PreSeed Now

Smart startups know when to pivot, and today’s team made a big one: from vertical farms to waste processing. But they could now have a compelling offer in a growing market. Read about Future Greens in today's edition of PreSeed Now, as we speak with co-founder Gabrielė Barteškaitė about how they've been developing their product with a local brewery, with an aim to serve the broader food manufacturing business... 👉 https://lnkd.in/eDPRRxhM 👈

The race to serve increased demand for hydrogen as an energy source is a topic we’ve touched on in the past, and no doubt will again, as there’s a lot going on there. Today we speak to Clyde Hydrogen Systems CEO James Peck about the University of Glasgow spinout's new take on solving the problem. Read it in full here: 👉 https://lnkd.in/eQzb387F 👈

A name that has come up increasingly frequently here at PreSeed Now is Antler, an early-stage investor with a global presence that includes a UK operation. They’ve had a hand in a number of companies we’ve covered, so it seems like a good idea to find out about what they do and how they do it. We spoke to partner Adam French, and you can read our conversation below… 👉 https://lnkd.in/ecXVZcJg 👈

You might not think of heat as a waste product, but for people in the field of thermoelectrics, it’s often a wasted source of energy we could be putting to use to help meet our future needs. A commonly-shared statistic is that around two-thirds of the energy we produce is converted into waste heat that disappears into the atmosphere. Thermoelectric materials have the ability to capture this heat and generate electricity from it. It’s already a valuable market thanks to materials like bismuth telluride But as Mater-AI sees it, there’s still a lot of work to be done in this field. Read on to find out more...

Deep tech alert! Dig into 13 new deep tech startups you need to know about from across the UK. There's a lot of good stuff here, from this week's Conception X demo day:

When you launch a new small business, legal documentation is probably not one of the tasks you’re itching to prioritise. Contracts, customer licensing agreements, policy documents and the like are easily put off. And it’s easy to forget about them until the very moment you really need them… or desperately wish you’d already done them. Looking to help businesses deal with this problem is shizl, a startup building a subscription business around access to the right documents at the right time, filled in and ready to use. There are plenty of companies that will give you online access to legal documents, but they typically leave you to your own devices when it comes to figuring out exactly what you need, and when. Shizl wants to make things as easy as possible, with AI to help guide you to the right documents, and help filling them in. It also wants to be the place you keep all those documents once they’ve been signed. We spoke to CEO Mark Edgeworth to find out more...

There’s a lot of talk about AI taking human jobs, but it’s usually in the form of chatbots and other traditional software. Is there a role for ‘digital humans’ too? Sum Vivas Ltd believes there is. The startup is working on what CEO Rob Sims describes as “life-like, very friendly, familiar-looking avatars that can be presented across a range of media.” The sell to businesses is that they can offer a customer service ‘human’, displayed on a screen. Customers can then speak to it in natural language. The digital human can answer questions from its knowledge base and generative AI, and even ask customers questions to help businesses learn more about what they need and how they feel about products and services. We spoke to Rob for today's PreSeed Now: 👉 https://lnkd.in/e3GbSVrX 👈

As the UK moves towards banning the sale of petrol and diesel cars and vans by 2035 (just over 10 years from now!) the pressure on electric vehicle infrastructure is going to rise. Unlike a petrol pump that might be used for a couple of minutes at a time, EV fast chargers can be occupied for half an hour or more at a time, and the slower chargers (cheaper, and healthier for your car’s battery) can take hours to charge a significant amount. Home and business charging points are the solution, but not everyone has off-street parking. And even if they do, if they’re renting, their landlord might refuse their request to have a charging point installed. With electric vehicle infrastructure unlikely to keep up with demand, GoPlugable EV Charging is a startup that thinks it has a solution. Its peer-to-peer charger network allows individuals and businesses to rent out their chargers to other drivers. It’s an “Airbnb for EV chargers”, as co-founder and CEO Maebh Reynolds puts it. Read on to find out more... 👉 https://lnkd.in/eanEBWK4 👈

If you like to keep an eye on the world of startups I can't recommend PreSeed Now highly enough. Brilliant idea in this week's newsletter that solves a real and scalable problem with EVs. I couldn't even consider an EV as I work from home in an apartment. I have no way of charging an EV but I'm sure plenty of my neighbours and local businesses do. Being able to rent a space overnight or during the day to charge suddenly makes that Taycan accessible. 👀

Our Founding Partner, Francesca (Check) Warner sat down with Martin SFP Bryant and PreSeed Now for their popular investor interview series. Head to the comments to read the full interview Check shared: 👉 Her unusual background in VC and how she first learned about venture 👉 How she met Matt Penneycard in a previous firm 👉 Ada as a pre-seed fund, and some of its recent investments including PHINXT Robotics and Radiant Matter 👉 A core tension in VC: VC should be about risk-taking and finding outliers, but it is often akin to risk mitigation and pattern matching. 👉And her plans for Ada Ventures as it seeks to help VC break free of pattern-matching