We’re halfway through September and this week’s crowdfunding roundup covers a lot of ground, from deeply technical to refreshingly simple. One has created plant-based biodegradable polymers in pellet form to replace fossil-derived plastics at industrial scale.

Another is a fintech app reimagining how rent payments work, while a third is an early-stage idea to help people to remember to take their medicine on time – simple, but such a necessity. These startups are all taking on very different challenges, but all inviting the crowd to back what comes next.

So, who are the startups crowdfunding this week? Here they are.

1. Chestnut Biopolymers

How much are they raising: N/A

Website: www.chestnut.bio

SEIS/EIS? EIS pending.

About: Chestnut Biopolymers develops plant-based, biodegradable biopolymers in pellet form as a direct replacement for fossil-derived plastics that dominate manufacturing today.

Plastics manufacturing runs on pellets and any alternative that wants to be successful needs to fit into that existing infrastructure. Chestnut’s biopolymers are a plant-based, biodegradable option that can be used with current equipment and processes. It’s a practical, industrial-scale answer to plastic pollution that meets the sector where it is right now – one that’s under immense regulatory and consumer pressure to move away from fossil-derived materials.

Where to invest: Crowdcube

2. Rentd

How much are they raising: N/A

Website: www.rentd.co.uk

SEIS/EIS? N/A

About: Rentd is a fintech app reimagining rent payments, turning one of the biggest monthly outgoings most people have into something that actually pays them back.

Rent is usually the enormous, unavoidable sum that leaves the account every month and gives absolutely nothing back to the person paying it (a roof over their head, yes, but not much else). With Rentd, renters can earn points on their rent and everyday spending for redeemable rewards with actual value. It’s some clever financial thinking in a market that often ignores renters in favour of homeowners and credit-card holders.

Where to invest: Crowdcube

3. Foudys

How much are they raising: N/A

Website: www.foudys.com

SEIS/EIS? Yes, SEIS & EIS

About: Foudys is a dedicated women’s football retailer and kit provider built specifically for fans, players and clubs in a corner of the game that mainstream retail has often overlooked.

Women’s football is growing rapidly but there isn’t much retail infrastructure supporting it. Fans have often struggled to find shirts they want and clubs haven’t always had a natural home for their merchandise. Foudys is changing that from the ground up, operating both online and through a physical flagship store in Manchester.

Where to invest: Crowdcube

4. DoseSync

How much are they raising: £20,000

Website: N/A

SEIS/EIS? N/A

About: DoseSync is an early-stage idea to make medication routines easier for people who forget doses or don’t believe in traditional pill organisers.

Forgetting to take medication is actually one of the most common and consequential problems in healthcare, affecting everything from short-term recovery to long-term condition management. Plastic organisers still work fine for some, but for others they’re inconvenient or just easily ignored. DoseSync is setting out to build something better, focused on the people existing solutions don’t currently serve well.

Where to invest: Crowdfunder

5. EasyCompanion

How much are they raising: £5,000

Website: N/A

SEIS/EIS? N/A

About: EasyCompanion helps older adults to navigate online tasks safely and confidently, making the digital world far less stressful to move around in.

For most of these adults, the internet is something they would like to use more but it’s simultaneously an overwhelming environment with confusing interfaces, unfamiliar terminology and real safety concerns. EasyCompanion is built around that gap, offering a way to get things done online without the anxiety that so often comes with it.

Where to invest: Crowdfunder

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Website:

Tell Us About Quibim

Quibim is a medical imaging AI company focused on unlocking the full potential of imaging data to improve patient outcomes. Founded with the ambition of turning imaging into a catalyst for precision medicine, the company develops advanced algorithms that convert MRI, CT and PET scans into quantitative insights, enabling clinicians to make faster, more informed decisions.Ìý

Its products are designed to fit directly into existing healthcare workflows, allowing hospitals and clinicians to adopt the technology without changing how they work. These tools support the detection and monitoring of diseases such as cancer and neurodegenerative conditions, while also helping pharmaceutical companies run more efficient clinical trials.Ìý

Today, Quibim operates globally with offices across Europe and the US, and its technology is already being deployed in real clinical environments, supporting doctors and researchers with more data-driven and consistent insights.

Want to be featured as 91̽»¨â€™s Startup of the Week? Find out more about this weekly feature, and how to get involved,Ìýhere.

What Makes Quibim Unique?

Quibim stands out for its focus on transforming standard medical images into measurable, predictive biomarkers that can be applied across both clinical care and drug development.Ìý

Unlike many AI solutions that sit alongside existing workflows, Quibim’s tools are designed to integrate directly into hospital systems, enabling adoption at scale without disruption.Ìý

The company also operates at the intersection of healthcare and life sciences, supporting not only clinicians but also pharmaceutical companies by improving patient stratification and clinical trial outcomes through imaging-driven insights.

Is There A Market For Quibim?

Yes, and it is growing rapidly. Healthcare systems globally are under increasing pressure from rising imaging volumes, workforce shortages and the need for earlier, more accurate diagnoses.Ìý

At the same time, pharmaceutical companies are investing heavily in tools that can improve the efficiency and success rates of clinical trials. Quibim’s technology addresses both challenges by enabling more precise analysis of imaging data and better patient selection.Ìý

The company’s presence across more than 230 sites worldwide, alongside partnerships with healthcare providers and life sciences organisations, further demonstrates strong demand for its solutions.

Where Can We Find Quibim?

Quibim operates internationally, with offices in the United States, the United Kingdom and across Spain.Ìý

Its technology is used by hospitals, research centres and pharmaceutical companies worldwide. More information can be found on its website: AI for Medical Imaging – Radiomics & Biomarkers – Quibim.

