grand Winners, and to every startup that pitched.

🥇 Smarter Machines: Rigid Robotics (Canada): AI that understands shovel operation - powering operator augmentation today and autonomous excavation tomorrow.

🥇 Smarter Mine Sites: IntelliSense.io (UK): Scientific-AI powered process optimization that connects the mining value chain to deliver measurable net metal recovery gains.

🥇 Low Impact & Sustainable Mining: Clear Carbon (Western Australia): Mining-grade emissions intelligence that turns fleet efficiency into verified emissions outcomes for reporting and reduction.

Rigid Robotics,Dig Robotics, FOSSA Systems, GECCO, IntelliSense.io, NTWIST, Strayos, Weeefiner, Clear Carbon, COSMOS Save Energy.

RemoteSolar’s Michael Schmitz: European Energy Sovereignty Starts at the Household Level

There is a version of the energy transition that places its faith in large-scale infrastructure, centralised generation and the gradual decarbonisation of existing grid systems. It is a legitimate and necessary part of the picture. But it is not, on its own, sufficient – and for the millions of European households currently exposed to the full volatility of wholesale energy markets, it offers little immediate comfort.

The more interesting question, and the one that has occupied us at RemoteSolar for several years now, is what it would mean for ordinary people to have a meaningful stake in their own energy supply. Not in a theoretical sense, but in a practical, structural one – where the power arriving in your home is traceable to an asset you have part-financed, at a price that cannot be arbitrarily revised upward at the end of a contract term.

That question has moved from the periphery to the centre of the European energy conversation with remarkable speed. And for founders building in this space, the implications are significant.

Read the full feature

Myonerv founder Sam Kamali: Why We Deliberately Jumped Into the Deep End of Stroke Rehabilitation

When you tell people you’re building a neurostimulator at Myonerv for stroke rehabilitation, the first question is usually: who’s your patient?

And when I tell them it’s severely paralysed patients, years post-stroke, people who’ve been told their window for recovery has closed, the reaction is almost always the same. Why would you start there? Why not go for the easier wins first?

I get it. On paper, it looks like we’ve made our lives harder than they need to be. But there’s a logic to it, and once you understand it, I think it’s actually the only decision that made sense.

Read the full feature

Dronamics and Bondio feature in Scaling Europe’s top 50 startups

Two Founders Factory portfolio companies, Dronamics and Bondio, have been recognised in the Scaling Europe 50, the annual ranking of the fastest growing European tech companies, compiled by Seb Johnson’s Scaling Europe newsletter.

The list, which analysed data across hundreds of companies to identify the continent’s highest growth businesses of 2026, places both ventures among an elite cohort that includes Lovable, which topped the rankings and Legora.

The recognition reflects the broader momentum building across the Founders Factory portfolio and the growing strength of European tech.

See the Scaling Europe Top 50

Job Openings

🛠️ Venture Builder — 6 Month Contract (Berlin, German Speaking) A hands-on studio role for an experienced operator who wants to work at the coalface of venture building in Germany. You will work directly with early-stage founding teams across Founders Factory’s Berlin portfolio, helping validate concepts, build product, and establish commercial traction from day one. German fluency is essential.

👉 Apply here

🛠️ Venture Designer (London) Venture Design at Founders Factory is how new venture concepts are created on demand, not by chance. Working closely with corporate partners, you will take high-level investment themes and turn them into validated, investment-ready business concepts — sitting at the intersection of strategic research, product thinking and commercial instinct. Ideal for a designer or strategist with a strong interest in early-stage company creation.

👉 Apply here

🛠️ Co-Founder — Healthcare Studio (London / Europe / Remote) Co-found a new healthtech venture from day one with Founders Factory, building the future of healthcare delivery as care shifts beyond hospital walls into community, home and continuous monitoring models. You will receive €275k pre-seed spin-out capital, hands-on support from senior operators across product, engineering, data and growth, plus a dedicated Venture Builder and access to Founders Factory’s network of healthcare partners — spanning remote monitoring, patient flow, cybersecurity, caregiver enablement and maternal health.

👉 Apply here

🛠️ CTO & Co-Founder — Malcolm, Insurtech Infrastructure Venture (London) Malcolm is building the infrastructure layer for AI-powered insurance distribution — the system that sits between AI agents and insurer APIs, making conversational flows reliable, compliant and production-ready. Already live with Aviva, with a small engineering team in place and a clear technical roadmap, Malcolm is looking for a technical co-founder to take ownership of where the product goes from here. The right candidate will bring deep backend or infrastructure engineering experience and the conviction to build the compliance rails that the agentic insurance economy will run on.

👉Apply here

For most of modern medicine, cardiology has been reactive. A patient develops chest pain. They arrive at the hospital. A scan confirms blockage. A stent is placed. Medication follows. Monitoring happens periodically. The system intervenes when something breaks.

This approach has been extraordinarily successful, mortality from acute cardiac events has fallen dramatically over the past forty years. Yet heart disease remains the leading cause of death globally, responsible for roughly one in three deaths. The issue lies in design. Modern cardiology was built to respond to emergencies, while cardiovascular disease develops gradually over years.

In this month’s Bulletin we look at how the next phase of cardiology is about earlier intervention as part of our healthcare accelerator with Northwestern Medicine. The convergence of AI, robotics and deeptech is transforming the heart from something occasionally measured into something continuously understood.

Also in the Bulletin:

• Meet Rio Tinto Mining Tech Cohort 4

• Rainstick Founder Darryl Lyons: How Ancient Knowledge Sparked a DeepTech Breakthrough

• New TechNation Report

• Designing Emissions Out Of Operations

• Founders Factory Head of Talent, Raluca on Hiring for Drive, Not Domain Expertise

• Raise Highlight: Alomana

• Partnership: Armada to retrofit TUI Cruises

• Events: PDAC, Hitachi Construction Machinery pitch day

• Job-openings

Cardiology’s Deeptech Transformation

Cardiac disease progresses slowly. Plaques form, rhythms destabilise and heart failure develops long before a patient presents in hospital. Historically, clinicians relied on episodic measurements like an ECG in clinic, a scan during a referral, or a stress test during an appointment, but AI is changing the timing.

Machine-learning models trained on ECGs can now detect patterns invisible to the human eye, predicting atrial fibrillation risk, early structural heart disease and future heart failure before symptoms appear. Wearables extend monitoring beyond hospitals, continuously tracking oxygenation and physiological trends over months rather than minutes.

This allows clinicians to intervene earlier, now adjusting medication or initiating preventative therapies. Instead of responding to deterioration, care teams can manage risk.

Northwestern Medicine, one of America’s premier, academic healthcare systems, is partnering with Founders Factory to bring the UK’s and Europe’s top AI founders to the US health market. Read more and apply to the programme here.

The operational impact is significant. Earlier intervention reduces emergency admissions, improves chronic disease management and shifts care from acute wards to outpatient and community settings. Cardiology becomes proactive rather than reactive.

Read the full article

Our New Mining Tech Cohort with Rio Tinto

Meet our six new investments through the Mining Tech Accelerator.

This cohort targets breakthrough exploration and processing technologies for iron ore, copper, lithium and critical minerals, with a focus on AI, advanced chemistry and spatial data to make discovery and processing faster, more efficient and more sustainable.

The six investments are:

• Foresight Spatial Labs – Building the world’s most advanced 4D spatial data SDK for Engineering and Autonomy (Ottawa, Canada)

• Chemshift – Low-cost lithium refining technology to transform the North American lithium value chain (Calgary, Canada)

• Supra – Supramolecular receptor platform transforming waste streams into high-purity critical minerals (Austin, US)

• Material Difference – Explainable AI as an unfair advantage in orebody knowledge. (Cambridge, UK)

• Voluna – Autonomous geochemical data collection providing faster, more accurate subsurface mineral mapping (Boston, US)

• Watergenics – AI-driven, real-time water quality monitoring for water-intensive mining processes (Berlin, Germany)

Programme momentum continues: the global portfolio has raised $120M+ in follow-on funding, including Hades (€15M seed), Spoor AI (€8M Series A), Endolith ($16M Series A) and VyCarb ($5M seed), with three startups now entering deployments in Western Australia across wildlife monitoring, seed germination and restoration.

Read more about the programme

Turning Ancient Knowledge Into a DeepTech Breakthrough with Rainstick Founder Darryl Lyons

“I’m a Maiawali man, an Australian Aboriginal man. My people are a rainmaking tribe, and for tens of thousands of years we used our Chuggera, our Rainstick, to bring storms and rain to help grain grow. That history gave me a deep belief that there was something real in the relationship between storms and plant growth. I genuinely believe we need to look back to create solutions for the future, not treating traditional knowledge as something locked in the past, but as a living system that can help shape how we use today’s tools to meet climate challenges.

At the same time, it felt obvious that changing climate was going to put serious pressure on production. If that was true, then agriculture didn’t need another marginal improvement - it needed moonshot-level thinking.That was the starting point.”

Read Darryl's Feature

Tech Nation has just published the Scaleup Playbook: The Inside Track to Series A

Tech Nation has just published the Scaleup Playbook: The Inside Track to Series A, with Airwallex.

Only 10% of VC backed European startups make it to Series A - TechNation, along with Founders Forum, spoke to 300 founders who've done it successfully to create a playbook with the inside track to series A.

Download report

Designing Emissions Out Of Operations

Climate innovation is often associated with new materials or breakthrough energy sources. But decarbonisation is naturally spreading through industry via another, pre-existing means: efficiency gains.

By design and accelerated with AI, we’re seeing reduced emissions as industry operations move more quickly and more accurately toward their commercial goals.

Energy, mining, agriculture and natural resources have all seen inefficiency drive emissions in past decades. Wasted energy, over-extraction, unnecessary transport, excess chemicals and poorly targeted interventions all add up. And it’s not just climate impact either, these are costly miscalculations, with more staff hours and energy-use sending costs spiralling for businesses.

AI is increasingly the tool that exposes those inefficiencies and removes them at scale, a practical decision-making engine embedded directly into real-world systems.

Four companies in our ecosystem, Terra AI, Prospectral, Endolith, and Rainstick, show how operational efficiency delivers measurable climate impact by changing how industries operate.

Read more

Founders Factory Head of Talent, Raluca on Hiring for Drive, Not Domain Expertise

“There’s a hiring mistake I see early-stage founders make more than any other. They look for the person who already knows their industry. The safe bet with the “right” CV, the familiar logos, the decade(s) of sector experience.

It makes intuitive sense. But in practice, I’ve often seen it to be the wrong call. Industry veterans who know the market beautifully can struggle with the pace, ambiguity, and scrappiness of the zero-to-one stage. They’re accustomed to resources, processes, and support structures that simply don’t exist yet. If someone doesn’t have the drive to operate without a playbook in those early days, they’re highly unlikely to meaningfully contribute toward getting you from pre-seed to Series B.”

Read Raluca's feature

Raise Highlight: Alomana 🎉

Alomana has raised €4M to accelerate Alo, its AI operating layer designed for enterprise execution, not just “AI assistance.”

The round is led by CDP Venture Capital (Corporate Partners I – ServiceTech), with participation from other leading Italian investors.

Alo is already deployed across finance, manufacturing and pharma, powering workflows like risk and security flows, financial controls and operational automation, turning AI adoption into measurable operational gains. Big milestone for a team building production-grade autonomy for regulated environments.

Partnership: Armada to Retrofit TUI Cruises

Armada Technologies has signed an agreement with TUI Cruises to install its Passive Air Lubrication System (PALS) on Mein Schiff 6.

