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It’s that time again… once a quarter we take a step back and look at which startups we’ve covered over the past year have made the most impact with you, the readers.

To do this we look at data such as article reads and shares, to figure out what’s hot over a rolling 12-month period.

So, read on to find out what’s made the list this time… including a surprisingly swift appearance from one startup!

– Martin

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

…based on reads and shares on PreSeed Now:

Ask Silver

The internet is a minefield of scams. Your phone’s SMS inbox might well be the same. Heck, scams can even come through your letterbox.

Ask Silver is a startup with the aim of becoming a kind of firewall for scams. While pitched as a solution for the elderly, it could be useful for anyone who just wants a quick sense-check on something they’ve received and a helping hand staying safe.

The longer-term goal is to build a suite of tools to block scams across channels such as messages, emails, phone calls, or web browsing. The startup has begun with an MVP in the form of a WhatsApp chatbot that allows anyone to check if something they’ve received is a scam.

Location: London

👉 Read more about Ask Silver

NeuWave Technologies

Conditions at sea can have a serious financial impact. Whether you operate a shipping company or are building a wind farm, knowing exactly when it’s safe to go to work is critical for not wasting time and money.

Weather is an obvious factor to consider, but the height of the waves at sea also matters a lot.

“Wave heights affect how safe it is for a vessel to go out and carry out its operations,” says Jana Stella, founder of NeuWave Technologies, a startup focused on providing more accurate predictions of wave heights than are available today.

While its tech could potentially be useful for any business operating at sea, the startup is beginning with a focus on supporting the renewable energy industry, specifically the construction and operation of offshore wind farms.

Location: Manchester

👉 Read more about NeuWave Technologies

Leaf AI

Leaf AI’s Lola Cares product is designed to tackle the problem of social isolation.

Far from being just ‘feeling a bit sad on your own’, loneliness was last year declared a “global public health concern” by the World Health Organization, which described it as being as bad for people’s health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

To tackle this, Lola Cares is what the startup describes as “a platform to build a community around each and every loved one that needs some form of care, whether they've got an acquired brain injury, whether they've got dementia, whether they're in OAP in a home, or an OAP who need support in their own home.”

The platform consists of three apps: Lola for Carers, Lola for Families, and Lola Cares.

Location: Liverpool

👉 Read more about Leaf AI

Clio

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

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

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

Location: Manchester

👉 Read more about Clio (they also gave us an update on their progress recently)

SAIF Systems

SAIF Systems became our first foray into the world of defence tech when we profiled them back in October.

Autonomous systems are likely to be an increasingly important part of everyday life in the future. 

Whether it’s self-driving cars on the roads, delivery drones in the sky, or robots in homes and workplaces, we’ll be seeing more machines left to their own devices to complete tasks thanks to advances in AI.

But how do we make sure they stay safe and on-task? That’s where a company like SAIF Systems comes in.

Imagine you’ve programmed a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle, AKA a drone) to fly via a specific route. But then something happens, like the weather changes, or the onboard computer gets confused, or its data link is lost. SAIF runs code on the UAV that keeps track of the situation and helps keep the flight on track and on mission.

Location: Oxford

👉 Read more about SAIF Systems

Fireflai

Just as the saying goes that ‘a tidy home equals a tidy mind’, tidy data can very much equal a tidy business.

This is the problem Fireflai has set out to fix. It uses a combination of machine learning and data science, combined with a sprinkling of generative AI over the top, to clean up millions of lines of data for manufacturing, distribution and retail businesses.

CEO and co-founder Thomas Gardner previously founded a business automation consultancy called Robiquity in 2016. He exited the company in 2022, after private equity firm Growth Capital Partners took a stake in it.

Location: Manchester

👉 Read more about Fireflai

MyOpNotes

It’s no secret that the UK healthcare system is struggling. People living longer, combined with years of funding cuts, have left the NHS with an uncertain future.

But part of the problem for individual healthcare trusts, as Grant Nolan, co-founder and CEO of MyOpNotes sees it, is that they’re not being paid properly for the work they do.

Nolan explains that the core of the problem is that surgeons write notes that are useful to themselves, which then have to be parsed by medical billers, and the two parties are looking for completely different things from the notes.

“No-one's really looking at how we can match up and marry up that gap and align the two, build a bridge. And really that's where MyOpNotes comes in.”

This startup captures higher quality data from medical notes to ensure hospitals get paid correctly, and potentially more quickly, for their work

Location: Distributed across Manchester, Oxford, Nottingham, and Leeds

👉 Read more about MyOpNotes

Shizl

When you launch a new small business, legal documentation is probably not one of the tasks you’re itching to prioritise.

Contracts, customer licensing agreements, policy documents and the like are easily put off. And it’s easy to forget about them until the very moment you really need them… or desperately wish you’d already done them.

Looking to help businesses deal with this problem is Shizl, a startup building a subscription business around access to the right documents at the right time, filled in and ready to use.

Location: Manchester

👉 Read more about Shizl

Ureaka

Okay, this is a first. A startup doesn’t usually make it onto one of these lists a couple of days after they were first featured in PreSeed Now, but that’s what’s happened here!

Concrete is one of the (literal) building blocks of the modern world, and yet it comes with environmental impacts that can be difficult to avoid.

But what if at least some of the negative impact could be removed by creating concrete in a new way? That’s what Scottish startup Ureaka is working on with its simple-sounding pitch: “We turn CO2 into concrete.”

“Ureaka makes carbon-negative bio-concrete,” explains founder Philip Salter. CO2 is stored inside the concrete as part of the production process.  

“We remove the inherently high carbon footprint of concrete, and we're also storing carbon in it.”

Location: Glasgow

👉 Read more about Ureaka

Paloma Health

It’s no secret that the NHS has been struggling for years to balance demand for its services with incredibly tight budgets. 

Typically, the solutions proposed are ‘give the NHS more money’, ‘cut services’ or ‘increase efficiency’. But what if it might be more effective to entirely rethink how services are delivered from the ground up?

That’s the goal of Paloma Health, a London-based startup that believes “process innovation” is the key to improving outcomes for patients.

“Almost every single industry that you've seen innovation in in the last 10 to 15 years has seen process innovation. Businesses like Monzo or Treatwell don't do anything new. They just do what currently happens, much, much better, and that hasn't happened in healthcare,” says co-founder Mark Jenkins.

Location: London

👉 Read more about Paloma Health

Back next week

We’ll have a fresh startup profile for you on Tuesday, direct to your inbox.