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Harvard’s alumni have gone on to build businesses in just about every industry, spanning finance, healthcare, retail, media and technology. Some have become household names while others are working on problems that most people don’t stop to think about.

And to be honest, that’s what makes Harvard so interesting from a startup perspective. The university isn’t just producing graduates who will go on to work for big corporations. Instead, it’s a place where people meet co-founders, test ideas, find funding and, in some cases, leave with a company already in the works.

Harvard Has A Knack For Producing Successful Founders, Why Is That The Case?

There’s no single Harvard-to-startup pipeline, and the founders who have come out of the university are a pretty good illustration of that. Some built their companies while they were still students and others came to entrepreneurship after years in academia or another career altogether.

The range is arguably one of the most intriguing things about the startup ecosystem at Harvard. The university’s Innovation Labs brings together students and alumni from across multiple disciplines while the President’s Innovation Challenge provides funding and support for founders trying to make something of their ideas.

Then there’s the location. The institution’s proximity to Boston and Cambridge’s biotech and technology hubs puts founders within easy reach of research institutions and investors. Kendall Square, in particular, has become one of the world’s biggest life sciences clusters, giving Harvard’s researchers and entrepreneurs a fairly unique environment in which to develop their vision. You could go from researching a problem to talking to someone who might fund it without travelling very far.

The common thread isn’t really the Harvard degree itself. It’s the combination of intelligent individuals, access to research, money, mentors and a culture where starting something of your own is treated as a perfectly reasonable next move.

10 Successful Harvard Alumni That Founded Startups

We’ve put together a list of ten founders and companies with Harvard connections, spanning some of the university’s biggest success stories as well as younger startups still finding their feet. The problems that they’re tackling are pretty varied too, from healthcare and breast cancer detection to drone recovery and even healthcare delivered through WhatsApp.

1. Michael Bloomberg, Founder & CEO of Bloomberg LP

Michael Bloomberg graduated from Harvard Business School in 1966 with an MBA, joined Salomon Brothers and spent the next fifteen years running the firm’s equity trading and information systems. After he was pushed out in 1981, he built a machine to replace his former employer’s advantage.

Bloomberg LP launched that same year with the Bloomberg Terminal and has since become the most important piece of infrastructure in global finance.

The company’s revenue runs well over $13 billion a year and Bloomberg himself served three terms as Mayor of New York. Today, he’s still one of the most-cited case studies at his old business school.

2. Philippe Rival, Co-founder & CEO of Enlaye

Philippe Rival is a French-Australian civil engineer who went to Harvard Business School to pick ip the management side of things. He partnered with an old high school friend to start Enlaye out of the Harvard i-Lab. The product is an AI-native risk management platform for the construction industry.

It uses graph neural networks to map contracts, schedules, documents and relationships, then flags potential problems before they become costly disputes.

Enlaye raised $5 million earlier this year and won $25,000 at the 2026 Harvard President’s Innovation Challenge.

3. Michael Brunman, Co-founder & CEO of Clerx AI

Michael Brunman took an unusually winding route to founder. He served as a software engineer in the Israel Defence Forces’ cyber directorate, practiced commercial litigation and IP law, went to PayPal as a product manager and then Harvard Business School for his MBA.

Afterwards, he built Clerx AI, an AI-powered intake and reception platform designed specifically for law firms, handling calls, chats and texts 24/7. It’s bootstrapped with a small team, but is growing through direct partnerships with legal software vendors.

4. Cathy Huyghe, Co-founder of Enolytics

Cathy Huyghe is a two-time Harvard graduate with a Master’s degrees in both Design and Journalism. She spent decades covering the wine industry for Forbes, The Atlantic, The Washington Post and Harvard Business Review.

In 2016, she launched Enolytics with her husband to bring data analytics to a $970 billion industry that had been running largely on intuition. Enolytics uses natural language processing to analyse what consumers actually say about wine in five languages, then feeds that back to wineries to shape everything from wine club retention to distribution decisions.

The company was later a featured case study at Harvard and Huyghe was named one of the wine industry’s ten Most Inspiring People in 2021.

5. Aditya Ranganathan, Co-founder & CTO at Avix Medical

Aditya holds his Master’s and PhD from Harvard, both from the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, where he also worked as a lead teaching fellow developing curriculum for the introductory data science and mathematical modelling courses.

He serves as the Chief Technology Officer at Avix Medical, whose flagship product, Catalina, is a portable handheld device designed to deliver early breast cancer detection in about 60 seconds. It uses a non-invasive sensor with the company’s patented TIS technology to characterise breast lesions in real time.

Avix took the top prize at the 2026 Harvard Alumni Entrepreneurs Demo Day and is heading to the Startup World Cup Grand Finale in San Francisco later this year.

6. Dr. Moka Lantum, Co-founder & CEO of CheckUps COVA

Dr. Moka Lantum is a Cameroon-born physician and pharmacologist with a PhD from Rochester and an MHCM from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. In 2020, he was named an Expert-in-Residence at the Harvard i-Lab.

In most of East Africa, if someone needs healthcare and they don’t have cash to pay for it upfront, they either skip it, sell an asset or turn to a moneylender. CheckUps COVA delivers healthcare and medical microcredit through WhatsApp, letting patients access nurse dispatch, telemedicine, pharmacy and diagnostics on demand and pay it back over time.

It’s a rare startup that has actually been built for the infrastructure it operates in.

7. Piers MacNaughton, ScD, Co-founder & CEO of SeeAir

Piers MacNaughton is a Harvard-trained public-health researcher whose ScD from the Chan School focused on green buildings, air quality and cognitive function. He went on to lead health strategy at View Inc. and co-authored some of the most-cited studies on how office environments affect thinking.