This is a strong signal for maritime decarbonisation: the biggest emissions reductions over the next decade will come from the fleets we already have, through retrofit and design optimisation. Armada’s second-gen PALS reduces hull resistance using the ship’s motion and water flow without air compressors, helping improve efficiency across a broader range of speeds and sea states while minimising auxiliary power use. Installation is planned for dry dock in Singapore (Q1 2027).

Events Round-Up

PDAC (Toronto)

We convened miners, investors and founders with TD Bank Group, Orion Industrial Ventures, Unearthed Solutions and CleanAI to explore how critical minerals are becoming a data, software and automation challenge not just geology.

The discussion focused on practical applications, such as using AI to improve exploration accuracy and unlock new opportunities across the mining ecosystem responsibly.

Hitachi Construction Machinery Pitch Day (Brisbane, 16 April):

Together with Hitachi Construction Machinery, we launched the LANDCROS Innovation Studios Mining Challenge to identify world-leading startups building breakthrough mining technologies across three themes:

🔷 Smarter Machines: Automation, operator intelligence, energy efficiency
🔷 Smarter Mine Sites: Connected operations, real-time data, decision layers
🔷 Low Impact & Sustainable Mining: water, emissions, circularity and reduced footprint

This challenge gives startups direct access to Hitachi Construction Machinery’s industry expertise and pilot opportunities, alongside Founders Factory’s global ecosystem of investors and commercial partners. Congratulations to the startups pitching in Brisbane on the 16th:

Rigid Robotics,Dig Robotics, FOSSA Systems, GECCO, IntelliSense.io, NTWIST, Strayos, Weeefiner, Clear Carbon, COSMOS Save Energy.

Job-openings

🛠️ Founder & CEO: GreenCircle - Bankability Layer for Green Construction (Germany/Hybrid)
With Vonovia, we’re building GreenCircle—an evidence platform that makes sustainable construction materials bankable via pilots and procurement-ready data, backed by €760k and access to Vonovia’s scale; seeking a German-fluent founder with enterprise SaaS instincts.
Apply here

🛠️ Founder & CEO: MeisterMatch - AI-Native Recruiter for Skilled Trades (Germany/Hybrid)
With Vonovia, we’re building MeisterMatch, backed by €760k plus 355 live roles as instant demand—seeking a German-fluent founder with HR-tech/marketplace instincts.
Apply here

🛠️ Co-Founder: Healthcare Studio - Founders Factory (London / Europe / Remote)

Co-found a new healthtech venture from day one with Founders Factory, building for the shift from hospital-led care to community, home and continuous monitoring. You’ll receive €275k pre-seed spin-out capital, hands-on support from senior operators and a dedicated Venture Builder, plus access to healthcare partners to validate and scale.

Apply here

For European healthtech founders, the United States is often seen as competitive and capital-intensive - a later stage market for mature products rather than a space for development. But demand from US health systems for European breakthroughs is increasing.

US healthcare spending accounts for nearly 20% of GDP or around $5.3 trillion - larger than the entire GDP of Germany. It is operationally decentralised and under constant pressure to improve outcomes while reducing cost. That tension creates a demand signal for solutions that optimise clinical performance and enhance decision-making, and ultimately make advanced therapies deliverable at scale.

AI models in cardiology are predicting heart failure and arrhythmias upstream of acute events. Oncology platforms are operationalising biomarker-first treatment pathways and integrating radioligand therapies into clinical workflows. In gastroenterology (GI), AI-assisted endoscopy is improving adenoma detection rates and standardising procedural quality. These infrastructure technologies go beyond incremental improvements, structurally reshaping how care is delivered.

In this month’s Bulletin, we look at how European innovations can scale in the US healthcare market via our programme with Northwestern Medicine. Also in the Bulletin:

• Converging on patient care - why we need a cohesive approach to life after diagnosis

• Lasers, geology, and sovereignty - Europe’s startup mining opportunity

• Survey: Take part in the Tech Nation 2026 Report

• Investing in Nebuly

• Events

• Open cohorts

• Job Openings

The Transatlantic Opportunity for European HealthTech

What makes the US particularly compelling is its receptiveness to systems based solutions particularly across clinical optimisation, business insights & predictive analytics, clinical decision support, precision medicine & advanced therapies, and quality, safety & reliability.

Hospitals are investing in predictive analytics to reduce readmissions in heart failure. Oncology centres are deploying decision support systems to navigate increasingly complex treatment algorithms. GI departments are adopting AI-enhanced imaging to improve detection rates and reduce variability. Advanced therapies, from CAR-T to targeted radiopharmaceuticals, require entirely new operational layers to be safely and efficiently delivered.

The common opportunity is in building the systems that allow those therapies to reach patients consistently and safely.

This represents a unique advantage for European founders. Many are building deeptech-first solutions in AI, robotics, and advanced analytics, in environments that demand rigorous evidence and clinical validation. When those technologies meet the scale and capital intensity of the US market, the growth trajectory can accelerate dramatically.

This is the thesis behind our Northwestern Medicine Healthcare Accelerator. Offering $150k capital and a 16 week programme to accelerate US market entry across Northwestern Medicine’s clinicians and 11 hospitals in Illinois. Founders will visit Chicago to scope pilots with NM senior leadership whilst connecting into local healthcare ecosystem payers, Government programs and US investors. All with the chance to work with the London Clinic in the UK, a recent NM partnership.

Healthcare innovation is going to be defined by infrastructure as much as by new therapies and drugs; and for European healthtech, the US is the platform on which systemic innovations can be scaled.

Learn more about the programme

Converging on patient care - why we need a cohesive approach to life after diagnosis

Neurodegenerative illnesses are global by definition. They cut across borders, income levels, age groups and health systems. In recent years, they have blurred those boundaries even further, with more than three billion people, nearly half the world’s population, estimated to be affected by a neurological condition.

Yet despite the scale of the issue, the response remains largely siloed. Research, innovation and care models are often confined within nations, disciplines or disease categories. All while people living with these conditions navigate fragmented systems every day.

The opportunities to converge globally by industry, technology and medical practice are huge. With a $60bn market cap for patient care tech, and with strides being made around the world in different and adjacent areas to neurological care, the issue comes down to focus.

If we want to meaningfully improve outcomes for neurodegenerative conditions, we need to shift our focus. Not just toward better treatments, but toward better lives after diagnosis.

Read more

Lasers, geology, and sovereignty - Europe’s startup mining opportunity

Europe invented modern mining and then forgot how to do it. To be fair, most of the high-grade deposits in Europe were already worked hard by the nineteenth century. By the mid-twentieth century, a lot of operations were chasing deeper seams and lower grades which pushed costs up. The industry moved elsewhere and extraction became something that happened in Australia, Chile, Africa.

The good news is that Europe has more than 800 medium to large hard-rock deposits for 30 critical raw materials across 33 countries. These are deposits that could support domestic supply, but are currently uneconomical to mine with today’s technology.

In our latest blog post our Mining and Deeptech Investor Jack Kennedy looks at European startup innovations in mining:

Read Jack's feature

Survey: Take part in the Tech Nation 2026 Report

The Tech Nation Report has been the UK’s state of the nation report on the technology industry since 2015.

Your survey responses will directly inform our 2026 report and help shape Tech Nation’s policy recommendations for government to strengthen the UK’s position in the global AI race.

The survey takes 2 minutes to complete. Responses will be anonymised and will not be attributed to individuals or their organisations.

Plus, you’ll have the chance to win £1,000 in cash, a personal invitation to our Future Fifty Forum, and a bespoke support package for your business.

Complete quiz

Investing in Nebuly

Introducing Nebuly - one of the latest companies to join our Fastweb + Vodafone Investment Programme.

Unlike traditional apps, conversational AI leaves no clear trail of clicks or page views, and fewer than 1% of users leave feedback. That makes it incredibly difficult to measure performance, user satisfaction or ROI.

Nebuly is building the analytics layer for the AI era.

Their platform gives organisations a real-time, privacy-first understanding of how people interact with AI, helping teams quantify productivity gains and identify opportunities for automation.

As AI becomes the primary interface between businesses and users, understanding those interactions will be as essential as web analytics was for the internet and mobile apps.

Read more about the investment

Events

Third Derivative Data Center Decarb Series - Innovations in Southeast Asia

​As data centre demand accelerates across Southeast Asia, driven by AI, cloud expansion, and regional digitalisation; ensuring access to clean, reliable energy at speed is becoming a defining challenge. This session will explore solutions enabling data centres in the region to scale efficiently while reducing emissions and strengthening grid resilience.

The session will then feature startup pitches and live Q&A with innovators working across clean power, storage, cooling, and materials.

Register

Founders Factory in Toronto for the PDAC 2026 Convention

We will be hosting TD Bank Group, Orion Industrial Ventures, Unearthed Solutions and CleanAI for “Venture-Backed Exploration: How AI, New Technologies & Business Models are Redefining Critical Mineral Discovery & Supply”.

The event brings together miners, investors and founders to explore how critical minerals are moving beyond a question of geology, becoming a data, software and automation challenge.

Discussions will range from the impact of capital, AI and emerging technologies and business models on mineral exploration, to some of the exciting developments in the market to date.

We look forward to the founder presentations and networking - and a chance to connect builders, operators and investors working at the intersection of AI and the energy transition.

Join waiting list

Founders Factory and Innovate UK Hospital to Community Accelerator Pitch Day

Last week we marked the close of our Hospital to Community Accelerator, delivered in partnership with InnovateUK, with a Demo Day showcasing the progress of the cohort.

Over the previous 12 weeks, founders worked closely with our partners and industry specialists to develop early-stage innovations designed to move care closer to patients and into the community. The programme focused on practical implementation, exploring how new technologies can operate in real healthcare settings.

The afternoon brought together clinicians, operators and investors for startup pitches, a panel discussion and open conversation about adoption pathways across the NHS and wider care systems.

A big thank you to the founders, partners and healthcare professionals who joined us and helped shape the conversation around the future of community-based care.

• Sensore — automated pressure ulcer prevention mapping

• Papcup — non-invasive cervical screening

• Arcus Dental — digital dental check-ups from home

• Punto Health — AI-powered dementia management platform

• Auracare — AI triage for primary care providers

• Dotplot — at-home early breast cancer detection

• Myonerv — wearable device to monitor and treat stroke-induced paralysis

• Circe — clinical group therapy platform for women

• William Oak — integrated diagnostics for nutritional deficiencies

• Lifeyear — an operating system for cardiac care

The discussions reinforced a consistent theme across the programme on shifting care from hospital to community requires more than new technology. It requires solutions that fit clinical workflows, support overstretched staff and deliver measurable improvements in patient outcomes.

Open cohorts

• MSWA Multiple Sclerosis & Neurological Care Accelerator - Applications close Feb 28th

  For early-stage ventures harnessing AI, robotics, wearables, and digital health to address multiple sclerosis, stroke, Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease, motor neurone disease and acquired brain injury. Apply here.

• Blue Action Accelerator – Applications open
  For early-stage ocean and blue economy ventures, supporting founders building solutions across maritime, shipping and supply chains, coastal resilience, conservation, and ocean infrastructure. Apply here.

• HSBC Industrial Innovator Programme - Applications close March 13th

  From industrial waste and critical minerals to maritime logistics and materials circularity, the programme focuses on themes where innovation can drive real environmental and commercial impact. Apply here.

• Northwestern Medicine & Founders Factory Accelerator — Applications close March 31st

  A US hospital-embedded programme helping European healthtech startups pilot and scale solutions across clinical optimisation, decision support and advanced therapies within real care pathways. Apply here.

