I-O Inspire entrepreneurs shine at finale showcase

With just three minutes and four slides each, participants pitched their ideas to an audience of venture capitalists, academics, and innovation professionals.

Hosted at UCL’s BaseKX incubator in London, the event brought together the latest cohort of budding academic entrepreneurs supported by UCL Ventures' Ideas to Opportunities (I-O) programme.  

The evening featured a dynamic mix of innovation, from next-generation battery technologies and audiology breakthroughs with applications in robotics and hearing aids, to miniaturised satellite communication components and new insights into how the human body defends its respiratory system from infection. 

The researchers’ pitches* were evaluated by a panel that included UCL Ventures' Associate Director (Physical Sciences & Engineering) Marina Santilli, UCL Ventures Associate Director BioPharm Mark Fisher, and I&E’s Ecosystem Innovation, Graca Carvalho, CDI Executive Director, UCL, and Growth Specialist Emilio Cuevas.  

The event marked the finale of UCL Ventures’ I-O Inspire programme, an 8-week series of lectures and seminars aimed at growing the entrepreneurial skills of UCL academics and supporting them to take the next steps in commercialising their research.  

I-O Inspire is just one element of the I-O programme: join UCL Ventures for the next in the ongoing I-O Converse session on 2nd July, 12.30-2pm to hear about UCL spinout Guilford Street Labs (GSL)’s mission to elevate care for patients with rare, cardiac and neurodegenerative diseases.   

*Pitches featured: Max Woodall , cylindAIR: A 3D Human Airway Model for the Next Generation of Respiratory Therapeutics; Farah Comis, Integrated photonics for Data Centers; Janos Kriston-Vizi, AI Model for Cellular Drug Discovery; Charlie Nason & Yang Xu, Next-generation cathode materials for low cost potassium-ion batteries; Wenhui Song, Intelligent Hearing Aids – Ihear; Paul Bavister, Wearable AI therapy / sound attenuation; Robert Bolt, Mechanochemistry; Amany Kassem, Nibras Communication- Pioneering optical-assisted transceiver to unlock terabit-scale wireless data transfer; Niyaz Zaman, ULK-1 TArgeting Chimeras (ULKTACs): A Transformative Step in Targeted Degradation; Yaoguang Song, Unlocking Next-Gen Batteries through Scalable Interface Engineering.