SeeAir is an AI-powered residential decarbonisation platform that helps homeowners to navigate the maze of energy programmes, incentives and contractor networks needed to get their homes off relying on fossil fuels.

It launched through the Harvard i-Lab’s Launch Lab X programme in 2025 and is now expanding from Massachusetts into New York.

8. Akonkwa Mubagwa, Co-founder & CEO of Winko Solar

Akonkwa Mubagwa’s route to Winko began with a childhood memory of burglars breaking into his family home in Zimbabwe during a power outage. He went on to study at Berkeley Haas before heading to the Harvard Kennedy School for a mid-career MPA.

Winko builds resilient solar power systems for hospitals across Africa, keeping oxygen concentrators, vaccine cold chains and lifesaving equipment running through the routine grid outages that plague much of the continent’s healthcare infrastructure.

The company won $75,000 at the 2026 Harvard President’s Innovation Challenge and Mubagwa is a 2025 Echoing Green Fellow.

9. Jeffrey McChesney, Founder & CEO of Target Arm Inc.

Jeffrey McChesney has quite a history. USAF Academy graduate, TopGun (Fighter Weapons School) alumnus, Columbia grad and Harvard National Security Fellow. It’s the kind of CV that suggests deep tech hardware was somewhere in his future.

Target Arm builds Tular, a patented platform that allows rotary and fixed-wing drones to launch and land from moving vehicles, even in windy conditions. It has obvious commercial use cases like last-mile delivery and mobile sorting, as well as obvious defence ones.

The company won the Harvard Alumni Entrepreneurs Startup World Cup in 2025.

10. Scott Cook, Founder of Intuit

Scott Cook got his MBA from Harvard Business School in 1976 after working at Procter & Gamble for some time. In 1983, he co-founded Intuit with Stanford-trained programmer Tom Proulx. Their first product was Quicken, personal finance software that undercut every competitor by actually being usable. TurboTax and QuickBooks followed.

Intuit went public in 1993 and is now worth well over $175 billion, sitting behind an enormous amount of American small business accounting and tax filing.

Cook has stayed close to the business as founder and chairman of the executive committee.

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The good news is that Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is one of the technologies that makes international business – and calling – less of a headache than it used to be. At first glance, it may sound like some complicated terminology, but it’s just a bit of a fancy way of saying that calls travel over the internet, a replacement for copper wiring phone systems.

If you’ve ever had a Zoom call for a meeting or phoned your mum on WhatsApp, you’ve used VoIP, even if you didn’t realise it. The technology itself has been around since the late 90’s (yes, that was some time ago as much as we’d all like to think otherwise) but its grown in popularity in recent years.

There’s a couple of reasons for that. Firstly, broadband has finally caught up. Secondly, remote work has forced a solution to the costly challenge of global collaboration. And lastly, businesses have come to the realisation that they were paying a premium for old infrastructure that their competitors left behind a long time ago.

The global VoIP market is expected to hit $180.5 billion this year, and Gartner reckons that VoIP will handle up to 90% of all business communication by 2030. Meanwhile, 77% of enterprises already consider it as the central system for operating their phones. It went from being a futuristic concept to what business communication looks like now.

Why Your Phone Bill Doesn’t Have To Cost The Earth For International Calling

Businesses that are swapping their legacy landlines for VoIP can typically shave between 30% and 50% off their communication costs. If you’re currently paying £1,500 a month in phone and line rental, you’re potentially looking at £5,400 to £9,000 back in your pocket. What business owner would say no to that?

International calling is where it gets really daft. Traditional carriers are continuing with billing international calls per minute as if the internet doesn’t exist. Calling a supplier in Vietnam on a standard UK line would cost you a truly eye-watering amount. And if you have to do it regularly, it just stops making financial sense altogether.

Fortunately, most VoIP providers include unlimited calls to a list of countries as standard. Everything else is pence rather than pounds. If you’ve recently winced at your international phone bill, that bit is worth noting.

To top it all off, there’s a productivity dividend on top of those cash savings. Unified-Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS) platforms can save employees up to thirty minutes a day just by keeping communication all in one place and up to 75% of users report an increase in productivity.

The 2027 Elephant In The Room For UK Businesses

It felt like 2026 just started, but here we are approaching the end of the year and one wouldn’t be shocked to see Christmas decorations hitting the shelves in a couple of weeks. For UK businesses, there’s something a bit more serious to take into consideration.

On 31 January 2027, Openreach will permanently turn off the Public Switched Telephone Network. Every service that runs over an analogue phone line will need to move to a digital alternative, VoIP being the obvious choice, before that date.

It wouldn’t be advised to leave the preparation to the last minute, given that it’s not just phones being affected. Fire and alarm systems, card machines, door entry systems and fax machines are all being pulled into the same migration. Getting this and your phone system sorted out now ahead of time will reduce the likelihood of headaches and panic come 2027.

Here’s Where VoIP Really Earns Its Keep Across Borders

If you’re expanding into multiple countries, you can buy local phone numbers in each location with VoIP so to your customers, you appear local. But you’re still paying a fraction of the old international rates. It’s a win-win.

Thanks to AI-powered call routing, you don’t need to worry about a call from Australia coming to you at 3am UK time. Instead, the call goes to someone in your team in that time zone. If you don’t have a team member out there, out-of-hours voicemails can be auto-transcribed and forwarded on to you to get to when you’re awake.

Not to mention the other features of video, chat, file transfer and screen-sharing all exist within the same platform. It removes the need for multiple other platforms where you’re constantly trying to keep track of all the access logins while juggling all the time zones.