Job-openings

🏥 Co-Founder: Healthcare Studio – Founders Factory (London / Europe / Remote)
Co-build a healthcare venture from day one with Founders Factory, tackling systemic challenges across remote monitoring, care optimisation and health infrastructure. You’ll receive €275k pre-seed funding, hands-on venture studio support and access to leading healthcare partners to validate and scale your idea.
Apply here

🔧 Founding Engineer – Konduit (London / Hybrid)
Join Konduit, a venture backed by Aviva and Founders Factory, building the infrastructure layer for real-time insurance capacity allocation. As Founding Engineer, you’ll architect and ship the core platform, shaping the technical foundation of a category-defining marketplace.
Apply here

🦾Venture Studio Lead – Founders Factory (Berlin, Hybrid)
Act as co-founder across new studio ventures, validating concepts, defining go-to-market strategy and preparing startups for spin-out and scale. You’ll operate at the intersection of product, commercial strategy and founder hiring to turn ideas into investment-ready companies.
Apply here

🧱Venture Builder – Founders Factory (London, Hybrid)
Work hands-on with founders to take ventures from 0→1, shaping product strategy, building MVPs and driving early validation. This is a fast-paced studio role focused on momentum, experimentation and building companies that can scale.
Apply here

🚀 Digital Ads Freelancer – Byway (London/Remote)
Reporting to the Head of Paid Growth, you will be the engine room of Byway’s through-funnel marketing strategy. Your work will directly support their 2026 goal of scaling international markets and diversifying into YouTube, TikTok, and Pinterest. Byway is a first-of-its-kind travel technology that uses miles of local expertise to route trips by land and sea optimised for your enjoyment. We are a 100% flight-free travel company and B Corp.
Apply here

Modern naval and security operations require technologies that can operate for long periods without human presence, remain resilient in harsh and contested environments, reduce logistical dependency, and deliver persistent situational awareness across vast ocean spaces.

These requirements are pushing defence organisations toward a specific class of solutions: systems that are autonomous, modular, energy-efficient, low-signature, and increasingly electrified.

In this issue of the Startup Bulletin, we explore how a new maritime architecture is emerging, shaped by defence requirements but proven through commercial use.

Also in the bulletin:

• Programme openings - round-up

• Designing mining tech for a future we can’t predict with Thunderstone

• Future of work: How AI is diluting management and elevating builders

• Investing in RemoteSolar

• Acquisition highlight: Acre

• Job openings

How Defence Needs Are Shaping Maritime Technology

The defence industry is an increasingly critical market and commercial testing ground for the next generation of maritime technologies seeking validation, real-world application, and pathways to scale.

These dynamics - driven by electrification, distributed systems, and modular energy - are reshaping how power, autonomy, and infrastructure are delivered across the ocean domain.

Backed by our Blue Action Accelerator, ACUA Ocean’s Multi-Role Offshore Support (MROS) uncrewed surface vessel is a clear example of this pattern in action.

With support from the UK Department for Transport’s Clean Maritime Demonstration Competition, MROS is being developed as a 43-metre uncrewed vessel with both civilian and naval applications. While it is positioned commercially for offshore logistics, inspection, and energy infrastructure, its underlying design choices reflect defence-led requirements.

Navies are increasingly seeking medium-sized uncrewed platforms that can:

• Remain on station for weeks without resupply

• Operate safely without crews in high sea states

• Support surveillance, seabed operations, and logistics

• Integrate new sensors, vehicles, and mission systems without redesign

Commercial offshore operators want many of the same things, albeit for different reasons: reduced operating costs, improved safety, and higher utilisation.

Read the full article

Programme openings - round-up

• Mediobanca Fintech Accelerator – Applications close Feb 6th
  For fintech and enterprise startups building solutions for financial services, with a focus on digital banking, data, risk, and next-generation client experiences. Apply here.
  
  

• Rio Tinto Mining Tech Accelerator – Applications close Feb 8th
  For industrial and climate startups tackling mining and materials challenges, focused on safety, productivity, decarbonisation, and real-world deployment. Apply here.

• Canada only: Blue Action Accelerator (non-equity) – Applications close Feb 15th For ocean and maritime startups from Canada or those looking to enter the Canadian market focused on securing first pilots and real-world deployments. Apply here.
  
  

• Western Australia Nature Tech Accelerator – Applications close Feb 15th
  For nature, climate, and industrial startups working on environmental regeneration, land and sea stewardship, and scalable technologies for Western Australia. Apply here.

  
  

• MSWA Multiple Sclerosis & Neurological Care Accelerator - Applications close Feb 28th

  For early-stage ventures harnessing AI, robotics, wearables, and digital health to address multiple sclerosis, stroke, Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease, motor neurone disease and acquired brain injury. Apply here.

• Global: Blue Action Ocean Tech Accelerator – Applications close Feb 28th
  For early-stage ocean and blue economy ventures, supporting founders building solutions across maritime, coastal resilience, conservation, and ocean infrastructure. Apply here.

• HSBC Industrial Innovator Programme - Applications close March 2nd

  From industrial waste and critical minerals to maritime logistics and materials circularity, the programme focuses on themes where innovation can drive real environmental and commercial impact. Apply here.

Designing mining tech for a future we can’t predict with Thunderstone’s Eric Wasson Burns

One of the most uncomfortable truths about mining is that no one actually knows what the demand curve will look like 10, 20, or 30 years from now.

We talk about lithium, nickel, copper, rare earths, materials that are clearly critical today, but history shows us that material demand shifts quickly. Technologies change. Chemistries evolve. Entire supply chains are disrupted by breakthroughs no one saw coming.

Inversely the back-bone of all this: mining, dependable supply depends on certainty.

Assets are developed with 20–40 year horizons. Capital is deployed based on assumptions that must hold for decades. Infrastructure is optimised for specific ores, grades, and processing routes. When demand shifts, mining can’t respond quickly. That’s why the industry experiences violent boom-and-bust cycles, stranded assets, and geopolitical fragility.

One of the hardest questions we kept running into was deceptively simple: which commodity do you build for?

If you optimise for one metal and the world moves on, you’ve built an elegant dead-end.

Read Eric's Feature

Future of work: How AI is diluting management and elevating builders with Founders Factory’s Chief People Officer, Farah

For the past decade, the startup obsession with scaling meant building larger teams, creating additional layers, more meetings, and celebrating headcount milestones like they were strategic wins. We made things bigger when they didn’t need to be, because big looked successful and complexity made it feel important.

The truth? Hiring isn’t proof of success, it can be a symptom of inefficiency. It shows where we’ve run out of leverage and the need to borrow capacity from elsewhere.

We’ve entered a completely new era, one defined not by how many people you manage, but by how effectively you can amplify the people (and tools) you have. This shift, toward leaner, flatter organisations feels like a long-overdue course correction.

Maybe it’s just me, but there’s something deeply satisfying about this shift. Fewer hierarchical layers. Small teams, finally building at the speed of their ambition.

Read Farah's Feature

Investing in RemoteSolar with Vonovia: Making Solar Accessible to Renters

Energy prices are too high, and the people who would benefit most from cheaper, cleaner power are often the ones least able to access it.

RemoteSolar builds that missing layer by unbundling solar parks and rooftop systems into modular units households can rent from 1 kWp upwards. Tenants or apartment owners subscribe to a share of a solar asset with no upfront capex and no project risk. When that capacity generates electricity, they’re billed for that portion at a fixed margin (around 1 cent per kWh plus taxes and fees), with any extra usage covered via a dynamic tariff linked to spot prices.

Read more

Exit highlight: Acre acquired 🎉

Congratulations to Justus Brown and the Acre team on the acquisition by ClearScore Group.

Acre began life as a Founders Factory studio venture: built from the ground up solving fragmented systems, admin-heavy workflows, and the time spent on busywork instead of delivering value to clients.

A major milestone for a platform that’s become core infrastructure for mortgage advisers across the UK.

Job-openings

🤝 Partnerships Lead: Founders Factory (Singapore)

Be the point person for FF & HSBC’s Industrial Innovation Programme, covering senior stakeholders across commercial banking, innovation banking and the private bank. Support the Future Industries Partnership portfolio companies with commercial opportunities in the region, primarily with corporate business development and funding connections

Apply here

🛠️ Founder & CEO: Malcolm - The AI Insurance Protocol (London/Remote)

Backed by Founders Factory and Aviva, this is a rare opportunity to found a category-defining B2B Insurtech from day one, with pre-seed backing and deep operational support. This is an opportunity to build the AI-native insurance rails that safely quote and bind insurance at scale.

Apply here

🛠️ Founder & CEO: Coreo - AI-Powered Sales Infrastructure (Milan/Hybrid)

Alongside our corporate partner Fastweb, we’ve signed off COREO solving a critical, unsolved problem. E. Enterprises can find SMEs but they struggle to book meetings with the real decision-maker and convert intent into revenue. This is a chance to build a category-defining B2B platform at the intersection of AI, sales infrastructure, and compliance with real customers, pilots, and revenue pathways already in motion

Apply here

Across our programmes, founders are building solutions that are transforming critical sectors such as energy, materials, manufacturing and infrastructure. These technologies go beyond reducing emissions - they reshape cost structures, improve efficiency and reinvent how industrial systems are designed, built and operated.

Impact at this scale is never achieved in isolation. It depends on founders willing to build in challenging, complex spaces; partners prepared to engage; and investors aligned around a long-term view of where durable value will be created.

To everyone who has supported Founders Factory this year across all our programmes - from mining tech in Perth, to financial services in Milan - thank you. 2025 has been a year defined by remarkable progress.

We’re pleased to share a selection of highlights in this end-of-year wrap, and even more excited about what we can continue to build together in 2026.

Henry Lane Fox
Co-Founder & CEO

–

2025 in Numbers

• Founders Factory backed 63 startups

• Global portfolio now totalling 450+ companies

• 8 startups built in our Venture Studio

• 7 new programmes and partnerships launched

Press Round-Up

• Founders Factory was named the UK’s #1 startup hub in the FT European Startup Hubs report.

• Scan.com, Xapien, Tembo and Byway featured in the Sifted 100 of the UK & Ireland’s fastest-growing startups.

• Wired’s Hottest 100 Startups in Europe featured 4 Founders Factory portfolio startups: Tembo, Byway, Shop Circle, Scan.com

• Team members featured in publications including Entrepreneur UK, CNBC, Health Tech World and Metal Tech News.

• Announced 7 new programmes across global media:

  • MSWA MS & Neurological Care Accelerator

  • CODE Tech Founders

  • HSBC Future Industries Partnership

  • The R3sidency

  • Blue Action Canada in partnership with COAST

  • Hitachi Construction Machinery Mining Challenge

  • Innovate UK Hospital to Community Accelerator

Portfolio Highlights

Industrial & Climate Tech

• Endolith announced a US$13.5m Series A to scale its biological intelligence platform for critical minerals recovery.

• Monolith was acquired by CoreWeave to expand its AI Cloud for Industrial Innovation

• Dronamics selected for up to €30m in equity investment from the European Innovation Council to expand its cargo-drone airline.

• Durin raised US$3.4m pre-seed to build automated drilling rigs for mineral exploration.

• SeaStock moved from R&D to commercial operations, raising A$3.4m, commissioning its Henderson module, and signing global supply agreements.

• AGRA secured A$600k funding and completed its pilot facility, showing indoor farming economics can now rival field-grown production.

• Hades Mining raised €5.5m pre-seed to develop its laser drilling system to unlock deep geothermal energy and critical minerals.

• Ceto raised US$4.8m seed to build a data intelligence platform for commercial shipping insurance.

• Tattva awarded a £650k Innovate UK grant to develop and commercialise carbon-sequestering biomaterials for construction.

• Brineworks received a US$1.8m European Innovation Council grant to scale its direct ocean capture technology for e-fuels feedstock.

• AtmoCooling raised US$2.6m pre-seed to turn deserts into agricultural and climate resilience hubs.

