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

Anemo Labs has raised £700,000 in pre-seed funding to build software and hardware that can pick up disease-related compounds by smell. The London deeptech startup says the round was led by Zinc and SFC Capital, with support from Innovate UK.

Founded in 2025 by Koye Sodipo, the company is working on an electronic nose, or e-nose, that combines sensor hardware with AI models. The idea is to detect and classify volatile organic compounds, the VOCs that make up smell. Anemo is starting in healthcare, where changes in the body’s chemical output can reveal useful clinical signals.

Its first focus is urine. The company wants to analyse VOCs from urine to support non-invasive screening and, in some cases, spot signs of disease before symptoms appear. Longer term, it is looking at diagnostic uses for conditions including urinary tract infections and certain cancers, where smell-related changes can be clinically meaningful.

This is not just a sensor project dressed up with machine learning. Anemo says it has an in-house sampling platform built to collect and label up to 5,000 smells a day, feeding training data into its models. Its team includes researchers with PhDs in sensor chemistry and electronics, while clinical advisers are helping with early validation work.

The company says early testing with the Sniffin' Sticks olfactory testing protocol produced 84.15 per cent correct classification across 12 scent categories. The new funding will go into sensor chemistry, smell data collection and labelling, and continued validation of the diagnostics platform with clinical partners.