We’ve raised £700K to digitise smell

Today we're sharing that Anemo Labs has raised £700,000 in pre-seed funding to build an AI-powered electronic nose. The round was led by Zinc and SFC Capital, with support from a network of angels and a grant from Innovate UK.

The problem we set out to solve

Smell is the last major human sense that hasn't been digitised.

Vision became data through cameras. Sound became data through microphones. Smell has stayed locked out because it's fundamentally different. It isn't a mix of three primary colours, and it isn't one continuous frequency signal. It's hundreds of signals from hundreds of different molecules at once.

That complexity is exactly why humans can't decode it — and exactly the kind of problem AI is good at, given standardised hardware and enough data.

We already know what's possible. Dogs can be trained in a matter of months to detect certain diseases by scent alone, often much earlier than our standard diagnostic tests. The problem is that you can't copy-paste a dog. When smell is digitised, we believe it will do to diagnostics what the vaccine has done for disease prevention: catch the thing before it becomes the thing.

Olfaction offers a non-invasive, passive and continuous medium to screen for disease. Our mission is to enable clinicians and individuals to catch disease even before symptoms appear.

What we've spent the last year building

A custom robotic sampling platform. It currently labels over 5,000 smell samples a day — still below the scale of olfactory training data needed long-term, but far beyond what manual methods can produce.

An AI training pipeline that generalises. Not one that memorises. In early testing using the Sniffin' Sticks protocol, a widely used olfactory test, our models classified scent category correctly 84.15% of the time across a dozen categories. That's one point on a curve we intend to climb fast.

Custom sensor membranes and patent-pending measurement electronics. None of the above matters without the ability to capture the raw olfactory signal in the first place.

What our investors say

"Most disease is caught late because the signals arrive before the symptoms do. Anemo is building the hardware and the data pipeline that makes sensing signals readable, non-invasively, at a cost that works at scale. Their platform generates labelled smell data and the compounding dataset that turns a sensor into a clinical diagnostic. We backed Koye and the Anemo team at inception, and are excited to continue the partnership for the next step."

Natalie Pankova, Partner, Health & Life Sciences, Zinc VC

"We're excited to back Koye and the Anemo Labs team on their mission to digitise smell. Turning smell into data that clinicians can act on is a genuinely new kind of diagnostic tool and we're glad to help them scale the labs behind it."

Ed Stevenson, Fund Principal, SFC Capital

What's next

The round goes into three things: advancing our core sensor chemistry, scaling the smell data labelling pipeline, and continuing validation with clinical partners.

We're starting in healthcare, where the need for earlier, non-invasive detection is most urgent. But digitising smell opens up a new layer of perception, with applications far beyond any single product.