If you’re relatively new to this newsletter, you should know that every three months we have a bit of fun and bring together our 10 most read and shared startup profiles from the past 12 months.

This time, the results are really encouraging for a couple reasons:

• Despite us not having changed the methodology for compiling the list, all but three of the top 10 are new entrants from the past three months. That points to rising engagement in our startup profiles ✊

• A women’s health startup tops the list, despite the notoriously challenging funding environment these startups face. I know a lot of our readers will be pleased to see this.

But before we get to that… Some ✨NEWS✨…

• Remember Fotenix, which we covered in 2023? The agtech startup has raised £2.1 million, consisting of a £1.6 million Innovate UK grant plus £500,000 equity investment led by River Capital, with participation from EHE Ventures.

• TheNextLevel, which was backed by DSW Ventures when we covered it in January, has had its pre-seed round bolstered to £500,000 with participation from GC Angels. Richard Hong of Pangaea Holdings also participated, and angel investor Elizabeth Gooch MBE joined as Chair.

• Our PreSeed Now Startup Tracker for Premium subscribers includes these funding updates, plus lots of other updates that never get mentioned in the newsletter and a way to explore all the currently active startups we’ve covered over the past three years. Give it a try!

– Martin

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

…based on reads and shares on PreSeed Now:

PeriPear

This startup is solving a serious problem very much deserving of attention, in the field of women’s health - a notoriously under-funded area. So, it was good to see PeriPear get such a good response from PreSeed Now readers.

Perineal tear injuries occur in as many as 90% of vaginal births, and nearly half of those will require surgical repair.

Midwife Nina van Schaick was frustrated with the lack of innovation in reducing these problems, which can result in expensive surgery and longer hospital stays for new parents, and complicate what should be a happy occasion.

Currently, a warm compress is best practice for reducing risk of tears, but van Schaick says that in many cases even that doesn’t happen. So PeriPear is developing a device designed to be used during childbirth that could significantly reduce the problem of perineal tear injuries.

Location: Oxford

👉 Read more about PeriPear

Voxelo

Voxelo is taking advantage of a recent innovation–the humorously named ‘gaussian splatting’–to provide easy, quick 3D object creation for the ecommerce market.

The startup’s software is designed to replace the need for expensive professional studio equipment or less effective tech such as the photogrammetry-based 3D mapping built into iPhones.

As an input, Voxelo just needs a normal video recorded via a smartphone or more high-end kit such as a DSLR camera. A user can simply walk around an object (or use a turntable if they have one), shooting a video of it as they go for two to three minutes.

They then upload their video to Voxelo, which separates the background from the object, and within an hour you get a fully-interactive 3D model you can tweak as needed before importing into ecommerce platform Shopify for use as an interactive product illustration.

Location: Manchester

👉 Read more about Voxelo

Qlarifi

Traditional credit bureaus aren’t well equipped to keep track of fast-paced, small value loans in the buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) space. This can be a problem to lenders and borrowers alike.

Enter Qlarifi, which describes itself as “the world's first buy-now-pay-later specific credit bureau.”

Qlarifi takes data from BNPL loan providers, with the aim of helping lenders of all kinds make more informed underwriting decisions. Meanwhile, regulators and the BNPL industry can get a more detailed understanding of what kinds of additional consumer protections they might need to put in place.

Location: London

👉 Read more about Qlarifi 

Veraty

“Two of the biggest blockers to startup and scale-up growth that we found is often the law; legal regulation, but also customer legals, legal teams and requirements, and then also data protection or cyber security,” says Veraty co-founder Jeremy Chan.

“So what we’ve tried to do is build in one platform, a legal AI that can handle all of those queries that startups and scale-ups might face, and unblock teams to help them grow quickly.”

In practice, this means a single AI interface to handle all the legal hurdles a startup might have. This includes everything from basic legal documents, to regulatory challenges, customer complaints, and closing B2B deals.

Eventually, the Veraty team want to replace lawyers entirely for these tasks, but they’re being careful about how they build the product and even provide customers access to human lawyers where needed.

Location: London

👉 Read more about Veraty

Enginuity

A stat commonly thrown around says that up to 95% of filed patents are never put to any use.

Enginuity wants to do something about that with its mission to “make the world’s IP searchable and actionable for innovators”.

You could just go to Google Patents to search up all of the patents featuring certain keywords you’re interested in, but the results are rudimentary and better suited to finding a patent you already know about than exploring innovations.

What Enginuity wants to do is help R&D departments, entrepreneurs, universities, and investors better understand what already exists in fields they work within, and help them build upon it.

Location: Distributed (founder based near Southampton)

👉 Read more about Enginuity

Iuvantium

It’s no secret that the risk that antibiotics is a serious risk to global health.

Iuvantium is a ‘precision immunology’ startup, using novel inorganic chemistry to develop vaccines as a replacement for antibiotics… and further down the line, potentially to treat viral pathogens and cancers, too.

The team’s work is based on research conducted by chief scientific officer Professor Jon Austyn at the University of Oxford into the ability for layered double hydroxides (LDH) to induce multiple types of immune response.

Iuvantium has now developed prototypes and has established research partnerships with universities and hospitals. Partnerships with pharma and biotech companies are next on the to-do list. In terms of commercialisation, the next step is animal studies to begin the road to deployment in humans.

Location: Oxford

👉 Read more about Iuvantium

VoxANN

Media production is a mass of niche specialisms. Some of them, like a video editor or a film director, you’ll be familiar with. But have you ever considered the needs of the hard-working people who take content and adapt it for different markets around the world?

Localisation is a big business, whether it’s focused on dubbing a popular children’s cartoon into almost every language on Earth, or making sure the pre-recorded in-flight announcements on a plane are accurate in all the languages an airline serves.

voxANN is a Manchester-based startup looking to serve this global market with a product that makes language service providers’ work cheaper, faster, and easier.

The startup is starting by offering its own software tools. The next step will be to create a marketplace-like platform that integrates with third-party apps and service providers to make the entire workflow seamless.

Location: Manchester

👉 Read more about VoxANN

Back next week

We’ve got a couple of great startups lined up to tell you about in depth next week. See you in your inbox on Tuesday and Thursday!