• ACUA Ocean launched its first unmanned surface vehicle, USV Pioneer, as part of ongoing sea trials for large-scale ocean data collection.

• GridShare closed its latest crowdfunding round, enabling retail investors to co-own new solar farms.

• Oxwash was acquired by Elis to drive carbon-neutral operations

Nature, Oceans & Biodiversity

• TreeTrack made the 2025 Foresight 50 and joined the Perth Landing Pad for its UAV-enabled post-wildfire restoration work.

• Fremantle Seaweed closed a A$2.2m community raise and achieved its first commercial agreement.

• Earthly launched nature capital fund to scale high-integrity restoration projects in WA

• North Australian SeaCulture expanded into Indonesia to partner with BRIN and adapt its seaweed-processing tech to Gracilaria ponds.

• Jack Fertility raised £500k to make male fertility testing simple and stigma free.

• Tidal Moon’s Professor Michael Wear received the inaugural Prime Minister’s Prize for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Knowledge Systems.

• Ocean Ledger closed US$975k pre-seed to deliver high-resolution coastal risk and environmental impact analytics.

• Vycarb closed a US$5m seed to deploy sensor-powered, water-based CO₂ capture and storage at industrial and coastal sites worldwide.

Fintech, Proptech & Insurance

• Meshed raised an oversubscribed £950k pre-seed to build the UK’s first AI-native insurance broker for SMEs.

• Nila raised US$2.4M, turning remittances into tangible care for families

• Wallround closed a €4.2m oversubscribed seed round to digitise and streamline energy-efficient building renovations.

• Roomix raised £850k to expand its custom furniture and home projects platform.

• Conveyd raised £2.5M to cut UK home buying times from months to weeks

AI, Cyber & Enterprise

• Shop Circle announced a US$100m Series B (total funding US$245m) as well as being named in Sifted’s Rising SaaS 100 as one of Europe’s fastest-growing software companies

• Synthesized raised a US$20m Series A to help enterprises cut QA coding costs, speed development and enhance security.

• Valarian announced US$7m in new funding to build secure data infrastructure for highly regulated industries such as defence.

• MatNex partnered with Viridien to build one of the most powerful supercomputers for materials discovery.

• Fantix sold its adtech business to Life360 to power targeted ad solutions, sharpening its focus on enterprise AI.

• BuiltAI studio venture BuiltAI raised US$6m seed to scale its AI financial modelling and underwriting platform for global commercial real estate investors.

• Falkin raised £1.6m pre-seed to embed AI-driven scam prevention directly inside banking and customer-service journeys.

• Johix raised US$350k to advance its SME alternative finance platform.

Founders Factory Ecosystem

• Hosted two Residency Weeks for our Mining & Nature Tech cohorts in Perth, Western Australia

• Co-hosted an Industrial Transformation roundtable at London Climate Action Week with HSBC and Third Derivative

• Ran Demo Days across our global programmes, including Blue Action Canada in Vancouver

• Hosted “Building in Berlin: Zero to One in 2025” featuring Wefox founder Julian Teicke and Carolin Gabor

• Hosted a Maritime Decarbonisation panel (with J.P. Morgan and Blue Action) and our inaugural Industrial Transformation Summit (with Rio Tinto and HSBC) at New York Climate Week

• Founders Factory and our mining tech ventures joined the global community of leaders, innovators and investors at IMARC

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AI agents dominated the conversation in 2025. Anthropic and OpenAI rolled out frameworks and best-practice playbooks, while developers everywhere began sharing early personal prototypes.But in reality many projects were stuck in pilots, came up against issues of scale or failed to make it to deployment. In this month’s editorial, Tech Lead Jack Howell and Product Director Jacob George share what we’ve learned from 14 months actually deploying agentic systems in highly regulated spaces like insurance and finance.

The crucial lesson for product leaders in agentic AI is that generic frameworks do not work. Specialised functions and industries require specialised agents, embedded in workflows often with a human in the loop. Specialised beats general. Integrated beats standalone. The Agent Revolution is underway, it’s just quieter and more operational than the hype suggests.

Also in the newsletter:

• MSWA MS & Neurological Care Accelerator - Applications Open

• Applications open for Rio Tinto Mining Tech Accelerator Cohort 4

• LANDCROS Startup Challenge by Hitachi Construction Machinery applications open

• Investing in Qi4M’s agentic AI ecosystem OrcheXtra

• This month’s raises

  • Vycarb

  • Falkin

  • Endolith

• Understanding the US-Australia Mining Framework

• Oxwash acquired

• Finding product-market fit with Lapis

• Jobs round-up

Venture building with AI Agents

At Founders Factory we’ve already solved a lot of the pain points around agentic AI and built AI agents to deliver outcomes we think will re-shape industries such as fintech and insuretech. By focusing on industry-wide use cases, we’ve steered away from building AI agents for niche problems, ensuring we’re always building for scale, and therefore facing the challenges I mentioned head-on, rather than avoiding them. This ensures that the AI agents we build will have a high level of adoption, deliver on the promised outcomes and handle the high-volume environments we’re building in.

We’re not just building software anymore; we’re developing goal-based systems that require continuous human feedback, immutable release snapshots, and conversation-level regression testing. Traditional software gives the same output for the same input. Agents reason creatively within boundaries. This fundamental shift demands new development methodologies: declarative programming for agent behaviors, continuous quality assurance through annotated conversations, and test suites that simulate thousands of real customer interactions.

These agents include:

• Agents for Time Efficiency with JointlyAI

• Agents for Search & Personalization with Project Delorean and Warren

• Agents for Resource Efficiency with Project Konduit

Read the full article

MSWA MS & Neurological Care Accelerator applications open

🏥 We’re proud to share a landmark partnership with MSWA to support breakthrough technologies for people living with MS and other neurological conditions.

Together, we will fund and commercialise global health tech startups developing cutting-edge solutions across:

🧠 Multiple sclerosis
🧬 Parkinson’s, MND, Huntington’s
🤖 Robotics & AI for neuro-care
📡 Wearables & remote monitoring
🩺 Post-stroke & acquired brain injury care

Alongside MSWA CEO Melanie Kiely GAICD, the launch was supported by WA Premier Roger Cook and Minister for Medical Research Stephen Dawson MLA - underscoring the state’s national leadership in neurological care and medical innovation.

“This is the world’s first startup program focused on MS and neurological conditions – and it’s awesome that’s happening in Western Australia.”

– Rohan Silva, Chair WA, Founders Factory

Applications are open now, welcoming founders using frontier technology to transform neurological care.

Apply now

Applications are now open for Cohort 4 of the Rio Tinto Mining Tech Accelerator

Along with our partners Rio Tinto, we’re backing breakthrough technologies across critical minerals, low-impact extraction, and resource efficiency.

To date, we’ve backed 18 companies from 1,500+ applications across the US, Europe, and Australia. This cohort, we’ll invest in six more pre-seed and seed-stage companies operating across:

⛏️ Smarter exploration
🌱 Lower-impact extraction
🔁 Waste, water & materials recovery
⚙️ Autonomy, robotics & digital infrastructure

If you’re building at the edge of industrial technology, from critical minerals to mine-to-mill optimisation, we want to hear from you.

🕒 Applications close February 2026

Apply now

LANDCROS Startup Challenge by Hitachi Construction Machinery Applications Open

💡 Applications are open for Hitachi Construction Machinery’s LANDCROS Innovation Studios Mining Challenge.

We’re partnering with Hitachi Construction Machinery to launch the LANDCROS Innovation Studios Mining Challenge. A global, open call for startups building the future of the mining industry.

This year’s challenge invites founders to submit solutions across three core themes shaping the next generation of industrial innovation:

🔸 Smarter Machines – accelerating autonomy, connectivity, and intelligence in heavy equipment.
🔸 Smarter Mine Sites – improving efficiency, safety, and data-led decision-making across operations.
🔸 Low Impact & Sustainable Mining – enabling more circular, lower-carbon, and environmentally responsible mining systems.

Up to 10 startups will be selected to pitch in Brisbane, Australia, on April 16, 2026, in front of global industry leaders and investors. One winner per theme will go on to collaborate directly with Hitachi Construction Machinery, with support from Founders Factory’s global venture team.

The competition is building the bridge between industrial technology and intelligent mining, helping startups scale solutions that make mining smarter, safer, and more sustainable.

🚀 Applications are open until January 20, 2026.

Apply now

Investing in Qi4M’s OrcheXtra: The Agentic Ecosystem to Manage Investment Cycles with Precision

Qi4M, the company behind agentic AI ecosystem OrcheXtra, helps financial institutions manage investment cycles with precision and coordination.

In most banks and asset managers, bringing a product from concept to client still means fragmented tools, siloed teams, and slow information flow. OrcheXtra changes that by connecting data, processes, and people through a network of specialised AI agents, generating context as well as core information.

Born out of the MBSpeedUp programme with Mediobanca in Milan, OrcheXtra is embedded in real workflows, helping teams move faster, stay aligned, and communicate with clients using a single source of truth.

Read the full story

Portfolio raises 🚀

A big month for fundraising across the Founders Factory portfolio:

Vycarb
Brooklyn-based Vycarb, an alumnus of our first Mining Tech Accelerator with Rio Tinto, raised $5m seed funding to scale its water-based CO₂ removal and storage technology. Its system transforms existing water infrastructure into distributed carbon storage, helping decarbonise heavy industry and coastal assets.

FALKIN
Digital safety startup FALKIN secured £1.6m pre-seed to help banks and credit unions move from fraud detection to scam prevention. By embedding AI-powered “safety rails” inside banking and customer-service journeys, FALKIN helps stop AI-enabled scams at the point of persuasion, not just at the point of payment.

Endolith
Biological intelligence company Endolith, part of our Mining Tech Accelerator with Rio Tinto, completed the first close of a $13.5m Series A. Endolith uses AI-guided microbes to recover copper and other minerals from low-grade ore and waste streams, offering a capital-light, lower-impact path to unlocking new critical mineral supply.

Understanding the US-Australia Mining Framework

The United States and Australia signed a landmark common policy framework for mining and processing critical minerals and rare earths. The framework signals a shared commitment to building diversified and sustainable supply chains for the raw materials powering clean energy, defence, and advanced technology.

At Founders Factory this framework mirrors some of the work we’re doing. Across both territories, we’re working with governments, corporate partners, and entrepreneurs to accelerate the technologies that will make this framework a reality.

Read on to see what this new framework aims to do:

Read more

Exit highlight: Oxwash acquired 🎉

Sustainable laundry startup Oxwash, one of our early accelerator ventures, has been acquired by European textile services leader Elis. From a single “lagoon” in Oxford to pioneering carbon-neutral industrial laundry at scale, Oxwash has shown how data-driven, low-impact cleaning can transform a legacy industry. The acquisition will help bring Oxwash’s technology and circular model to laundry operations across Europe.

Finding Product–Market Fit: The Lapis Approach to Rethinking Market Focus

When a startup is built around a powerful piece of technology, deciding to focus on a specific industry can determine whether the technology becomes viable in-market.

Lapis’s Knowledge Bank, backed by Founders Factory and Mediobanca through our MBSpeedUp venture studio reimagines how information is stored, retrieved, and applied inside financial institutions. It does this succinctly by crawling databases, selecting the right information, and highlighting what’s important to those who need it.

Here’s how founders, Pietro Arina and Davide Ferrari deliberately narrowed their focus to a precise, high-value product for investment professionals 👇

Read more

Job-openings

COO & Co-Founder: AI-powered Agritech (Milan)

Build a hardware/software platform that’s already saving nurseries 20% on water, energy, and pests. You’ll lead ops, product, and science integration alongside a top team of agronomists.

