Six Southampton start-ups set to change the world launched at London Tech Week

The University of Southampton’s on-campus early-stage accelerator Future Worlds has launched six new world-changing companies.

Following nine months of work developing their ideas, founders from the student body and faculty pitched to investors, mentors and potential customers at the British Film Institute on London’s Southbank.

The launches were part of the programmes annual demo day, Demo Day, which was held in the middle of London Tech Week, which Future Worlds has partnered with this year for the first time.

Tamara Ivancova, Founder of Amara Automotive

Ben Clark, Director of Future Worlds, explained: “Demo Day is all about celebrating, enabling, and accelerating the brilliance of the exceptional founders that we’ve been working with. Their goals are inherently disruptive because the status quo isn’t good enough.

“We’re motivated by the opportunity for a better tomorrow and excited by founders who are driven to make a difference and change the world for good.

Til Jordan, Founder of LZero

“The best outcomes emerge through maximising diversity and minimising limits, but barriers prevent too many from beginning a startup journey and constrain others that do get started.

“At Future Worlds, we seek to eliminate those barriers to build a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive tech ecosystem.

“It’s also vital we don’t forget that centres of innovation in the UK aren’t restricted to the ‘golden triangle’ of London, Oxford and Cambridge, but can be found in other areas of the nation like Southampton.

Laura Meehan, Co-Founder of Journally

“The incredible startups coming out of Future Worlds demonstrate that world changing innovation is found all across the UK where regional tech clusters need to be actively supported if we’re to truly build the next ‘Silicon Valley’.”

The programme exists to help students and researchers at the university start their founder journey and develop their ideas into world-changing startups which are globally scalable and impactful.

This year, those startups are:

Sam Munday, Founder of Data Revival

• Dr Andy Shapanis, founder of Xgenera, a company offering early stage cancer diagnostics via a blood-based, multi-cancer diagnostic test.
• Dr Slywia Barker, founder of MicroVita, a biotech platform that offers toxicological testing of new drugs to improve efficiency of drug development at the clinical stage.
• Til Jordan, founder of LZero, a company that tests blockchain security and efficacy via a cloud-based simulation platform.
• Sam Munday, founder of Data Revival, an SaaS platform empowering organisations in the chemical industry to leverage their R&D knowledge at speed.

Dr Sylwia Barker, Founder of MicroVita

• Tamara Ivancova, founder of Amara Automotive, a company creating sustainable vehicles to help city commuters minimise their travel cost, time, and emissions. Its first product is the Elecy, an enclosed 4-wheeled e-bike.
• Laura Meehan and Jessica Jobson, founders of Journally, an app that works to identify, prevent, and improve the mental and physical health of elite athletes, reducing the financial and human loss of illness.

The founders launched their startups shortly after returning from Future Worlds’ annual week-long trip to Silicon Valley.

Dr Andy Shapanis, Founder of Xgenera

The tour of the Bay Area – this year including visits to Plug and Play, UC Berkeley’s SkyDeck, and Google – gave the cohort the opportunity to connect with and learn from Future Worlds’ high-quality founder, investor, and advisor network at the heart of the global startup ecosystem and refine both their pitches and their long-term plans for their businesses ahead of Demo Day.