The event is the culmination of Future Worlds’ latest programme and will see six founders from the student body and faculty pitch the businesses they have built around their world-changing ideas in science and technology over the past nine months to investors, mentors, and potential customers, right in the middle of London Tech Week, which Future Worlds has partnered with this year for the first time.

Future Worlds exists to help students and researchers at the University of Southampton start their founder journey and transform their ideas into world-changing tech startups that are globally scalable and impactful. Demo Day brings startups from a top regional innovation hub on the South Coast to the very heart of the UK tech ecosystem. All six startups are emerging from the University of Southampton, a world-leading UK institution that is internationally renowned for the scale and commercial impact of its research and teaching in engineering and physical science.

The six startups and their founders that will be pitching at Demo Day are:

• Dr Andy Shapanis – Founder of Xgenera, a company offering early cancer diagnostics via a blood-based, multi-cancer diagnostic test. (raising £4m)
• Dr Sylwia Barker – Founder of MicroVita, a biotech platform that offers toxicological testing of new drugs to improve efficiency of drug development at the clinical stage. (raising £550k)
• Til Jordan – Founder of LZero, a company that tests blockchain security and efficacy via a cloud-based simulation platform. (raising £500k)
• Sam Munday – Founder of Data Revival, a SaaS platform empowering organisations in the chemical industry to leverage their R&D knowledge at speed. (raising £250k)
• 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. (raising £150k)
• 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.  

Demo Day comes shortly after the cohort returned from Future Worlds’ annual week-long mission to Silicon Valley in May. 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.

Ben Clark, Director of Future Worlds, said: “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. 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. 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’.”