Anemo Labs, a London deep tech startup digitising the sense of smell, has raised £700,000 in a pre-seed round led by Zinc and SFC Capital, with additional support from Innovate UK.
Founded in 2025 by Koye Sodipo, Anemo is developing electronic nose (e-nose) hardware paired with AI models that detect and classify disease-related volatile organic compounds (VOCs), the molecules responsible for smell, from urine. Just as cameras digitised sight and microphones digitised sound, the e-nose sniffs a sample and translates what it detects into data a computer can read and interpret. Because certain diseases change the chemical makeup of what the body naturally emits, a simple, non-invasive smell test could one day flag warning signs before a person even feels sick. The founding belief is that smell is the last major human sense yet to be digitised, and that digitising it opens up a new layer of perception with applications far beyond any single product category. Healthcare comes first, where the need for early disease detection is most critical, with a longer-term ambition spanning other conditions where smell carries a clinical signal, including UTIs and certain cancers.
The founding team combines deep technical expertise with clinical grounding. Its core scientists hold PhDs in sensor chemistry and electronics, the disciplines underpinning the e-nose hardware, while a network of clinical advisors helps guide early diagnostic validation work.
Central to the approach is an in-house sampling platform that can sample and label up to 5,000 smells a day, a scale of olfactory training data that is difficult to replicate with manual methods. In early testing using the Sniffin' Sticks protocol, a widely used olfactory test, Anemo's models classified scent category correctly 84.15% of the time across a dozen categories.
The round will be used to progress Anemo's core sensor chemistry, scale its smell data labelling pipeline and continue validation with clinical partners for its olfactory diagnostics platform.
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.
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.
