Welcome to the sixteenth edition of our newsletter - fuelled by Olympic inspiration! This newsletter is aimed at investors, collaborators, future hires and early adopters of our products.

While the Olympics has been incredibly exciting, most of us get our daily activity from our commute. This means we can have 30% of our daily exposure to air pollution while commuting. We have been zoning in on these challenges in our latest article. This is also in preparation for Will's appearance at the Zero Carbon Commuting conference in September. While our initial product is focused on athletes, the applications to active travel and other sectors are huge. Please join us on our mission - Personalising Air Quality, for everyone.

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Hot off the press

• we were so excited to see Georgia Bell - who supported us right from the outset of our elite athletes' panel - win Bronze in the 1500m in Paris. While we clearly can't claim any causality, it was great to see an athlete who obviously pays attention to all aspects of her craft winning big! Later this month we'll have the pleasure of seeing Claire Cashmore MBE PLY compete in her sixth Paralympics. And another member of our panel, Travis Bramley is providing huge insights in our latest product development while also competing internationally
• having updated our website, we have gone for a bigger launch of the AirTrack dashboards. We continue to test premium features with our user group and hope to launch these fully very soon! We'd love any feedback on our website too
• Louise's podcast on Tech Talks is coming soon. We'll add a link when it drops!

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Go with us towards clean air

• we've said goodbye to our second intern Mary-Julian Brewer who has been the author of many of our recent articles, with one more in the works for next week. It feels strange as a six-month old company to have already said goodbye to two core team members! Please engage with MJ's articles, as well as her and Fallon's work getting our Instagram going!
• we are continuing to build our B2B pipeline and would welcome any introductions in the worlds of fitness, health, active travel and support to families. Now that we're close to a full product, we want to build out those priority partnerships
• we continue to be amazed by all the support we get from far and wide. Big shout outs to Ben Hawes Ravi Nar Simon Brown Salvatore Di Maggio LLM Elinor Honigstein Rishi Chowdhury Akhil Menon 🌍 Ben Brabyn Eda Leka Nicky O'Malley David Savage Deborah Gruenberger Helen Buchan Dr. Zhong Wei Khor Luke Lindforth-Delaney Antoine Rondelet Jessica Barlow 🚀 Nina Hampson Jas Schembri-Stothart Yuxi Pan Daniel Wardle Sam Kinsey-Briggs MBE MA Graham Thomas Andrew Hughes Pooya Kamvari Pete Waddingham Geoffrey Lloyd Tom Maverley Ruaraidh Dobson Zhenghong Liu Ula Caroto, Chartered FCSI (she/her) Noelle Morgan ACC, CPC, ELI-MP Andrea Bonzano Travis Bramley Charlotte Day. We hope you'll all continue with us towards clean air.

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Meet our users

Meet Sean Owens, one of our early adopters and user testers! Sean says: I work full-time as a family doctor in Ireland. Much of the work of modern medicine is now focused on disease rather than health. The health advice that is given in the healthcare setting is usually swamped by an unhealthy food environment, locked in a sedentary lifestyle, toxic social media, etc., outside of the healthcare setting. Most of us recognise that we could eat healthier and exercise more frequently. We know we could limit our alcohol intake and go to bed earlier. But few of us ever stop to consider whether the air we breathe is conducive to our overall health or even silently causing us harm.  

There is a lot to say and do about air pollution. Despite being named as one of the largest health threats globally, air pollution is easy to dismiss as the air we breathe often doesn’t look or feel like a problem. The EPA estimates as many as 1600 people in Ireland die each year because of air pollution before considering how many people are seriously ill and unable to work, care for loved ones, live independently, etc. Those numbers are comparable to COVID, yet we rarely stop to wonder if we could avoid some of the harmful effects of unclean air. Perhaps making the invisible issue of air pollution visible is as important a step as actually cleaning it up.

Enter Air Aware Labs. I first became aware of their work when a group of like-minded healthcare professionals decided to run a marathon to highlight the 26 years we have left to reach Net Zero. By chance or circumstance, the marathon in Dingle Co. Kerry is on September 7th, which is the UN International Day of Clean Air. So many of the climate action policies we need to take have health co-benefits, but none more so than reducing air pollution. When training, we used Strava to share the successes as well as the pains in training for a marathon. When I discovered Air Aware Labs could link in with my Strava account, I could now see the invisible. I am now finding out where and when to run to maximize my health. They say if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Now, we have a way of measuring the air quality we breathe.

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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

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