These 10 startups are getting you most excited

Hello there,

We’ve got something big for you today.

It’s time for our quarterly look at the startups that are exciting PreSeed Now readers the most.

But that’s not all. We’re also launching the all-new version of our Startup Tracker, now as an easy-to-use web app!

More on all of that below.

– Martin

Track all the startups we’ve profiled in one handy web app

We’ve profiled almost 140 super-early-stage startups at PreSeed Now. And they’re all in our new web-based Startup Tracker.

We launched an MVP of the database in Notion last year and got feedback like:

• “It’s like Crunchbase, but better for pre-seed”

• “This tracker! OMFG! This is what I've been looking for for months.”

• “I highly recommend it. What a cool tool.”

Now thanks to a collaboration with The Tech Dept, the Startup Tracker is now available as an easy-to-browse web app.

It lets you:

• Easily browse a growing number of high-quality pre-seed UK startups

• See key information about their product, sector, funding, location, and more

• See the latest updates about their funding status and progress they’ve made since being featured in PreSeed Now

• Request an introduction to founders

Want access? All paid subscribers get access automatically. And to mark the launch, we’re offering 20% off all new subscriptions, meaning you can access the Startup Tracker (and the other benefits of a subscription) for £80 for your first year, or £8 per month.

👉 Just sign up using our special launch party discount 👈

**(Already a paying subscriber? Look out for an email that was sent to you on Tuesday with the subject line: ‘Activate your PreSeed Now Startup Tracker account’)**

PS: You can find us on Product Hunt too…

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

…based on reads and shares on PreSeed Now:

Every three months we take stock of what we’ve covered lately, to identify the 10 startups getting the most attention over the past 12 months on PreSeed Now.

If the taste of our readers is anything to go by, you should keep an eye on this lot:

Honu

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

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

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

Location: London

👉 Read more about Honu

Lark Optics

One problem holding back AR and VR is the nausea it can leave users with. Lark Optics has developed tech to avoid this problem in augmented reality glasses.

Rather than focus your eyes on a ‘virtual screen’, which can be the cause of sickness, this startup projects the AR image onto your retina. The AR is always in focus no matter what your eyes might do to adjust to the real world around you.

Lark Optics is working to a fabless model for producing the components they design, which they will then sell to companies that make AR headsets.

Location: Cambridge

👉 Read more about Lark Optics

CastRooms

The live music industry isn’t in a great state of health, and CastRooms wants to change that by reimagining livestreamed events.

The startup creates a live, on-screen human crowd by collecting together video feeds from viewers' device cameras. The idea is that the energy from the crowd feeds back to other crowd members and to the artists themselves.

It sounds simple, but a lot of thought has been put into making this a compelling experience that can exist alongside a live in-person crowd, or take place entirely online.

Unlike online business conferences, which have fallen out of favour, CastRooms could be onto something here in the entertainment space.

Location: Leeds

👉 Read more about CastRooms

Blend

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

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

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

Location: London

👉 Read more about Blend

Cambridge Future Tech

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

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

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

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

Location: Cambridge

👉 Read more about Cambridge Future Tech 

Arro

Craig Watson learned a lot about the pains of doing product development research at a meaningful scale while he worked at Spotify after they acquired his last startup.

Arro aims to cure those pains, using generative A.I. to replace human-led user interviews with automation.

“You can conduct research while you're sleeping,” Watson says. “Instead of having to set up five or 10 customer interviews, which would be standard enough, you could set it as 1,000, or 500, or 10,000 if you want to, and then that works in the background autonomously.”

Location: London

👉 Read more about Arro

Eilla AI

Eilla AI’s product is designed to assist the workflows of analysts and associates working in venture capital, M&A, and private equity.

It can do the heavy lifting in tasks like creating company profiles, competitor analysis, market mapping, and conducting due diligence.

But they don’t want to replace the entry-level rung of the industry entirely.

“Our goal is not to replace anyone, but to actually make much more efficient analysts and associates,” says CEO and co-founder Nikola Lazarov .

“As our clients say, the ‘monkey work’ is what they're doing a lot of the time. We want to help them with that so that they can focus more on thinking, which is why they are hired, right?”

Location: London

👉 Read more about Eilla AI

Klarytee

When you’re a business that handles a lot of data, keeping in line with data protection regulations–and stopping your information falling into unwelcome hands–can be a big job.

Klarytee’s product offers granular control over how different data can be handled, with policies that can be automatically applied to specific data types.

“We build security into the data itself,” explains founder Nithin Thomas. “We can free organisations to be able to leverage things like A.I. and SaaS, and cloud and all of these things without having to worry about security, because the security follows the data wherever it goes.”

Location: London

👉 Read more about Klarytee

Zally

Are passwords nearly dead? The rapid emergence of passkeys in your favourite apps is helping to send them towards the grave, but Zally has developed tech that it believes has advantages that set it apart from other approaches.

It uses the sensors in your device to determine whether it really is you trying to log in.

On a mobile device, Zally measures things like how you’re holding and moving the device, and how you interact with the screen. On desktop, it looks at things like how you move the mouse pointer and use the keyboard.

Zally is confident of the tech’s ability to tell people apart and is busy gearing up for launch.

Location: Manchester

👉 Read more about Zally

Aquascope

Led by a former Olympic rower, Aquascope knows a lot about water.

This startup provides “freshwater intelligence” to help companies that rely on water from rivers and lakes understand how healthy and plentiful the supply will be over time.

The startup’s tech provides ongoing monitoring of freshwater rivers for industry, utilities providers, policymakers, and beyond.

“It's a tool to help people get data and insights on water much cheaper and much faster than the traditional routes,” explains CEO Andrew Hodge. 

Location: Harwell, Oxfordshire

👉 Read more about Aquascope

Back on Tuesday

PreSeed Now profiles a different super-early-stage B2B or deep tech startup from across the UK every Tuesday and Thursday.

Don’t forget to grab our launch offer for the new PreSeed Now Startup Tracker while it lasts!

You also get access to all the full-length versions of the almost 140 (and counting!) early-stage startup profiles we’ve published since 2022.