Inside Durham’s Venture Lab: Here are 8 of our favourite projects

The Hazan Venture Lab is Durham University’s own start-up accelerator, providing access to networking events, skills-development workshops, and funding opportunities for eager entrepreneurial minds. It is aimed at everyone from graduates and business developers to students with a curiosity for enterprise.

We spoke to the founders of some of our favourite start-ups currently being developed in the lab:

AegirFlow

AegirFlow is a sustainable FMCG start-up founded through the Durham Venture School, reimagining how beer is made, transported, and consumed. Its flagship product, Beer Squash, is a high-strength beer concentrate that consumers dilute at home using a simple ratio and a carbonation sachet, producing a fresh pint in seconds.

The core idea is straightforward: Conventional packaged beer is roughly 90% water, meaning breweries spend enormous amounts of energy and money shipping water around the country. Beer Squash removes that water before transport, cutting the carbon footprint of delivery by an estimated 85 to 90% compared to a standard bottled beer.

AegirFlow’s aim is to build a brand around sustainability without compromising the drinking experience. Looking further ahead, the company plans to license its method to established breweries, enabling a wider revolution in the beer industry by helping others cut their carbon footprints and logistical costs at scale.

AegirFlow is set to complete its testing phase within the next few weeks, with launch to follow in the coming months.

Armaturelabs.ai

Life science lab data has never been more valuable. Labs’ systems were built to store it, not to utilise it, and an abundance of information often becomes a roadblock rather than an asset. Scientists spend valuable time searching for and reconciling data that should already be working for them.

Armature builds the infrastructure to change that. We turn your existing systems, data, and workflows into an intelligent foundation, connecting everything across your entire data landscape, from the structured systems your lab already runs on through to the unstructured data sitting in drives, cloud storage, and on-prem repositories.

With your data now an asset, we give your scientists the tools to build and deploy their own automations. Nobody knows better than they do what is slowing them down. Teams can effortlessly access knowledge, automate repetitive work, and make smarter decisions, freeing scientists from the administrative burden that accompanies research so they can focus on the discovery that actually drives innovation.

Building an automation starts with a scientist describing what they want in plain English. Armature turns that into a structured plan they can review, edit, and refine until it reflects exactly what they need. From there, rather than AI interacting with your systems directly, it generates code artefacts that do. AI is inherently non-deterministic, but the code artefacts it produces are not, meaning every interaction with your systems runs the same way every time, is fully inspectable, and yields reproducible results.

Every automation, every action it takes, and every approval given along the way is logged and accounted for. Scientists and management have full visibility into what is running, what it touched, and who signed off on it.

Automations built in Armature are reusable across teams. Over time, the outputs and knowledge generated within Armature become part of your organisation’s foundation: A compounding asset that grows more valuable the longer you use it.

Armature is currently looking to deploy its product with a pilot cohort.

Fluxero

Fluxero is a Durham-born green technology company building the intelligent software layer to anchor the global distributed green hydrogen economy. As variable wind, solar, and hydro capacity rapidly expands worldwide, outdated power grids are routinely forced to waste multi-billion-dollar surpluses of clean energy due to capacity bottlenecks.

Fluxero bridges this gap from A to Z by deploying small, modular hydrogen plants located directly at the generation source. Rather than just offering static software, Fluxero builds, manages, and operates the entire infrastructure stack. The nervous system of the operation is a proprietary Digital Twin software architecture. Driven by physics-based AI, the twin eliminates technical risks, maps global geospatial energy data, and continuously maximizes real-time production efficiency.

The resulting zero-carbon green hydrogen is an infinitely versatile asset, engineered to power heavy industry, automated robotics, and high-performance AI compute infrastructure anywhere in the world. Backed by industry heavyweights Barclays, Google, and the NVIDIA Inception program, Fluxero utilizes an asset-light software licensing and infrastructure delivery model to capture high-margin revenue as we scale our modular plants globally.

Fluxero is currently seeking seed funding to launch a commercial pilot site.

Meblur

 Meblur delivers “real-time collaborative storytelling.”

On Meblur, instead of creating an AI character and talking to them, you can create your own character and then talk as them. We take your simple messages and effortlessly transform them into rich, in-character prose, allowing you to communicate by building up a world that exists entirely between you and the person that you’re talking to.