Apply

Founding Engineer: AI Financial Coach (London)

Build the brain behind Warren. You’ll work on RAG, agents, and evaluation loops, taking LLMs from idea to production in a space where trust and precision really matter.

Apply

GTM Co-Founder: AI Proptech (Berlin)

Reinvent property management with Immoly, Germany’s first AI-native platform for landlords. In partnership with Vonovia, Europe’s largest residential real estate company.

Apply

Each role comes with equity, salary, and a chance to co-found a business with unfair advantage.

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By 2040, the number of people living with major conditions such as diabetes, cancer, and heart failure is expected to rise by almost 40%. In the UK this growing burden threatens both the National Health Service (NHS) and the wider economy. Continuing to rely on hospital-centred care isn’t sustainable; we need a shift towards community-based, preventative models that keep people well for longer.

The question is how to make that shift. It starts with rethinking the entire care pathway; moving from reactive treatment to proactive, technology-enabled models that meet people where they are. Across the UK, we’re already seeing what’s possible: virtual wards, remote diagnostics, and AI-driven monitoring are helping patients receive care at home while easing pressure on hospitals.

In this month’s newsletter we look at how startups and outside innovation can relieve the burden on the NHS and its central infrastructure.

Also in this month’s newsletter:

• Apply for the R[3]sidency with Coinbase, Fabric Ventures and Animoca Brands

• Meet the Rio Tinto cohort

• Founders Factory at Italian tech week

• Founders Factory at New York Climate Week

• Perth Residency Week with our Nature and Mining Tech Cohorts

• Jobs round-up

How Do We Move Healthcare from Hospital to Community?

At Founders Factory, we’re exploring this transformation through our Hospital to Community Accelerator, delivered in partnership with InnovateUK.

Through previous accelerators, we’ve seen firsthand how these innovations can improve outcomes, lower costs, and reduce pressure on primary and acute care systems. The opportunity now is to scale what works, bridging the gap between innovation and adoption through real-world pilots, strategic partnerships, and sustained investment.

Applications are now open for founders who are demonstrating that community-based care isn’t just feasible but effective too. The programme supports startups developing technologies that bring care closer to patients; from predictive analytics that prevent hospital admissions to workforce tools that free clinicians to focus on care.

Apply here

The Hospital to Community Accelerator is a 10 week, non-equity programme designed and delivered in partnership with InnovateUK, part of UK Research & Innovation.

The accelerator supports up to 10 early stage health tech startups working on remote monitoring, at-home diagnostics, new community care models, and digital tools that ease hospital pressure.

The R[3]sidency with Coinbase, Fabric Ventures and Animoca brands, is now open

Applications are officially open for The R[3]sidency.

Created in partnership with Coinbase, Fabric Ventures and Animoca Brands, The R[3]sidency backs ambitious founders building early-stage startups in Web3 and AI.

Successful applicants receive £230k cash investment and an intensive 16-week accelerator programme, including access to the combined industry networks and expertise of the partners.

Apply to the R[3]sidency

Meet the latest cohort from our Mining Tech Accelerator

We’re proud to introduce you to our latest cohort of mining ventures, backed by Rio Tinto and Founders Factory through our Mining Tech Accelerator.

This cohort of startups are introducing new technologies focused on reducing the impact of mining activities and accelerating rehabilitation efforts. The six investments are:

• DNAir - Nature & biodiversity monitoring

• Foray - Ecosystem restoration technologies

• FAST Metals - Turning mine waste into profit

• Hades - Next generation subsurface drilling technology

• Namu Robotics - Pioneering reforestation with autonomous robotics

• Spoor - AI monitoring that helps wind energy grow responsibly

Over the past 18 months Founders Factory and Rio Tinto Ventures have reviewed over 1,500 startups globally to select 18 investments - including this current cohort.

Many of these accelerator participants have secured research agreements with Rio Tinto and its various business units across the world.

Learn more about the programe

Founders Factory at Italian Tech Week

The Founders Factory team and startups from our Fastweb and global accelerator programmes convened in Turin alongside the most influential founders, investors and corporates in technology – with headliners including Jeff Bezos and Ursula von der Leyen.

Special moments included:

• Founders Factory Co-Founder & Executive Chair Brent Hoberman on stage, discussing raising capital as a young founder and comparing the performance of European and US VCs

• FF portfolio in the room: Monia, Nebuly, Tetto, Claro AI, ShopCircle were connecting with partners and future customers

• Studio Lead for Italy, Alberto Mucci, joined a dinner for exited founders on betting against trends and challenging the view that European entrepreneurs trail competitors

• Founders Factory Investor, Edoardo Gentili, hosted The Venture Convivio Dinner with Italians in VC community – co-hosted with Base10 Partners, Italian Founders Fund Eurazeo, Rancilio Cube SICAF- 200 of the best founders and investors worldwide

• ShopCircle’s Luca Cartechini joined the panel for Edoardo’s dinner sharing insights on LLM wrapper features and the importance of slow hires.

Our Sector Director Andrea Guzzoni joined Exceptional Ventures and Paolo Pio’s HealthTech lunch; ElevenLabs’s networking aperitivo and B Heroes drink and deal event.

Founders Factory at New York Climate Week

We had an energising New York Climate Week last month with the Founders Factory team, our partners, and an incredible community of industry leaders, entrepreneurs and investors.

Across two days, we convened vital conversations and showcased pioneering startups tackling some of the hardest-to-abate sectors: mining, shipping & supply chains and agriculture.

On the Wednesday, together with J.P. Morgan, alfa8 and Blue Action, we co-hosted The Maritime Decarbonisation Challenge: Who Pays, Who Builds, Who Waits?

On the Thursday, downtown at Nine Orchard, Founders Factory hosted our inaugural Industrial Transformation Summit. Leaders from Rio Tinto, HSBC, Orion Resource Partners , Vimson Group, Nestlé, TELUS Global Ventures (TGV), Superorganism, Prologis, A.P. Moller - Maersk and ZEBOX joined us to explore the technologies and market dynamics enabling more efficient and nature-positive solutions for the mining and shipping industries.

And a huge thank you to our partners Rio Tinto, HSBC, Blue Action and The Government of Western Australia.

On the ground in Perth for Residency Week with our Mining and Nature cohorts

This month marked a major milestone for our Mining Tech and Nature Tech Accelerator cohorts, halfway through their programmes with Rio Tinto and the Government of Western Australia.

Every six months, these founders join us from around the world in Perth for an intensive week to accelerate product–market fit, build commercial partnerships, and connect directly with industry.

We explored and tested several themes with founders to ensure they could push their concepts from lab to market, including:

Regulation & scale: Engaging with WA government leaders on regulatory, trade, and biodiversity priorities to unlock pilot and market-entry opportunities.

Customer validation: Refining business cases and pressure-testing propositions with potential customers and industry leaders.

The in-person collaboration gives founders and our team the space to develop ideas, validate assumptions, and build globally scalable businesses.

🗞️ Jobs round-up:

Nursy - is the first AI-powered assistant designed for nurseries and specialty crop growers, integrating hardware and software to increase productivity, cut resources waste, and strengthen climate resilience (Milan, Italy)

• Chief Operating Officer & Co-Founder

Durin - automated drilling rigs to accelerate mineral discovery and reduce exploration costs (Los Angeles, US)

• Senior web-developer, CA

Terra AI - AI for mineral exploration to reduce drilling costs and improve accuracy (Palo Alto, US)

• Software Engineer, Remote, US

Rainstick - agriculture & nature restoration using electrical fields to mimic the natural effects of lightning, boosting seed yields faster and more sustainably (Cairns, Australia)

• Senior Robotics and Automation Engineer, Queensland, Australia

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Heavy industries such as steel, chemicals, and manufacturing are among the hardest sectors to decarbonise. Reducing their environmental impact is one of the greatest challenges in the climate transition, yet many of the technologies that could expedite change have struggled to achieve market adoption.

Industrial firms often operate with high capital intensity, limiting funds available for the kind of upfront investment that new technologies demand. In many cases, it isn’t just about swapping in lower impact equipment - it requires a wholesale rethinking of processes, supply chains, and business models. That scale of change has kept promising solutions on the sidelines.

Future Industries Partnership, our new programme delivered in partnership with HSBC and Third Derivative/RMI, aims to change this. In this edition, we profile the first cohort of startups selected for the programme - deploying a broad range of impactful technologies, from the replacement of carbon intensive building materials, to modular, energy efficient air-conditioning.

Also in this month’s newsletter:

• Founders Factory at New York Climate Week

• Fundraising round-up

• WA new cohort

• CODE

• UKRI Innovate UK launch

• Jobs roundup

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  ---

⚡️ Scaling heavy industry startups with HSBC and Third Derivative

In June we launched the Future Industries Partnership in collaboration with HSBC and Third Derivative. A three-year philanthropic programme to accelerate climate technologies in heavy industry across Asia and the Middle East.

During the 18-month accelerator these startups will receive technical and commercialisation support, 1-2-1 mentoring, partner match-making and innovation showcases to guide their projects to success. Namely, reducing the emissions and environmental impact of heavy industry.

Here’s a look at the first cohort:

Carbon Signal – Cutting building audit times from months to minutes with high-fidelity energy intelligence.

Greengine – Creating scalable micro-algae based carbon capture for big industries and institutions.

HYDGEN – Modular electrolyzers producing ultra-pure green hydrogen directly on-site.

NoPo Nanotechnologies – Single-walled carbon nanotubes driving efficiency in batteries, polymers, and electronics.

Ocean – Bamboo-based building materials for low-carbon, climate-resilient construction.

Octolife – Affordable, modular AC delivering low-emission cooling at scale.

Renkube – Creating Motion-Free Optical Tracking boosts solar yields by up to 40%.

Rewind Turbine – Fully recyclable, modular wind blades for wind turbines simplifying logistics and cutting costs.

Torus Robotics – Building ultra-efficient axial flux motors reducing energy use in HVAC systems.

🌆 Founders Factory at New York Climate Week

Find us across multiple events at next week’s New York Climate Week.

The Maritime Decarbonisation Challenge

On the 24th September we’re convening a closed-door roundtable of shipping companies, charterers, cargo owners and port authorities to debate who pays, who builds, and who benefits from maritime decarbonisation. The discussion is hosted in partnership with J.P. Morgan alfa8 and Blue Action.

Industrial Transformation Summit

This New York Climate Week, on the 25th September, Founders Factory hosts its inaugural Industrial Transformation Summit with partners HSBC, Rio Tinto and Blue Action.

The summit will feature panels on mining ventures, supply chain transformation and aligning incentives between nature and industry, with expert insights from industry leaders, entrepreneurs and deep tech investors. 12 startups from Founders Factory’s global portfolio will present in our Startup Showcase.

💸 Fundraising Round-up

Meshed

🤖 Meshed raised an oversubscribed £950k pre-seed round to build the UK’s first AI-native insurance broker for SMEs.

Backed by Haatch, Exponential Science and Aviva (via Founders Factory), Meshed is rebuilding the insurance broking stack to deliver more efficient, cost-effective solutions.

Founded by Mark Costello (CEO), Vincent Liu (CTO) and Jake Wells (COO), the team are keen to connect with brokers, underwriters, engineers and builders with the vision to transform the insurance industry.

WALLROUND

🏠 WALLROUND closed a €4.2M oversubscribed seed round to digitise and streamline energy-efficient building renovations.

Led by Revent with participation from GGF and Vonovia, the funding will help WALLROUND, expand operations across Germany, enhance automated planning workflows and grow its tech, product, and operations teams.

Founded in 2024 via the Founders Factory & Vonovia Venture Studio, WALLROUND is fixing renovation’s outdated and fragmented processes by unifying property analysis, planning, procurement, and QA into one platform.

