Heywa Labs secures £3.7m seed to build generative UX for interactive search
This article covers Heywa Labs, an AI startup, which has raised £3.7m in a seed funding round to build a generative UX interaction layer. The funding is intended to accelerate product and research work and expand the team as Heywa develops structured, visual and interactive search and discovery experiences for consumer mobile apps, affecting how users plan, travel, cook and undertake other everyday tasks.
Heywa Labs, an AI startup, has raised £3.7m in a seed funding round to build what it calls generative UX — a new interaction layer intended to let AI-powered search and discovery generate fast, visual and interactive experiences instead of lists of links or blocks of text. The funding will be used to speed product and research work, grow engineering, design and growth teams, and push the product into more markets.
Why it matters
Generative AI has transformed model capabilities, but many interfaces still return walls of text or ranked links. Heywa Labs is targeting that usability gap by creating dynamic, structured experiences that adapt as users interact, aiming to support exploration, comparison and decision-making rather than linear consumption.
If it works, the shift would affect how people use AI for everyday tasks on mobile — from planning meals to booking travel — where speed, clarity and interactive guidance matter. The company already says its first product is live on the App Store in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada, which gives it an early consumer testbed for the idea.
Inside the product
Heywa describes Generative UX, or GenUX, as a layer sitting above models and data but below applications. Rather than returning paragraphs or links, the product generates structured, visual stories composed of tappable cards that change as users interact.
Heywa’s consumer app, Heywa, targets use cases such as cooking, DIY, travel, fitness and personal growth. The team emphasises real-time adaptability: as user intent shifts, the interface reconfigures to surface the most relevant tools and content for exploration and comparison.
The startup is based in London and was founded by Milena Nikolic. The founding team includes people who previously held senior product and engineering roles at Google, Snap and Trainline, with experience in search, discovery, personalisation and large-scale consumer platforms. The company says it has a team of ten and plans to expand across engineering, design and growth.
Who are the investors?
The round was led by Cherry Ventures, with participation from Openseed, Pareto, Plug & Play, Ventures Together and a group of angel investors. The capital is earmarked to accelerate product development and research, expand the team and support international expansion.
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Founder perspective
In the announcement, Milena Nikolic, Founder & CEO at Heywa Labs, said:
People want information that is structured, visual, and interactive - yet AI interfaces went straight back to walls of text, at the cost of human experience. The next decade won't be won by smarter models alone, but by the companies that define how intelligence shows up for humans. Generative UX restores clarity, speed, and delight, especially on mobile where most of life now happens. We’re a team of ten building something users say feels more engaging and more delightful than products built by tens of thousands of engineers elsewhere. That’s only possible because we’ve built GenUX from first principles - a system that can generate, adapt, and maintain interactive experiences dynamically.
The bigger picture
Heywa’s pitch sits at the intersection of two active trends: the rise of generative AI models and a renewed focus on how those models are delivered to end users. The company’s London base and early roll-out in English-speaking markets follow a pattern of UK startups testing consumer-first AI interfaces abroad before broader European expansion.
The deal also signals continued interest from AI investors in companies tackling interface and product problems rather than model-level improvements alone. For the UK and Europe, the story is another example of founders combining product design expertise with model-led innovation to try to create differentiable user experiences.
This financing will let Heywa push its experiments in generative UX further; whether that leads to a new mainstream interaction model for search and discovery remains to be seen, but it underscores a broader push among European startups to rethink how AI is embedded in everyday apps.
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