A Couple Things To Keep In Mind

VoIP is a fantastic piece of technology, nobody is disputing that. But there are, of course, some things to be mindful of. The biggest factor to take into consideration is that VoIP needs an internet connection to work. If your broadband goes out, so does your phone system. There are ways to get around it, but don’t let it catch you by surprise.

The next thing is security. Last year, the global average cost of a data breach was $4.4 million and VoIP systems are an attractive target because they carry sensitive information. Here, it all comes down to choosing a reputable VoIP provider that offers end-to-end encryption and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance. Before you commit, read the fine print to make sure security is accounted for.

So, is VoIP worth it for UK businesses making international calls? It is, with a touch of urgency given the impending 2027 switch-off. The infrastructure has proven itself, businesses that have made the switch have seen the results themselves and the cost savings are there.

The post Going Global? Here’s What VoIP Can (And Can’t) Do For You appeared first on 91̽»¨.

It’s a new week and there’s a new group of startups pitching their case to the crowd. This week’s roundup is a strong showcase of deep tech solving practical, tangible problems.

One startup has created patented acoustic-AI technology to digitise and scale recycling, while another is developing fridge-free pharmaceuticals and vaccines. A third has built an AI-powered indoor plant growing system, bringing serious tech to the humble houseplant. Founders taking on real-world problems with this kind of technical depth are set to make a real difference.

So, who are the startups crowdfunding this week? Here they are.

1. Candam Technologies

How much are they raising: €300,060

Website: www.candam.eu/

SEIS/EIS? N/A

About: Candam Technologies has developed a patented acoustic-AI technology to digitise and scale recycling, using sound and machine learning to bring a level of intelligence to a process that has long relied on manual sorting.

Sorting is one of the biggest bottlenecks in recycling, with facilities struggling to identify and separate materials at speed, and huge quantities of otherwise recyclable waste ends up in a landfill because the system can’t keep up. Candam’s acoustic-AI approach opens up a new way of tackling that, using sound to identify materials with a level of precision that visual sorting alone can’t match.

Where to invest: Europe Republic

2. Camden Town WFC

How much are they raising: £50,002

Website: www.camdentownwfc.com

SEIS/EIS? Yes, EIS

About: Camden Town Women’s Football Club is inviting investors to be part of the future of women’s football, a corner of the game growing faster than almost any other.

Women’s football has undergone quite the transformation over the past few years, with attendances, sponsorship and commercial interest climbing at scale. The clubs that will define the next chapter of sport are being built at present, and Camden Town WFC is offering supporters and investors alike a chance to be a part of that story from a relatively early stage.

Where to invest: Europe Republic

3. Stablepharma Ltd

How much are they raising: N/A

Website: www.stablepharma.com

SEIS/EIS? Yes, EIS

About: Stablepharma is developing fridge-free pharmaceuticals and vaccines to remove reliance on cold-chain storage and delivery.

Vaccines and many pharmaceuticals lose effectiveness or can become unstable if the temperature slips at any point between manufacture and patient. However, maintaining that chain is costly, energy-intensive and often just not possible in the places where it’s needed most. Stablepharma’s technology makes products thermostable at room temperature so they can reach the people who need them without the constraints of refrigeration.

Where to invest: Crowdcube

4. Jay & Joy

How much are they raising: N/A

Website: www.jay-joy.com

SEIS/EIS? N/A

About: Jay & Joy is a French pioneer in plant-based cheese, drawing on traditional cheesemaking knowledge to create products with their own taste while offering a better proposition for the environment and animal welfare.

Plant-based cheese has, for the most part, been the most compromised category in the plant-based world. While meat and milk substitutes have made huge strides, cheese has stubbornly resisted. As a result, many alternatives end up falling short of the real thing. Jay & Joy wants to change that, applying traditional cheesemaking craft to plant-based ingredients in a way that other brands don’t.

Where to invest: Crowdcube

5. Evogro

How much are they raising: N/A

Website: www.evogro.com

SEIS/EIS? Yes, EIS

About: Evogro makes AI-powered indoor plant growing systems that deliver high-quality fresh produce consistently, sustainably and without needing a green thumb.

Growing at home has the appeal on paper but in reality, it’s a lot tougher with variable results, wasted effort and produce that doesn’t really match what you buy at the store. Evogro’s system lets AI handle the tricky parts – light, water, nutrients and timing – while the user has to plant and harvest. For anyone interested in the idea of homegrown food but put off by the effort or unreliability, it’s a compelling product.

Where to invest: Crowdcube

6. Aqua Glow

How much are they raising: N/A

Website: www.aqua-glow.com

SEIS/EIS? Yes, EIS

About: Aqua Glow makes award-winning collagen drinks that have already picked up some serious recognition after launching just a year ago.

Collagen has moved from niche wellness product to the mainstream, with drinkable formats leading the way because they fit so naturally into daily routines. In a category where new entrants appear almost weekly and fade out just as quickly, early traction and industry recognition matter enormously. Aqua Glow’s products are already in Boots, Ocado and WHSmith across the UK and Europe.

Where to invest: Crowdcube

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Website:

Tell Us About Leapter

Every enterprise makes thousands of decisions: Is this customer eligible? Does this transaction require additional review? Which price or discount applies? Should this insurance claim be approved, rejected or escalated?

Behind each of these decisions is business logic – the company’s rules, policies, calculations and decision criteria. Today, that logic is often scattered across policy documents, spreadsheets, meetings, ticketing systems and software code. The people who understand the rules depend on developers to translate them into working software, which can make the process slow and difficult to verify.