Congrats to co-founders Lukas Steinhilber (CEO), Tatiana Wotzasek (CPO) and Henning von Oesen (MD).

Hades Mining

🔥 Emerging from stealth, Hades Mining announced a €5.5M pre-seed round to build Europe’s first vertically integrated, tech-enabled mining company.

Founded in 2025 by Dr Max Werner, Björn Dressler and Dan Gengenbach, Hades Mining aims to reduce Europe’s >90% reliance on external sources for critical minerals by unlocking geothermal energy at scale.

Backed by Founders Factory and Rio Tinto through our Mining Tech Accelerator, the round is led by Project A with participation from Visionaries Tomorrow, Viessmann Generations Group and a network of strategic angels.

🚀 Congratulations to the Hades team!

Meet the Western Australia Gov Nature Tech Accelerator Cohort 3

We’re excited to announce the latest cohort for the WA Nature Tech Accelerator, in partnership with the Government of Western Australia.

From methane-busting seaweed and wildfire-detecting sensors to modular insect farms and ecosystem listening tech, these six pioneering companies are redefining how nature and innovation intersect to drive sustainability and economic diversification in Western Australia and beyond

The cohort includes:

• Quenda (WA) – Zero-emission, solar rovers for land rehabilitation

• Fremantle Seaweed (WA) – Growing seaweed to cut livestock methane by 80%

• North Australian SeaCulture (WA) – Native seaweed farming & processing

• Pyri (UK) – Passive ground sensors for early wildfire detection

• Flybox® (UK) – Modular insect farms turning food waste into animal feed

• Synature (CH) – Bioacoustic tech to measure ecosystem health

Read about the accelerator here

🌍 CODE Tech Founders Programme

This month, we welcomed a new cohort of Saudi Arabia’s most entrepreneurial companies to London for the third edition of CODE, run with the Ministry of Communications and IT of Saudi Arabia and Imperial Enterprise Lab.

Over six weeks, founders will be immersed in London’s ecosystem, gaining access to world-class expertise, connections, and intensive company-scaling support from the Founders Factory team.

👏 Huge congratulations to all the CODE founders selected.

Innovate UK Accelerator launch

You can now apply for the Hospital to Community Accelerator, a 10 week, non-equity programme designed and delivered by Founders Factory in partnership with innovateUK, part of UK Research & Innovation.

The accelerator supports up to 10 early stage health-tech startups working on remote monitoring, at-home diagnostics, new community care models, and digital tools that ease hospital pressure.

Open roles:

• Senior Full Stack Engineer - Xapien - play a key role in shaping the core Xapien platform as they grow rapidly.

• Tech Co-Founder - Tetto Assicurazione (LLM-Powered Home Contents Insurance) (Milan) – Tetto Assicurazione aims to revolutionise the Italian insurance market with a mobile-first, AI-powered home and contents insurance subscription service.

• Senior Software Engineer - Mae - An opportunity for someone who is passionate about maternal health equity to build and shape key features of Mae’s platform

• Growth Venture Builder - Founders Factory (Berlin) - 6 months, German speaker. We’re looking for a well-rounded, hands-on Venture Builder to help launch a new startup in the climate space with Vonovia, Europe’s largest residential real estate company.

• Founder & CEO at AI-Driven Property Manager Voltigo (Berlin) - ​Voltigo taps into a multi-billion-euro opportunity — serving an underserved market with long-term user relationships and recurring revenue models based on energy usage, carbon savings, and future green lifestyle services.

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How heavy industry interacts with our natural environment has come under increasing focus over the last few years.

Governments—from the EU through to Australia—have introduced legislation designed at encouraging ‘best available techniques’ when it comes to emissions and their impact on air, water, and land.

So what are these best available techniques? As with any innovation, startups are best positioned to introduce transformative, even radical new processes to industry. Investing in Western Australia’s nature tech ecosystem, we’ve seen how startups are transforming the intersection between nature and industry—from the materials they use to the lasting impact it leaves.

Also in today’s Startup Bulletin:

• Our top recommended reads this month

• Highlights from our global portfolio

• Opportunities, jobs, events in tech

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🏭🌳 Four startups intersecting nature & industry

SeaStock

The problem: Cattle are the largest source of agricultural GHG emissions. Methane from their digestive processes contributes around 14% of all human-induced emissions. Previous attempts to solve this have proved ineffective or marginal at best.

The solution: Nature holds the solution—specifically, in seaweed. Asparagosis seaweed is a naturally occurring seaweed in Western Australia: when introduced to cattle diets, can reduce methane emissions by up to 90%.

SeaStock, a Fremantle-based startup, manufactures marine science solutions to produce and extract compounds derived from seaweed and algae. Beyond agriculture, their solutions promise to transform industries including cosmetics, food, and pharmaceuticals.

Call to Country

The problem: Businesses around the world often come into contact with Indigenous communities—particularly where industry intersects with Indigenous lands and heritage. Organisations increasingly recognise the importance of engaging first hand with these communities to ensure social and environment compliance.

These solutions, however, are often fragmented and inconsistent. This ranges from isolated cultural awareness training to tokenistic, compliance driven exercises, rather than true integration and engagement.

The solution: WA-based, Indigenous-led startup Call To Country are building a cultural competency platform to help businesses map their organisational needs to industry best practice approaches in order to strengthen cultural capability. Their technology platform aims to act as a ‘cultural coach in your pocket’ for on-demand advice and support.

Rainstick

The problem: The agricultural industry is facing an existential crisis—declining crop yields, erratic weather, and tightening restrictions on pesticides. The search for chemical-free, scalable methods to boost agricultural productivity continues…

The solution: Farmers and agricultural businesses should turn to nature—lightning, in particular. Rainstick has developed synthetic lightning—specifically, a Variable Electric Field Treatment (VEFTTM) technology, which uses 50,000 frequencies across 9 waveforms—to stimulate biological and electrochemical changes in seeds, enhancing germination, resilience, and overall crop performance. It also has the potential to stimulate agriculture in a number of harsh or hostile conditions, such as environments impacted by industry or extreme weather.

Co-founded by Darryl Lyons, the descendant of the Rainmaker tribe in Australia, this technology taps into age-old Indigenous wisdom around weather and agriculture.

Nitronic

The problem: Nitrogen fertiliser production currently relies largely on the Haber-Bosch method: a highly energy intensive method that consumes about 1-2% of the world's energy supply and is responsible for approximately 1.8% of global carbon emissions. Decarbonising agriculture critically starts with addressing this huge problem.

The solution: Nitronic have developed a new method for sustainable nitrogen fertiliser production, using non-thermal plasma technology. A method that significantly reduces energy requirements compared to the Haber-Bosch process.

—

Applications for our latest Nature Tech program are now open. If you are interested, or know an appropriate startup, find out more & get in touch here.

Find out more

📚 Our recommended reading list

• No Rivals: The Founders Fund Story (The Generalist)

• Why Did Microsoft Invest In OpenAI? (Ed Zitron)

• Shipping is one of the world’s dirtiest industries – could this invention finally clean up cargo fleets? (The Guardian)

🚀 Highlights from our Global Portfolio

• Dronamics were selected for equity investment of up to €30M by the European Innovation Council, as they look to expand their groundbreaking drone airline across Europe

• Tattva received a £650K Innovate UK grant as they develop and commercialise a novel carbon-sequestering biomaterial for construction

• Shop Circle were named in Sifted’s Rising SaaS 100 Rankings, among Europe’s fastest growing and most promising software companies

• We hosted a roundtable breakfast event on Industrial Transformation, as part of London Climate Action Week

• In Berlin, we held an event titled ‘Building in Berlin: Zero to One in 2025’, featuring a stellar panel of Julian Teicke, founder of wefox, Carolin Gabor, ex-MD of finleap, plus Founders Factory CEO Henry Lane Fox and Chief Studio Officer Claire Morris

📍 Opportunities, jobs, events

• The Tech Nation Report 2025, out now: https://report.technation.io/download

Jobs

• Content Lead @ Founders Factory—opportunity to shape, define, and own FF’s content and thought leadership strategy. Find out more here

• Commercialisation Lead @ Founders Factory—support our early-stage portfolio to define and execute their go-to-market strategies, build early customer traction, and lay the foundations for scalable sales. Find out more here

See you next month 👋

Interested in reading more of the same? Check out the Founders Factory blog and previous newsletters.

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Achieving that scientific breakthrough might feel like definitive success. But really, that’s only the beginning.

Proving that your technology can work is one thing; being able to sell it into large companies and disrupt major industries is a whole challenge of its own. This is particularly true in heavy, highly regulated industries—like mining—where safety and reliability often comes first.

Liz Dennett, founder of Endolith, has faced this challenge head on. Scaling deep tech out of the lab and selling to corporates, she says, is one of the hardest things she’s ever done—and that’s coming from someone who climbs mountains in her spare time.

In today’s Startup Bulletin, Liz shares her insights into disrupting heavy industry, and the four things that have found her some success in this regard.

Also in today’s newsletter:

• 📚 This month’s reading list

• 🚀 Highlights from our global portfolio

• 📍 Opportunities in tech (events, jobs, etc)

Subscribe now

Endolith’s Liz Dennett: On disrupting heavy industry

Liz Dennett, founder of the biointelligence startup looking to transform copper recovery, shares what she’s learned about disrupting a heavy industry like mining

Start with an immediate problem

When I joined Cemvita (the forerunner to Endolith), I was coming in with a strong view to the potential of microbes as an application to numerous areas in the mining industry and its value chain.

The problem is—industry doesn’t reward future potential. It rewards immediate results and impact. So the most important decision I made was to get our team to sit down and figure out where we could have the most immediate impact on the climate transition—not in ten years time, but right now.

This brought me back to a conversation I’d had during my PhD, about the most important resource for the future of humanity. Copper—a critical element for the transition to clean energy—always cropped up. So I brought these two things together—microbes, an organism that can radically improve metal recovery, and copper.

That mantra keeps popping up for me—cash is king, focus is queen.

Show you understand—and care

You’re often told in technology to not shy away from being an outsider, a disruptor. But things work a little differently in heavy, highly regulated industries. These companies are risk averse and safety always comes first: anything that changes too radically without the right checks and balances might result in injury or worse.

I’ve tried before blundering in as an outsider: but you’re much more effective in showing that you understand the industry, that you’ve taken time to listen and hear their problems, empathise with what they value, and demonstrate how you think they can move forward.

Tap into insider knowledge where possible

One of the best advantages you can build, and a great way to demonstrate understanding and nuance, is through tapping into insider knowledge. This may be industry experts, or even people who work at the types of companies you are trying to sell to.

This was a huge advantage of the Founders Factory Mining Accelerator, which gave us senior level access to Rio Tinto, giving us strong insight into the dynamics of selling to the mining industry, and potential problems to be solved at these multinationals.

Footnote: For many founders, speaking to ‘insiders’ will take place through the discovery phase, where you should speak to as many industry professionals to start to build an image of your ideal customer profile and the problems you are solving for.

Incremental gains aren’t enough

Scaling and selling deep tech is incredibly hard. You can’t pin success on a 10%-20% improvement. Your product should not just be the better option, it has to be the easiest possible choice, a solution that can easily adapt to existing systems and demonstrate radical improvements.

I keep reminding myself that to succeed, ”Market adoption has to be inevitable”.

