Anemo Labs raises £700k led by Zinc and SFC Capital
This article covers Anemo Labs, a London deep tech biotech startup, raising £700k in a pre-seed funding round led by Zinc and SFC Capital with additional support from Innovate UK. The funding will support development of its electronic nose hardware and associated AI models aimed at detecting disease-related volatile organic compounds in urine, an early-stage effort to advance non-invasive diagnostics.
Anemo Labs, a London deep tech biotech startup, has raised £700,000 in a pre-seed funding round led by Zinc and SFC Capital, with additional support from Innovate UK. The money will fund development of the company’s electronic nose hardware and its AI models aimed at detecting disease-related volatile organic compounds from urine — an early-stage attempt to translate smell into clinical data.
Why it matters
Early, non-invasive diagnostics are a major focus for biotech investors because they can shift care towards prevention and earlier intervention. Anemo’s approach targets volatile organic compounds, molecules that change with some diseases and can be sampled without invasive procedures. If its e-nose and models can reliably flag conditions such as urinary tract infections or certain cancers, the technology could add a new, continuous layer of screening in clinical pathways.
Inside the product
Anemo combines bespoke sensor hardware with machine learning to identify and classify scent signatures. The company says its devices sample urine and detect VOCs that are then interpreted by AI models. A central piece of the operation is an in-house sampling platform that can collect and label up to 5,000 smell samples a day, intended to accelerate the training data pipeline.
In early testing using the Sniffin' Sticks protocol, a standard olfactory assessment, Anemo reports its models categorised scent types correctly 84.15% of the time across about a dozen categories. The current focus is on improving sensor chemistry, expanding the labelled dataset and continuing validation with clinical partners to prove diagnostic performance at scale.
Who are the investors?
The round was led by Zinc and SFC Capital, with additional support from Innovate UK. The announcement positions the funding as seed capital to progress core sensor chemistry, scale the data labelling pipeline and continue clinical validation.
In the announcement, Ed Stevenson, Investor at SFC Capital, said:
We're excited to back Koye and the Anemo Labs team on their mission to digitise smell. Turning smell into data that clinicians can act on is a genuinely new kind of diagnostic tool and we're glad to help them scale the labs behind it.
Innovate UK’s involvement highlights public-sector interest in early-stage diagnostic technologies, while the presence of Zinc and SFC signals private investor confidence in hardware-plus-AI approaches to clinical problems.
If you're researching potential backers in this space:
- Explore our list of biotech venture capital firms in the UK
- Browse our directory of biotech angel investors in the UK
Founder perspective
Anemo was founded in 2025 by Koye Sodipo. The founding team includes scientists with PhDs in sensor chemistry and electronics, and a network of clinical advisors guiding early validation work. In the announcement, Koye Sodipo, Founder at Anemo Labs, said:
Olfaction provides a non-invasive, passive and continuous medium to screen for a number of diseases. Our mission is to enable clinicians and individuals catch disease even before symptoms appear.
The emphasis is on building both the physical lab capability to generate labelled smell data and the clinical evidence needed to move from a lab demonstration to regulated diagnostic use.
The bigger picture
The deal reflects growing interest from UK biotech investors in early diagnostics that combine hardware and AI. Non-invasive sensing tools face clear technical and regulatory hurdles: sensors must be sensitive and reproducible, datasets must be large and well labelled, and clinical validation must demonstrate clear benefit over existing tests. Public backing from Innovate UK can help bridge early validation work, while private investors provide capital for scaling lab and engineering efforts.
Anemo’s progress will be worth watching for anyone tracking the translation of novel sensing modalities into clinical practice across the UK and Europe, where early detection remains a priority for health systems and investors alike.
They've invested in Anemo Labs
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