Leapter gives business experts a more direct role. They describe the policy or decision they want to implement and collaborate with Leapter’s AI to refine it, using natural language. Leapter’s AI turns this knowledge into a Blueprint: a visual, executable and versioned representation of the business logic. Experts can easily verify the logic, see how the decision works, test different scenarios and approve the result. Once approved, the Blueprint can be used by applications, automations and AI agents to make the decision consistently and deterministically. No hallucination in the decision path.Ìý

Want to be featured as 91̽»¨â€™s Startup of the Week? Find out more about this weekly feature, and how to get involved,Ìýhere.

What Makes Leapter Unique?

With AI, generation has become fast. The new bottleneck is verification. Enterprises need to make sure AI is not hallucinating or making wrong decisions when it comes to mission-critical decisions. Leapter focuses on helping the people who understand the business participate directly in creating, verifying, and governing the logic.

A Leapter Blueprint is not simply a diagram explaining what the software should do. It is the logic that actually runs. If an expert changes a condition, threshold or exception, they are working with the same artifact that will later make the decision.

AI helps draft the Blueprint, identify missing information and generate tests. However, the AI cannot approve its own work. A person reviews and approves the logic before it is deployed.

This creates a clear division of responsibilities: AI accelerates the creation process, while people remain accountable for the decision. They have a clear and visual language that allows them to understand the entire logic and how it will run, before it actually runs in production. Once approved, the logic runs deterministically; the same information and the same rules produce the same result.

Why Is There A Market For Leapter?

Business logic sits behind many of the most important decisions enterprises make, from pricing and customer eligibility to fraud controls, compliance checks and operational approvals.

These decisions need to be implemented in software, but the traditional process is difficult. Business experts write requirements, developers interpret them and the result is often buried inside code that the original experts cannot easily review. Making even a small policy change may require multiple meetings, tickets and development cycles.

AI is increasing the speed at which software can be created, but it also introduces a new challenge: companies need to know which rules their systems are applying, who approved them and why a particular decision was made.

This creates a growing need for business logic that is visible, testable and governed. The need is particularly strong in regulated and high-stakes industries such as financial services, insurance, logistics and compliance, where organizations must move quickly while still being able to explain and reproduce their decisions.

Leapter addresses this gap by connecting business expertise directly with executable software.

What Excites You Most About The Future Of Leapter?

We are excited about a future in which the people closest to a business decision can help build and improve the systems that make it.

A compliance specialist should be able to shape a compliance decision. A risk expert should be able to define how risk is evaluated. A pricing specialist should be able to inspect and refine the rules behind a price, without needing to become a software developer.

AI makes this level of participation possible. Leapter provides the structure and control required to make it safe and practical for enterprises.

We believe business logic will become an asset in its own right: visible, reusable and versioned independently of any single application. Approved Blueprints could then be used consistently across websites, internal systems, automated workflows and AI agents.

Why Should People Be Paying Attention To Leapter?

Because the next chapter of AI will not be defined only by who can generate the most software. It will be defined by who can put AI-generated systems into production responsibly and at scale. In fact, analysts say that over 60% of AI projects never actually gets deployed.Ìý

Building an impressive AI demo is becoming easier. Building something an enterprise can understand, approve, audit, and trust is still incredibly difficult. That trust gap is one of the biggest barriers standing between experimentation and meaningful enterprise adoption.

Leapter is tackling that bottleneck directly.

We are creating an architecture in which AI is used where it is strongest: to help people create, explore, and refine, while approved, deterministic logic is used where correctness and accountability are non-negotiable.

Leapter has already secured €2 million in pre-seed funding to advance this vision and is currently looking to expand its investor circle. We believe the companies that solve trust, governance, and ownership will define the enterprise AI era, and that is exactly the future we are building for.

Where Can We Find Leapter?

Website: Ìý

LinkedIn:

YouTube: Ìý

Twitter/X: @leapteraiÌý Ìý

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The institution’s alumni have built businesses across just about every sector that you can think of, spanning tech, healthcare, retail, energy and media. We’re taking a look at a handful of the mix of billion-dollar giants and newbies that have their roots at the prestigious university.

But first things first, what seems to be in the water over at Stanford?

How Is Stanford Producing So Many Founders?

There’s not really anything in the water or a magic formula that’s churning out founder after founder. There are, however, a good number of contributing factors.

You’ve got StartX, which is Stanford’s own accelerator, that has backed hundreds of companies since 2011. Then there’s the Graduate School of Business that runs its Impact Founder programme annually, funding student ventures across climate, health and social good. The proximity to Sand Hill Road certainly also helps when investor meetings are basically just a bike ride away.

And then there’s the culture. It’s one where putting your degree on hold to actually build something meaningful is admired rather than just finishing on time. When that happens, you’ve got an environment that behaves a little less like a university with startups nearby and more like a startup network but with lecture halls.

It’s the reason why every year, so many graduates are walking out the door with a company that’s already trading.

10 Successful Stanford Alumni That Founded Startups

From graphics chips and genetic testing to AI sales tools and scam protection, these alumni entrepreneurs are showing what “Stanford-founded” looks like in 2026.

1. Phil Knight, Co-founder of Nike

Way before Air Jordans and the famous swoosh, Phil Knight wrote a paper at Stanford about Japanese running shoes disrupting the German-dominated athletics market. He eventually teamed up with his old track coach, Bill Bowerman, and started Blue Ribbon Sports in 1964 which later became Nike in 1971, the household brand we all know.

Today, Nike is undoubtedly one of the biggest companies in the world. Knight’s original thesis, which included a good product, a decent story and a route to market, is basically the same recipe that half of the companies mentioned here are following now.

Six decades later, Nike is still turning over more than $50 billion a year.