This has been excerpted from our recent founder spotlight on Liz Dennett, which you can read in full here:

Read full article

📚 This month’s reading list

• AI Eats the World (Benedict Evans)

• Forget SEO, the hot new thing is ‘AEO’ (Business Insider)

• The Art of Evals: How Figma Put People at the Center of Its AI Product (First Round Review)

🚀 Highlights from our global portfolio

• We announced the launch of the Future Industries Partnership, a philanthropic initiative funded by HSBC to fund new technologies focused on decarbonising and upgrading heavy industries like steel and cement. We’ll be providing hands on operational support to those companies involved

• We hosted twelve startups from our mining and nature tech accelerators in Perth for a week of in-person programming, networking, and partner engagement, culminating in an opportunity to pitch to a room of industry leaders and investors

• Endolith, the mining biointelligence platform, published the results from its testing with Think & Act Differently (BHP’s innovation arm), demonstrating significant advances in copper recovery from low grade ores—essential for meeting the growing demand for copper

• Valarian announced a further $7M in funding, bringing their seed funding to $20M. They’re building infrastructure for secure data management, focused largely at highly regulated industries like defense

• Our team visited Vancouver to host the culmination of our first Blue Action Canada program, featuring eight startups innovating in the blue economy space. This included programming as part of Web Summit, being held this year in the British Columbia capital

Opportunities in tech

📆 Events

• SLINGSHOT by SWITCH (October 29th - 31st)—SLINGSHOT is a global deep tech startup pitching competition, part of the Singapore Week of Innovation and Technology (SWITCH), taking place 29th to 31st October 2025. Find out more and register here

📍 Jobs

• Founder & CEO at Capita—we’re looking for an entrepreneur-in-residence to lead the strategy & build of our latest fintech concept, an AI-powered financial companion for ‘emerging affluents’

See you next month 👋

Interested in reading more of the same? Check out the Founders Factory blog and previous newsletters.

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To Dan Secretan, AI isn’t a replacer, it’s an enhancer. A “super strength”.

The proof is in the pudding. In teams which are using Xapien’s LLM-based background checking platform, researchers are now known as ‘strategic analysts’, advising the business on how to proceed based on Xapien’s research.

The story of Xapien is a great example of building ahead of a wave, becoming a category leader in a technology as it reaches maturity and widespread application. In this month’s newsletter, we look at the four steps that have brought Xapien to where it is today.

Also in today’s Startup Bulletin

• Our recommended reading from this month

• Highlights from our global startup portfolio

• Opportunities, roles, events

Subscribe now

Building Xapien in four steps

Xapien’s founder Dan Secretan shares the four key steps that brought his business to where it is today:

1. Identify a growing problem

My co-founder Shaun and I had spent many years combined working in financial crime, law enforcement, and security, seeing how technology can be applied to empower these sectors.

As the internet hit the mainstream, the types of threat and risk we saw emerging was unlike what we were seeing before. As business became increasingly globalised and online, it was harder than ever to understand who you were doing business with: and our due diligence systems weren’t adapting to keep up with it.

It was in dire need of a context layer—something you could map on top of existing systems to increase understanding, context, and accuracy.

2. Harness an evolving technology to solve it

We quickly identified two technologies—or technology phenomena—which could solve this. Shaun’s background was in open source intelligence, using the wide range of publicly available information on the internet to enhance decisions or data. I, meanwhile, was already seeing the potential of AI, in particular the lesser known technology of large language models (LLMs).

The combination of these two things could be gamechanging. There was so much information on the internet (news articles, blogs, reports) that could help you truly ‘know your customer’ better than ever before. LLMs fed on this information could provide comprehensive, and more importantly, accurate background checks.

And thus, Xapien was born.

3. Find your first buyer to start generating revenue

Given my background was in financial crime, we set out to target a huge industry: financial services. I had seen even just a glimpse of the money these organisations spend on background checks and due diligence: and if we could capture even just a fraction of this trillion dollar market, and make progress, we could see huge benefits.

The catch? Financial services are incredibly hard to sell to. They have slow sales cycles and procurement processes, especially given the rigidity of their existing due diligence systems. So we had to look elsewhere—one, to build confidence with other potential customers, and two, to start generating revenue.

What quickly transpired was that there we had a blindspot to an entirely different category of companies who used background check technology—philanthropic donations. Everyone from universities, to museums, to arts organisations, all investing money in understanding where the money they are being given is coming from. The additional context that Xapien provided meant that checks were tailored and nuanced to each company's needs.

One such example—a cancer charity, who wanted to flag donations from tobacco companies.

4. Balance future & present to develop your product

We've found significant benefits in separating core product development from exploratory research and development.

We have two distinct teams: an engineering team focused on building specific product components, and a smaller research team dedicated to exploration and experimentation with new models to discover advancements. The collaboration between these teams allows us to consistently deliver, while ensuring we are still pushing the limits of what we’re able to do.

Read more

📚 What we’ve been reading this month

• Vertical AI: beware what you wrap (Matt Brown)

• The Next AI Wave Will Be Social, Not Solo (Every)

• All At Sea (BLLNR)

• The Truth Behind UK Startups (Entrepreneur UK)

🚀 Highlights from Founders Factory’s global portfolio

• We announced our new Crypto & AI Accelerator, backed by Coinbase, Animoca Brands, and Fabric Ventures. Read about it here in Sifted

• We closed our next six investments for our Mining Tech Accelerator, including Durin (fully automated drill rigs), Terra AI (AI modelling for exploration), and Rock Zero (zero waste lithium extraction). Check out our full cohort here

• We also announced our latest Nature Tech Cohort, featuring six startups from Australia, the UK, and Canada. Check out the full cohort here

• Ceto announced $4.8M in seed funding, as they build out their data intelligence platform for commercial shipping insurance

• Lucy Adams, co-founder of Martee AI, was named in the latest Forbes 30 Under 30, in their social impact category

• Durin, the automated drilling rig startup, announced their $3.4M seed round, led by 8090 Ventures with investment from a16z, among others

• Gridshare launched their latest crowdfunding campaign, offering the chance to invest and co-own a newly constructed solar farm. Learn more here

📍 Opportunities

Roles

• Founder Engineer at Ditto—AI-powered social network. Learn more here

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Today marks our 50th edition of the Startup Bulletin. It’s official—we have more editions than James Bond books, Harry Potter books, and Game of Thrones books combined.

Over the past four years, we’re shared insights on everything from launching a crowdfunding campaign to coding your MVP, from low carbon cargo drones to autonomous wind-harnessing yachts. All with the central mission of putting the thoughts of the best of the startup ecosystem into the hands of those currently in the weeds, building.

As we mark the big half century, we reflect back on some of the trends we’ve picked out over the past 50 newsletters, and what it’s taught us about the long and often bumpy road of starting your own business.

Also in today’s Startup Bulletin:

• This month’s reading list

• Highlights from our global portfolio

• Opportunities, events, roles & more

Subscribe now

🔎 Startup Bulletin at 50: Four trends we’ve spotted

The deep tech vibe shift

When we launched the Startup Bulletin, our content largely reflected the types of investments we were making—largely consumer facing, software businesses. Take our first ever newsletter on crowdfunding (#1), a practice usually reserved for startups looking to get their product into the hands of eager users, who they can bring in as early ambassadors by investing.

Deep tech, as the name suggests, occupied the peripheries of investors' minds. Considered capital intensive, unscalable, complex, investors steered away from these types of investments.

If there’s been any huge shift in venture we’ve noticed over the last fifty editions, it’s been the vibe shift around deep tech. We detailed our thoughts about this shift here (#40)—in short, those willing to enter into the risk of building a deep tech company are rewarded with creating category-defining, groundbreaking technologies, on top of which many applications can be built. The rewards—financial, social—are huge, and investors are catching on.

One great example is in #45, our profile of DRIFT Energy (#45), who are building not one but two deep techs into one product—an AI routing algorithm to follow optimal sailing conditions, on board an autonomous sailing vessel that harnesses wind and converts it into green hydrogen.

The rise of the Venture Studio

Writing a newsletter ‘for founders, by founders’ is convenient in that it largely guides itself—working closely with founders, we’re largely attuned to what founders are looking to read about.

We’ve seen an interesting shift in terms of the type of support that founders are looking for. An abundance of AI has meant that startups can operate much more lightly on their feet. Capital alone is not enough to navigate these uncertain waters; expert, operational support (not just advice) from a very early stage is key.

Our Venture Studio model, which we launched eight years, is swiftly gaining popularity in the market. We shared a primer on Venture Studios here (#36), detailing our unique (at least we think so) support model that derisks concepts before attaching a founder, coupling them with a comprehensive support package that includes a hands-on venture builder, corporate expertise, and bespoke functional support.

Climate remains our biggest challenge—but how we’re solving it is changing

It’s certainly not news that we’re now closer to solving the climate crisis today than we were four years and fifty SB editions ago. Attitudes to climate tech differ depending on who you speak to, and the challenges that climate tech founders (#34) faced two years ago certainly haven’t gone away.

One thing remains true—that finding better ways to manage our population and the Earth’s resources remains top of the agenda. This stretches to everything from how we discover and excavate natural minerals to how we create energy to how we construct our built environment.

The next industrial revolution—to find smarter, more efficient, and cleaner ways to do business—is happening in front of our eyes, and we’re excited to feel as close to it as we do.

Drawing trends between successful founders is futile

Launching the Startup Bulletin, I (naively) thought it would help me get into the consciousness of a founder and understand what was in the DNA for successful entrepreneurs. The more founders I speak to, the more futile I realise this is.

We’ve spoken to everyone from Canva’s Melanie Perkins (#33) to Calm’s Michael Acton Smith (#31), as well as our own portfolio including Scan.com’s Charlie Bullock (#43) and Dronamics’ Rangelov Brothers (#25).

Advice pings back and forward—knowing when to pivot versus knowing when to stick to your guns; following fast moving waters versus being wary of hype. So trying to find a common thread can truly be like searching for that non-existent needle in a haystack.

But don’t worry, we’ll keep trying to find it over the next 50 editions too.

📚 This month’s reading list

• Ben Thompson interviews Sam Altman (Stratechery)

• Michiaki Matsushima speaks to Yuval Noah Harari on AI (WIRED)

• Hyperlegibility (Not Boring)

• PLUS one to listen to—Byway’s Cat Jones on Radio 4’s You and Yours

🚀 Highlights from our global portfolio

• Founders Factory was named the UK’s top ranked startup hub, according to the Financial Times European Startup Hubs ranking. The annual list of incubators and accelerators ranks 150 organisations across Europe, with Founders Factory placing fifth overall

• We kicked off our second cohorts for our Mining Tech and Nature Tech Accelerators, with twelve new startups across both programs. See more details on these cohorts below

• Shop Circle announced their latest $60M Series B funding round, as they grow their suite of e-commerce tools. The latest round, led by Endeavor, brings their total funding to $245M

• We saw four companies featured in the Sifted 100, ranking the UK & Ireland’s fastest growing companies—Scan.com (#13), Xapien (#38), Tembo (#48), and Byway (#61). This places us in their top ten investors of fast-growing companies

• Atmcooling announced $2.6M in pre-seed funding, whose evaporative cooling technology aims to transform deserts into agricultural and climate resilience hubs

• Brineworks received a $1.8M European Innovation Council grant, to help supercharge their direct ocean capture technology that turns seawater into a scalable feedstock for e-fuels

• Ocean Ledger closed $975K in pre-seed funding. They’re providing high-resolution geospatial analytics for coastal risk assessment and environmental impact analysis

• Fantix, the enterprise AI startup, sold their adtech business to smart technology company Life360 to help power smarter, targeted advertising solutions

• ACUA Ocean launched their first unmanned surface vehicle, the USV Pioneer, in Plymouth as the ocean data collection company continues to undergo sea trials

📍 Opportunities

Events

• Women in AI Drinks (Wednesday 9th April, London)—a chance to meet likeminded founders, investors, and operators working in the AI space

Roles

We’re hiring for several roles in our Venture Studio, including for EIRs and entrepreneurial product designers:

• Founder & CEO at Delorean (AI Agent Insurtech)—lead strategy & build of our latest Aviva Fintech venture

• Founder & CEO at Tetto Assicurazione (LLM-Powered Home Insurance)—lead strategy & build of our latest Fastweb Studio venture

• Venture Builder (Product Lead/Product Design Engineer) at Founders Factory London—join our Venture Studio team in London

See you next month 👋

Interested in reading more of the same? Check out the Founders Factory blog and previous newsletters.