We’ve always found the world of human creativity more interesting than the real world, so we’ve built a way to socialize within it, while ensuring that the real world is just one “Add Match” button away.

Meblur is aiming to launch within the next two weeks.

Proxara

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Proxara is the control point for a company’s AI tools and agents, keeping sensitive data inside the firm while employees use AI.

Problem: AI adoption has outpaced governance, and employees are pasting sensitive data into external AI systems without observability or compliance.

Instead of restricting usage, Proxara audits and intercepts every AI prompt across all surfaces, replacing identifiers (client names, IDs) with tokens ([CLIENT_A]) via a local LLM in company infrastructure before they reach any AI tool. It then restores them in the response so the output remains useful. With increasing AI sprawl, Proxara unifies compliance on-prem, with proxy software on employee devices covering browser, apps, internal agents, and more.

This enables AI governance across the firm, with observability into usage, ensuring no sensitive data ever leaves the company. It is built for fast-moving AI-forward companies and regulated firms that want to keep their tools without losing control of data.

Our founders bring years of cybersecurity and compliance experience and are open to conversations in this space.

Proxara has launched a pilot and is currently raising a pre-seed round.

Too Early Co.

 We built the Too Early Co. to connect the UK’s brightest and most ambitious university students with work placements at fast growth start-ups.

As two Durham University Economics students, we have seen first-hand the default pathway for elite university students into large corporate graduate schemes. However, more recently, we have seen a change in the tide, with a growing appetite to work in exciting start-ups operating out of the UK. We want to help start-ups acquire top-level talent by matching and screening students that are hungry for experience and ready to put their bright ideas and fresh perspectives into action.

Too Early Co. has an applicant pool of 250+ top-level students from the UK’s leading universities, all ready to contribute meaningfully this summer.

Too Early Co. is currently seeking firms for talent acquisition.

Trilotea

Gut health therapeutics often fail from a lack of consumer routine and commitment. Conventional formulations are also limited by poor absorption, limited bioavailability, and inconsistency between samples. The gut therapeutic market is also poorly regulated, with highly superficial marketing, inadequate dosages, and insufficient clinical backing.

Trilotea aims to solve these 3 key issues by utilising a novel tribiotic formula. This targets gut health through an all-encompassing mechanistic approach, targeting fibre fermentation, microbiome modulation, and direct epithelial signalling, with strong individual backing for a range of gut-related issues, including GI disorders, immune resilience, mood, cognitive function, sleep, development, and skin health.

A proof of concept has been developed incorporating this formula with sufficient clinical doses in a tea-based format. Here, we target the one of the most consistent routines among UK adults to encourage a frictionless transition into routine supplementation, while also optimising the additional health benefits of whole leaf tea for a synergistic, ritualistic therapeutic.

Another aim of this product is ongoing trialling and optimising. Tea-based gut supplementation is highly understudied, providing an opportunity to communicate original research with the scientific community while ensuring ongoing product development and consumer interaction. Similarly, new gut health ingredients and formulations are being discovered all the time, providing ample opportunity to explore and innovate. Specialisation into context-specific or seasonal brews, such as hay-fever/cold targeting or IBS/immunosuppression-focused, also adds to a rich and exciting field for Trilotea to pioneer.

Trilotea is currently undertaking validation trials.

⁠WorldPool

A family friend in Venezuela once described how unstable financial infrastructure made it difficult for ordinary people to save with confidence or plan ahead financially. Instead, neighbours would come together in small community savings circles, pooling money regularly so each person could rely on the support of the wider group when they needed it.

Seeing how these systems created trust and financial resilience within communities inspired the idea behind WorldPool: Bringing a centuries-old tradition of saving together onto the digital financial infrastructure that many people across Latin America are already adopting today.

After speaking with people across Latin America, Africa, and South-East Asia, it became clear these systems are still widely used today, increasingly through digital payments.

WorldPool is building a simple way for trusted groups to organise these savings circles online, with clear rules and transparent contributions. The aim is not to replace community finance, but to make it easier for communities to coordinate and support one another digitally.

WorldPool is currently live as a Mini App on World App, looking for people to help with outreach and vetting.

Thinking of joining the entrepreneurial world? Applications to the Durham Venture School close on Friday 29^th May.

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