2. Jensen Huang, Co-founder & CEO of NVIDIA

Jensen Huang completed his Master’s in Electrical Engineering at Stanford in 1992 and co-founded NVIDIA a year later – reportedly in a Denny’s diner in San Jose. For almost two decades, the company was mostly known by gamers, dominating the graphics-card market and building its GPU infrastructure.

But then, AI happened. Researchers came to the realisation that the parallel processing NVIDIA had built for rendering was almost perfectly suited to training neural networks. After that, demand went through the roof.

Just about every serious AI model is now trained on NVIDIA chips, with the company crossing a trillion dollars in market cap in 2023.

3. Mike Tung, CEO of Diffbot

Mike Tung studied artificial intelligence at Stanford before founding Diffbot in 2012. The company’s goal is to turn the entire internet into a structured, queryable knowledge graph.

Put simply, it means using computer vision and machine learning to read arbitrary web pages the way a human would and then convert what’s there into structured data.

Diffbot was StartX’s very first company investment and while some of the flashier LLM startups have chased headlines and billion-dollar valuations, Diffbot has built a profitable AI infrastructure with a lean team of about thirty people.

4. Sharath Keshava Narayana, CEO & Co-founder of Sanas

Sanas came out of Stanford’s AI lab in 2020. The team spent the next two years working on real-time speech AI namely noise cancellation, speech enhancement and, most notably, accent harmonisation.

The product does real-time accent translation between speakers on a call and is now used across BPOs in the Philippines, India and beyond.

Sharath Keshava Narayana, a serial entrepreneur joined as a co-founder and the CEO in 2022 with Sanas being ranked in the top 10 in Inc. Magazine’s AI and Data category this year and achieved a listing on the New York Stock Exchange.

5. Ann Wu & Akash Levy, Co-founders of Silimate

Ann Wu and Akash Levy met as electrical engineering graduate students while at Stanford. They both believed that chip design is broken and launched Silimate in 2023, an AI copilot for chip designers that finds functional bugs, predicts performance issues and recommends real fixes in real time.

It’s the first electronic design automation company that Y Combinator has ever backed and they’ve worked across the board with smaller startups to Fortune 500 chip teams.

Some of the team includes ex-Apple and ex-NVIDIA engineers – not bad for a company that’s only about eighteen months old.

6. Josh Payne, Founder & CEO of Coframe

Josh Payne launched Coframe in 2023, which uses AI to run continuous conversion experiments on websites. Think A/B testing but at ten times the speed, with AI both suggesting variants and analysing what actually converts.

The company’s customers include OpenAI and The Economist, and they’ve raised $9 million to date.

Josh has three Stanford degrees – BS, MS and MBA – and now guest-lectures on generative AI at the university. He’s also the brains behind GPT-Migrate, one of the first widely-used autonomous coding agents and co-founded Autograph, the digital collectibles company.

7. Tanuj Thapliyal, Rish Gupta & Sud Bhatija, Co-founders of Spot AI

These three Stanford friends founded Spot AI in 2018 with the simple question: why aren’t businesses doing more with all of the video footage their cameras are already recording? They raised $93 million to built AI-powered camera systems that turn CCTV into a proper business intelligence tool.

The platform now serves 1,100 customers across manufacturing floors, retail stores and security perimeters, spotting operational issues, standardising procedures and coaching teams in real time. In 2021, they were listed on the Forbes Cloud 100 Rising Stars.

Rish Gupta leads as CEO, Tanuj Thapliyal sits as Executive Chairman and Sud Bhatija runs operations and growth.

8. Rohan Suri, Co-founder of Nooks

Rohan Suri met Dan Lee and Nikhil Cheerla studying computer science at Stanford and launched Nooks in 2020 as a virtual office tool for remote classrooms during Covid. Today, Nooks is an AI sales platform that helps reps prospect, dial and coach more effectively.

The company has raised $70 million to date with all three founders making the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2024. The platform has expanded well beyond its original auto-dialler into AI-driven prospecting, live coaching and account research.

9. Francis Appiah, Founder of Cetera Energy

Francis Appiah, an MS Chemical Engineering student, was named a 2026 Stanford Impact Founder Awaredee for Cetera Energy, a programme the Graduate School of Business runs specifically to back climate and social ventures with technical depth.

Cetera’s pitch is turning wastewater into low-carbon lithium. The battery industry is predicted to run into some serious lithium shortages by the end of the decade and existing extraction methods are slow, expensive and environmentally costly.

Cetera is aiming to build a much cleaner supply chain from the outset by pulling lithium out of industrial wastewater streams that would otherwise just be discarded.

10. Abhinav Kejriwal & Nickhil Jakatdar, Co-founders of PreventiveHealth.ai

Abhinav Kejriwal is the CEO of PreventiveHealth.ai while Nickhil Jakatar is a veteran entrepreneur who chairs the company. Their flagship product is Mira One, a service that pulls together advanced biomarkers, genetic testing and wearable data into a single health report.

The pitch is preventative rather than reactive medicine, to catch chronic disease before it starts, using the kind of combined data that most doctors don’t have the time or tools to look at together.

The company is powered by GenePath Diagnostics, a NABL-accredited clinical lab with deep experience in molecular diagnostics and geonomics. In other words, their reports are made to stand up in a clinical setting.

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Anyone who’s left uni in the last couple of years will have a similar version of the same story. Applied to hundreds of jobs, received a bunch of “unfortunately this time” replies and the odd interview that one would really rather forget about entirely. And the parents who bagged their first jobs off the back of a somewhat decent CV and a firm handshake haven’t quite figured out how it’s gotten to that point.

Well, it’s a bit tricky to “get your foot in the door” when there is no door. Most people are pointing the finger squarely at AI for that.