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The gender finance gap is real.

Women are less likely to hold bank accounts, they’re less insured, women-owned businesses are less likely to get access to credit. Despite radical transformations over the last decade, women still have worse access to financial services than men.

You can trace a clear link back to the underfunding of women-led fintech startups—receiving around 2% of VC funding. This is leading to fewer women-led companies, with fewer women-oriented (or at least, personalised) financial products on the market. How can fintech promise to widen access to finances to all, when half the population is so underrepresented?

To mark International Women’s Day this week (March 8th), we’re taking the opportunity to highlight four women entrepreneurs who are leading the way in fintech’s transformational decade.

Also in today’s newsletter:

• Highlights from the Founders Factory portfolio

• What we’ve been reading this month

• Opportunities in tech

Subscribe now

💸 Four women transforming fintech

Solving financial advice’s data problem

⭐️ Nicky Sevel, CEO & co-founder of Woven

It’s not so much a case of whether AI can disrupt wealth management—it’s more a case of how. Data is the major blocker here, given that most advisors work with fragmented or incomplete data siloes and therefore can’t properly leverage data.

This is the problem that Woven is solving, with founder Nicky Sevel at the helm. Nicky’s career has seen her bridge roles across wealth management, from financial planning to solution designing. Woven is in fact her second business in the space, having previously founded Neeshe, aiming to democratise financial advice to financial advice for women.

The business was recently named in Sifted’s 14 Wealthtech Startups to Watch.

You can listen to her recent appearance on the Women Talking Money podcast here

Disrupting data collection & upgrading the gig economy

⭐️ Lindsay Forster, CEO of Shepper

Lindsay Forster leads Shepper, the smart asset checking business. The concept is simple: their community of ‘Shepherds’, now numbering over 200,000, completes tasks set by organisations (consumer, media, real estate, etc) ranging from data collection to asset checking to quality testing.

The business has quickly become a thriving community enabling people to earn flexible, extra income, as well as provide support and training to others on the platform.

Lindsay describes the opportunity she sees attached to Shepper: “At the centre of all this, we’re trying to help our Shepherds succeed personally and professionally. Working for Shepper doesn’t require any specialist skills or qualifications: we give all the training in our app to get them started.”

Read our profile of Lindsay, alongside Shepper founder Carl Ameln

Providing financial coaching for all

⭐️ Alisha Chowdhury, CEO & founder of Kiro

Personal finance advice is ordinarily the preserve of the super wealthy. Advice for young millennials and gen Zs, meanwhile, is few and far between—anything that does exist is largely online and can be hard to decipher or trust.

“Over 75% of Gen Z say they’re stressed about their personal finances. Most turn to friends, family, or social media platforms like Reddit for financial guidance, but these sources often lead to poorer economic outcomes,” Alisha said in an interview with Poets & Quants.

That’s what drove Alisha to found Kiro, the first AI-powered financial coach aimed at connecting young adults to personalised financial resources. Their partnership model sees them offering Kiro’s white-label solution to credit unions, building societies, and pension providers, ensuring that customers have 24/7 access to a financial coach within their existing platforms.

Bringing due diligence on-chain

⭐️ Cindy van Niekerk, CEO & founder of Umazi

Umazi is a startup that uses distributed ledger technology to accelerate corporate identity verification and due diligence for cross-border trade and working capital optimisation. It’s designed to reduce the time and cost of verifying partners, suppliers, and other corporate entities.

Cindy founded the company off the back of her experience of consulting for the banking industry, having managed projects at the likes of JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, and Barclays. One experience stood out to her: “The bank, like all the others I previously contracted at, distributed communications to their clients to help them become compliant with the latest regulation. One client sent us a photo of his desk with the comms strewn across his desk. I was taken aback by the lack of client consideration.”

The aim is to enhance trust, transparency, and compliance across financial services.

Read last year’s IWD newsletter:

Women leading the climate revolution

📚 What we’ve been reading this month

• Don’t Call It Deep Tech (Cantos Ventures)

• The Humane AI Pin never had a chance (The Verge)

• The Next 10 Years Will Be About the AI Agent Economy (NFX)

• Vibe Coding: The New Way We Create and Interact with Technology (Patrick Chan via AI Monks)

🚀 Highlights from the Founders Factory community

• Shop Circle announced a $60M Series B as they look to advance the next generation of e-commerce software. The round was led by US firm Endeavor and Italian fund Nextalia

• Claro AI, who helps SMEs deploy small language models from unstructured data, closed €650K in pre-seed funding

• Matnex announced their partnership with Veridien to launch the world’s largest and most advanced supercomputer for material discovery, backed by investment from the likes of Samos Investments, Ada Ventures, and MDOne, among others

• Metalchemy won the PITCH trophy at Web Summit Qatar. The nanotechnology startup builds in antibacterial properties into food packaging, aimed at reducing food waste

• Vycarb were named in Forbes’ list of 5 Environmental Startups Leading the Way in 2025, highlighting their technology for water-based CO2 removal and storage

Opportunities

💼 Roles

• Founder & CEO at Project Delorean (reimagining insurance infrastructure with AI)—we’re looking for an entrepreneur-in-residence to lead strategy and build of our latest Aviva Venture Studio project

• Tech Co-founder & CTO at Regeno (financing transition to regenerative agriculture)

• Tech Co-founder & CTO at MietMagie (neobank for renters)—must be based in Germany

See you next month 👋

Interested in reading more of the same insights? Check out the Founders Factory blog, and previous newsletters.

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Interviewing DRIFT Energy’s founder Ben Medland last year, I asked him why he thought the oceans got a fraction of the attention that the wider environment does. His answer:

“It comes down to mind share and proximity. People have sympathy for the ocean, but they rarely interact with it. The people who do, really get it. But there are so many problems in the world right now, that we’re often distracted by what's in front of your eyes.

“The ocean is hidden.”

The blue economy receives less than 3% of total climate investment, according to a recent report by JP Morgan. The statistics are striking, for something which covers more than two-thirds of our planet, and stores 50x times more carbon than the environment.

Shipping is one such critical focus area. While aviation is far more carbon intensive than shipping, the overall impact of the shipping industry massively outstrips aviation—accounting for 3% of global GHG emissions.

Solving for shipping means solving for the oceans. Solving for the oceans means solving for the planet. So is the shipping industry open to decarbonisation? In this month’s Ocean Special Startup Bulletin, we look at various solutions that are disrupting the shipping industry to make it cleaner and more efficient.

Also in today’s Startup Bulletin:

• Our top recommended reads

• News from our portfolio

• Opportunities, jobs, etc

Subscribe now

🚢 Can shipping go emissions free?

Four startups transforming, disrupting, and decarbonising the shipping industry

Armada

The problem: Shipping uses a popular technology called ‘air lubrication’ to help boats travel more efficiently. In essence, these are machines which release a thin layer of microbubbles across the hull of a ship, to reduce friction with sea water.

This technology is not without its flaws though. Most systems rely on compressors, energy intensive machines that can even increase the drag on ships when not in operation. Their efficiency is disputed (many estimate they lead to between 0 and 7% in fuel savings), and are also limited to certain conditions (they have limited efficacy in stormy seas).

The solution:

Armada has patented a new ‘passive air lubrication system’, using the ship’s forward motion to create a precise air-water mixture for lubrication which crucially doesn’t rely on air compressors. This system gives better overall performance and is adaptable to various conditions.

Their impact: It’s summarised best in their tagline—”The cleanest energy is the energy we never use.”

Brineworks

The problem: Electrification faces a huge roadbump when it comes to shipping. Instead, the industry (as will many ‘heavy industries’) will rely massively on the production of e-fuels (the likes of CO2 and hydrogen) for clean power.

The solution: Brineworks ingeniously tackles two ocean challenges. They draw on the ocean’s vast carbon store (as well as its near infinite supply of hydrogen) for the scalable and sustainable production of e-fuels, through saltwater electrochemistry.

The impact: Brineworks expects to be able to extract CO2 at less than $150/ton, well below current costs of $600-$1000/ton, while at the same cleanly powering maritime (as well as aviation). Moreover, their modular system creates the possibility for fuel production anywhere you find seawater.

Metal Light

The problem: While focus sits firmly on the ships themselves, we can’t ignore port infrastructure when it comes to wider decarbonisation. Port side power remains a huge issue, with ships relying on diesel engines to generate electricity even while docked.

The solution: Metal Light metal-air generators create sustainable and circular energy from waste metal. Once used, metal is oxidised, refined, and ultimately reused.

The impact: Standard shore power cable handling equipment can connect their metal-air generators to ships’ internal distribution, allowing them to turn off internal generators and run cleanly when docked.

Offshore Designs

The problem: ‘Hull fouling’ (AKA dirty ship hulls) has a huge impact on the efficiency and speed of vessels. It’s believed to add $30BN in costs every year to the shipping industry, not to mention the vast environmental impact.

The solution: Offshore Designs’ HullM8 robot is the first hull cleaning robot capable of cleaning a wide range of growth. This is done proactively, while ships are in ports to unload or refuel, rather than in a dry dock.

The impact: Proactive hull cleaning has a vast range of benefits for the shipping industry, not only offering cost savings but also reducing GHG emissions, preserving hull coatings, and reducing dry dock time.

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These four companies are all part of our Blue Action Accelerator portfolio. If you’re building in this space, or solving other blue economy challenges, we’d love to hear from you.

Learn more here

📚 What we’ve been reading this month

• Gold rush: Why VCs suddenly love mining (Sifted)—featuring comments from our head of investments, Olivia Brooks

• What to watch in 2025 (The Generalist)

• The Five Stages of AI Agent Evolution (NFX)

• By default, capital will matter more than ever after AGI (LessWrong)

🚀 Highlights from Founders Factory & our portfolio

• We announced the launch of Blue Action Canada, with plans to initially back eight British Columbia-based startups innovating in the blue economy. Check out details of our first cohort here

• We kicked off our CODE Accelerator, a bootcamp bringing some of MENA’s top early stage entrepreneurs to London for six weeks of in-person programming and networking.

• Entrepreneur featured profiles of two stellar founders from our portfolio: Cat Jones, founder of Byway; and Gauthier van Malderen, founder of Perlego

📍 Opportunities in tech

Applications

• We’re welcoming applications for a number of our Accelerator programs. See below for details and deadlines:

  • Western Australia Nature Tech Accelerator (deadline February 14th)

  • Pico Media & Live Events Accelerator (deadline February 16th)

  • Blue Action Accelerator (deadline February 28th)

Jobs

• We’re looking for an Entrepreneur-in-Residence to lead Project Delorean—our latest insurtech startup in our Aviva Venture Studio. Find out more here

Other

• All Response Media have launched their TV Star Competition, giving startups a chance to win a fully-funded TV ad campaign worth £50K. Past winners include Calm, PensionBee, and Carwow—and this year, we’re on the judging panel. Find out more & apply here

• Tech Nation, supported by Founders Factory, has just launched the annual UK Founder Survey, which will directly inform The Tech Nation Report 2025 (and your chance to win £1000 in cash, an exclusive invitation to the Future Fifty Forum, and a bumper startup support package for your business). Find out more & complete the survey here

See you next month 👋

Interested in reading more of the same? Check out the Founders Factory blog and previous newsletters.