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

Shockingly, almost every new school in England has dangerous air pollution levels, increasing risks of diminished attention spans and long-term dementia risk, as recent studies highlight. Someone in the world develops dementia every 3 seconds. However, a landmark study ranks reducing personal exposure to air pollution as the second most effective measure we can take to prevent it. This is an incredibly compelling reason for our proposed solution to reduce personal exposure. At Air Aware Labs, we're committed to ensuring that the benefits of education, travel, and outdoor activities aren't compromised by poor air quality. Please join us on our mission.

******************

Hot off the press

• we have kicked off our first funding round - raising £300k pre-seed. The SEIS/EIS* form is in, we're finalising our first investor paperwork, we're ready for more. Big shout out to FounderCatalyst for all their support. Please talk to us if you are interested in investing!
• we have been accepted onto the Sustainable Ventures programme, where we will receive guidance on everything from investment readiness, to marketing and business planning. We'll be joining an amazing cohort of five early-stage sustainability and climate tech start ups. Thank you to London Borough of Lambeth for funding this initiative
• we are completing our list of advisers. Although our core team has vast expertise from science and medical through to product and tech, we recognise we need support in other areas. We have one slot remaining - a machine learning adviser, so if you think that's you, let's talk! We'll be profiling our advisers over the next few newsletters.

******************************

Go with us towards clean air

• we've overcome the last technical hurdle (we think!) to our first product launch. We'll be putting final touches over the next week. This is our first offer to respond to the challenges for those exercising outdoors in areas of pollution, as investigated in our latest article. Please use our product, promote it and appreciate it when it comes!
• please let us know about any programmes, grant opportunities or customers that you think would be relevant for us. For customers, we are still focusing on sports and active travel as initial markets, but continue to investigate wider markets such as healthcare to ensure we are building a product that will fit a range of sectors
• beyond our investors and advisers, we are also amazed by the support we get from... well, good humans! Big shout outs this week to Sam Simpson Olivia Sibony Geoffrey Lloyd Sana Khareghani Ravi Nar Sophie-Claire Turner Adrian Jones Kate Barnard - 'Data Diva' Melissa Menke Aoife Kirk Iyad Kheirbek Pooya Kamvari Michael Rudman Sarah King Ula Caroto, Chartered FCSI (she/her) Tim Wright Rishi Chowdhury Dr. Hannah Forbes ⚡️ Olamide Raheem Richard Ng Maiko Schaffrath Julie Blane Andy Crouch Lucy Johnson Steve Dunlop Xavier Giammattei-Watkins Emily Pilsworth Tessa ClarkeAnna Jílková. We hope you'll all continue with us towards clean air!

******************

Meet the advisers

Having profiled our founding team members over the past five issues, we are now starting to introduce our wonderful advisers. This week we are meeting Dan Hardy our atmospheric chemistry adviser. Dan is a Zinc fellow and has been a huge support over the past 5 months - from introducing us to PhD students to support our work to helping us with our financial planning. He is founder of Microsol, a scientific start-up that characterises aerosol particles at the single particle scale. He also runs the EPSRC Centre for Doctor Training in Aerosol Science. He is excited about working with Air Aware Labs on our shared challenges of innovation in the world of air pollution.

*************

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!

******************

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