The Vanishing First Rung Of The Corporate Ladder

Let’s begin with the numbers because to be honest, they’re rather alarming. In the UK, graduate vacancies on Adunza fell from 15,397 in July 2025 to 8,383 in July this year. That’s a decrease of roughly 45% in one year. Tech grad roles have taken the hit particularly hard, with the Institute of Student Employers recording a 46% drop in jobs from 2024 according to The London Economic.

Looking across the Atlantic, the picture is also a fairly bleak one. Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab reported a 67% drop in US entry-level tech postings between 2023 and 2024. Recent graduate unemployment hit 5.7% in the States, which is a complete near-reversal of the pattern where degree holders fared better than the broader workforce.

And the companies actively rolling out generative AI? Well, their entry-level is dropping by as much as 80% per quarter. Not year, per quarter.

What Is AI “Eating” Then?

Quite simply, the bottom of the ladder. AI is becoming exceptionally good at doing the things that used to be a junior’s job. You know, drafting the deck, tidying up the spreadsheet everyone refuses to look at, summarising reports and so on.

All of those small tasks that nobody wanted to be bothered with were the tasks that gave a graduate their first two paid years of learning. Now, it’s being taken over by tools that don’t need coffee breaks. How can a graduate compete?

Brookings Institution research went and put a number on it. AI could automate more than 50% of tasks in entry-level positions, which is about five times the risk faced by more senior roles.

So really, that “paid learning curve” where companies basically subsidised your early education by paying you to do the grunt work is disappearing altogether.

The Particular Problem Happening In The UK

Between the start of this year and July, overall UK job postings fell by 11%. Meanwhile, the knowledge of AI tools and AI-related skills appeared in 9.4% of UK job ads. This is telling you that employers want more from fewer people and they want them AI-fluent from day one.

Now if you add the rising employer National Insurance contributions and general economic wariness that seems to be felt by most to all of that, hiring managers are bluntly asking the question: why train a junior when a chatbot can churn out a decent draft for £20 a month? It’s a fair question to ask on their part.

The knock-on effect isn’t pretty given that more than a million young people are now classed as NEET – not in education, employment or training. Alan Milburn, who is leading an independent review into youth unemployment, is warning that entry-level opportunities have been hollowed out. Yep, there’s even a decline in the humble Saturday job which is the training ground before the training ground.

The Ladder Is Still There, It Just Looks Different

It’s not to say that “AI is going to eat your future” because quite frankly, that doesn’t paint the full picture of what’s going on. What’s happening now is something researchers are calling “seniorisation” which is where junior job postings are being loaded with senior-level asks, specifically around judgement and AI orchestration.

While the old ladder rewarded endurance meaning, put in your time doing the boring bits, learn by osmosis and wait your turn, the new one wants new hires to hit the ground running with tools that lets one person do the work of three.

Some call it a “superagency” where juniors are now using AI to punch above their weight when it comes to experience. If a first-year hire has the right prompting habits, they could actually produce work in a much shorter time than it would have taken a mid-level employee a couple of years ago. AI isn’t removing the need for judgement, it’s giving professionals just starting out in their careers a way to do meaningful work sooner.

What Does The New Corporate Ladder Look Like?

Well for a start, it has more rungs at the top than the bottom. You don’t spend the first two years note-taking and prepping reports. It’s part AI-fluency bootcamp and part real work. LinkedIn’s 2026 Jobs on the Rise report even puts AI engineers and AI consultants as some of the fastest-growing roles in the US. A couple of years ago, those jobs didn’t even exist.

For graduates, the uncomfortable bit is that a CV alone isn’t enough. It’s portfolios, side projects and proof of AI skills that will really get you somewhere. For employers, the uncomfortable truth is that trying to remove the bottom rung to save costs may cause a talent crisis in the next decade. If nobody is training the juniors, who’s going to replace the seniors in 2036?

So, can we really say that entry-level jobs are in the grave? It’s a bit dramatic. But the death of entry-level jobs as we’ve known it is a bit more accurate.

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A new month brings a new round of startups crowdfunding – and this week is all about giving people better tools to do their work. One is an AI-powered platform with B2B agents selling card payments and telecoms in person. Another is an app helping people to host and promote their own events, while another platform is making AI visibility in chat-based apps accessible to all businesses.

These are three very different audiences, but each of these startups have set out to give these audiences a proper leg up to make life easier.

So, who are the startups crowdfunding this week? Here they are.

1. AKT London

How much are they raising: £2,100,000

Website: www.aktlondon.com

SEIS/EIS? Yes, EIS

About: AKT is a global, multi award-winning natural deodorant and body care brand built for people who are born to perform.

Natural deodorant has come a long way from its slightly worthy early days, and AKT is at the front of that shift, proving that clean formulations can more than hold their own when it comes to performance. The company was founded by two former West End performers which makes the brand’s positioning unusually credible – high-pressure stages and long, physical days required a natural product that worked. AKT was built from that direct need.

Where to invest: Europe Republic

2. The Football Factory

How much are they raising: £100,000

Website: www.thefootballfactory.ai

SEIS/EIS? Yes, SEIS

About: The Football Factory is building full economic ecosystems around clubs, treating them as asset-backed ventures – something that does not yet exist in the football world.

Football is one of the most emotionally invested industries but clubs at every level struggle financially or over-rely on owner wealth. TFF is rethinking that from the ground up, designing club-centred ventures with real assets and sustainable revenue models.

Where to invest: Europe Republic

3. FieldSpot.ai

How much are they raising: £20,000

Website: www.fieldspot.ai/

SEIS/EIS? N/A

About: FieldSpot.ai is an AI-powered platform built specifically for field sales, the door-to-door B2B agents selling card payments, telecoms and energy in person.

