Welcome to the seventh edition of our newsletter, as we venture out into the real (often digital) world beyond Zinc. This newsletter is aimed at investors, collaborators, future hires and early adopters of our products.

There is never a quiet week at Air Aware Labs, but this one has felt particularly busy - and in a good way! We took a moment over the weekend to reflect on the truly shocking statistics about air pollution's impact on health in our article on World Heath Day. This gave us even more reason to forge ahead to our first product launch this week: our contribution to reducing those impacts for a group that is highly affected - people exercising outdoors. Please join us on this mission.

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Hot off the press

• we have launched our first product! This is incredibly exciting as we see our hard work of the past few months start to make a difference to people. Air Aware Labs integration with Strava enables people exercising outdoors to track and reduce their exposure to air pollution. Our wonderful paralympian Claire Cashmore MBE PLY is already using it!
• we have been accepted onto the Google for Startups programme! This will help us to build our product and grow our business over the next two years
• an important milestone in our funding journey - HMRC has provided advance assurance of our SEIS/EIS* status. We have been setting out our stall on various platforms (you can find us on UKBAA and Barclays Demo Directory) and Louise will be joining Female Founders Office Hours hosted by Playfair next week. Please talk to us if you are interested in investing!

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Go with us towards clean air

• join our Stava integration and the club! This will be our active community of users, testing the engine of many of our future product integrations. More features are coming and we are hungry for feedback
• over the next few weeks we will be doubling down on user engagement so that we are building a product that people love! We'd love any support on this - from marketing strategies to community building
• we are so grateful for the instantaneous support we got this week with our product launch! Big shout outs this week to Laurie Ainley Sana Khareghani Reid Derby Geoffrey Lloyd Amanda Vine Ian Shapiro (he/him)Gareth Barber Heather Davies Parisa WrightConnell Locke Ula Caroto, Chartered FCSI (she/her) Jenny Wilcox Marina Walker Adrian JonesLucy Anderson Paul Finch Gaby Jesson Jason Hall and Air Quality News. We also loved our interactions pre-launch with Eddie Alleyn Douglas Squirrel Ian Ozsvald Alex Creswell OBE Tom Maverley Avrilia Diamanti keeping us powered up and ready to go! We hope you'll all continue with us towards clean air.

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Meet the advisers

This week we are meeting Zhenghong Liu our healthcare innovation adviser. Zhenghong is a Consultant Emergency Physician working in a large public hospital in Singapore. He completed the Singapore Biodesign Fellowship in 2022 and is currently working on various clinical innovation projects. Living in a country that suffers from seasonal trans-boundary haze, the impact of pollution is obvious to him, and the need for solutions vital. As a clinician taking care of patients presenting with respiratory illnesses, he sees an unmet need in this area. As an innovator involved in the healthcare technology scene, has has spotted a gap in clinical innovation- where innovators/engineers are unfamiliar with clinical settings and vice versa. He sees it as his job to fill that gap.

Zhenghong says: “Hope for the best, prepare for the worst”- while I remain cautiously optimistic about our efforts to reduce the effects of climate change, I can also see that it is likely to impact every one of us in the coming years. The work that Air Aware Labs is doing makes perfect sense - empowering every individual with the right tools to mitigate the impact of pollution on their health. I firmly believe their work will get more and more relevant in the coming years, as the need will be ever increasing especially for vulnerable populations.

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Get in touch

Please follow Air Aware Labs to stay in touch with our progress. If anything in this newsletter has piqued your interest, please send me (Louise Thomas) or William Hicks a message!

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More newsletters

Although the Venture Builder has finished, we will never forget our fellow ZINC teams.  Please read and subscribe to newsletters of others in cohort 7:

• Pavandeep Rai here
• Marjo Palanee here
• Donna Egan here
• Josh Piddock here
• Guy Naor here
• Veronika Bridgman here
• Lisa Rickers here
• Natalia Baltazar here

*SEIS and EIS are schemes that offer tax relief for investors in early stage companies

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