Anemo Labs lands £700K to give AI a sense of smell

London-based deeptech startup Anemo Labs has secured £700,000 in pre-seed funding to advance its technology for identifying disease-related compounds through smell. The round was spearheaded by Zinc and SFC Capital, with additional backing from Innovate UK. Founded in 2025 by Koye Sodipo, Anemo Labs is developing an electronic nose, or e-nose, that integrates sensor hardware with AI to detect and classify volatile organic compounds (VOCs) - the molecules that give rise to smell.

The company is initially applying the technology to healthcare, where alterations in the chemical compounds exuded by the body can reveal information linked to specific diseases. Anemo is engineering its system to scrutinize VOCs from urine, with the objective of facilitating non-invasive screening and potentially discerning signs of disease prior to symptom onset.

The company envisions expanding its diagnostic applications to conditions where alterations in smell can signify a clinical signal, encompassing urinary tract infections and specific cancers. Olfaction offers a non-invasive, passive, and continuous avenue to screen for numerous diseases. Our mission is to empower clinicians and individuals to detect disease even before symptoms manifest, Koye Sodipo, Anemo Labs' founder, declared.

Anemo's technology amalgamates sensor chemistry and electronics with machine-learning models honed to differentiate between diverse smells. The company's scientific team comprises researchers with PhDs in sensor chemistry and electronics, while clinical advisors are aiding its early diagnostic validation endeavors. A cornerstone of Anemo's approach is an in-house sampling platform engineered to gather and annotate up to 5,000 odors daily, furnishing training data for its models.

Preliminary testing utilizing the Sniffin Sticks olfactory testing protocol indicates that Anemo's models accurately classify scent categories 84.15 percent of the time across 12 categories. The funding will be earmarked to further refine Anemo's sensor chemistry, augment its smell data gathering and annotation capabilities, and persist in validating its olfactory diagnostics platform alongside clinical collaborators.