Traditional CRMs are designed for office-based sales teams and for someone walking a territory with a phone in hand, most of the software is slow and full of irrelevant features. FieldSpot.ai believes that field sales is its own discipline, with its own rhythm and deserves tools built around how the job actually gets done.

Where to invest: Crowdfunder

4. Futura

How much are they raising: £50,000

Website: N/A

SEIS/EIS? N/A

About: Futura is building an app that gives people a proper platform to host and promote their own events, with the opportunity to chat and make friends along the way.

Event hosting always sits awkwardly across a bunch of tools. There’s a platform for tickets, one for promotion and nothing that ties it all together. Futura is bringing those pieces into one app so that hosts can promote what they’re putting on while attendees can connect with each other around it.

Where to invest: Crowdfunder

5. DaitaFix

How much are they raising: £60,000

Website: www.daitafix.com/

SEIS/EIS? N/A

About: DaitaFix is on a mission to make AI visibility in chat-based applications accessible to businesses of every size, not just the ones with large budgets to hire specialist agencies.

More consumers are turning to ChatGPT, Claude and other chat-based tools to research, compare and decide what to buy. Being visible inside those conversations is becoming as important as ranking on Google once was. The catch is that optimising for it has largely been reserved for businesses who can afford serious expertise. DaitaFix is giving smaller businesses the tools to understand how they’re showing up in AI-driven answers.

Where to invest: Crowdfunder

The post 6 Startups Crowdfunding w/c 31.08.2026 appeared first on 91̽»¨.

Website:

Tell Us About incentifi

incentifi is a self-funding behavioural rewards platform that turns wellness into travel and real financial value. Employees earn money off holidays and travel by engaging in everyday healthy habits like walking. No complex or extreme fitness programmes to navigate. Just consistent, accessible activity that earns real-world rewards.

The platform was founded by Paul Kelbie and James Barrington-Madders, who set out to disrupt the landscape of traditional corporate wellness. Their personal mission is to make health feel worth prioritising for people by connecting their daily habits to the things they genuinely look forward to, like holidays and meaningful experiences. When the reward is something people want, they are more likely to take part and stick with it.

The impact flows in both directions. Employees have a reason to take their health and wellbeing seriously, built around rewards they care about. And when employees feel good, their employers feel it too, with fewer sick days, stronger performance and a workforce that wants to stick around.

Want to be featured as 91̽»¨â€™s Startup of the Week? Find out more about this weekly feature, and how to get involved,Ìýhere.

What Makes incentifi Unique?

Paul Kelbie and James Barrington-Madders, who between them spent decades working in recruitment, luxury travel and hospitality industries, built an understanding of what people care about. And what they consistently saw were that teams became more engaged and productive when the reward was something experiential such as travel.

That insight is the engine behind incentifi. One of the first workplace wellbeing platform of its motivates employees to make healthy daily choices by turning everyday movement into real cashback and discounts on holidays.

At a time when the cost of living is putting real pressure on household budgets, incentifi can help employees take the edge off one of life’s most restorative and increasingly expensive experiences. Every step taken, is quietly working towards a more affordable holiday or travel experience.

The travel component of the platform provides a significant advantage in that incentifi grants users access to closed user group pricing on travel, with a huge inventory of 3 million hotels and properties, that are not available to the general public. Even before accounting for earned rewards, the platform offers substantial upfront value.

To redeem, steps tracked via Apple Health or Google Fit convert into Points which to earn cashback-style Coins i.e. real financial value spent on hotel stays at exclusive wholesale prices, future travel upgrade or digital gift cards (redeemable at one of incentifi’s 150+ partnered retailers).

Critically, it’s built for everyone, not just fitness obsessives. The platform rewards consistent healthy habits at all activity levels, making wellbeing inclusive rather than a perk for the few. The platform also gives employers something they’ve lacked, visibility. Most wellbeing initiatives operate without clear insight into engagement or impact – money goes in, but there’s no clear picture of what’s working or why.

incentifi changes that, by offering real-time dashboards featuring live programme tracking, near-real-time earning updates, omnichannel messaging, and actionable workforce analytics. Employers can see what’s driving behaviour and which incentives are resonating most, turning wellbeing from a leap of faith into a measurable investment.kind to seamlessly merge gamified health tracking with meaningful, experiential travel rewards.

Is There A Market For incentifi?

Yes and it’s urgent. Workplace wellbeing in the UK has reached a critical juncture, with approximately 79% of employees experiencing moderate to high levels of stress. For more than a third of the workforce, this pressure bleeds into their personal lives and disrupts their sleep.

The impact is evident in a 15-year peak in sick leave, now averaging 9.4 days per staff member, with mental health struggles serving as a primary catalyst. Furthermore, presenteeism remains a significant burden, accounting for 50-70% of all wellbeing-related expenses while silently eroding innovation and productivity across businesses of all scales.

This is costing UK businesses around £56 billion per year. Yet the gap between the scale of the problem and the effectiveness of current solutions is widening.

incentifi was built to address this directly, not with tick-box solutions, but with a platform that makes healthy behaviour rewarding for employees and measurable for employers. When employees move more and feel better, organisations see the results in stronger engagement, better retention, and a healthier bottom line.

Where Can We Find incentifi?

You can learn more and sign up as a founding member at https://incentifi.io/ or follow the founders on Instagram and LinkedIn for updates, insights and behind the scenes content on how the platform is being used in practice.

Instagram: @paulkelbie
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulkelbie/
Instagram: @jbmadders
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-barrington-madders/

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