£700k · Pre-Seed · AI · London, UK
Anemo Labs, a London-based company developing an AI-powered electronic nose, has raised £700k in pre-seed funding. Zinc and SFC Capital led the round, with support from angel investors and an Innovate UK grant.
The company is building a sensor platform that converts complex smell signatures into data that machine-learning models can classify. Its custom membranes and measurement electronics detect patterns across volatile organic compounds, while a robotic sampling system produces labelled data for model training. Anemo is starting in healthcare, where it aims to screen and monitor disease-related biomarkers in urine, sweat and other bodily fluids without invasive sampling.
Anemo says its robotic platform now labels more than 5,000 smell samples a day. In early internal testing using the Sniffin' Sticks protocol, its models classified scent category correctly 84.15% of the time across 12 categories. That result measures general scent classification, not disease detection or clinical accuracy. The funding will go toward sensor chemistry, a larger smell-data pipeline and continued validation with clinical partners.
The dataset and the sensor have to improve together
The commercial challenge is not simply training a stronger model. Smell is produced by mixtures of many molecules, so the raw signal depends on selective sensor materials, consistent sample handling and enough labelled examples to separate useful patterns from noise. Anemo's patent work describes tests across more than 170 molecularly imprinted polymer formulations, while its company timeline says it completed a 48-channel olfactory chip in January 2026. Improving the hardware can create cleaner training data; more data can then reveal where the sensor array needs to become more selective.
That loop could become defensible if Anemo can standardise collection and build a dataset competitors cannot easily reproduce. It also creates a demanding execution sequence. Early scent-category performance does not establish that a device can distinguish a disease biomarker across varied patients, medications and environments. Clinical partners must help define cohorts and reference tests, and the system will need repeatable results before it can support regulated decisions.
Zinc's investment thesis identifies prostate cancer as the first clinical focus and says external trials are intended to test repeatability and real-world performance. The pre-seed round gives Anemo room to strengthen the sensing and data infrastructure behind that work. Its next meaningful milestone is not another laboratory classification score, but evidence that the full system can detect a clinically relevant signal reliably outside the training setup.
