Venture capital firm Crit Ventures announced it made seed investments this month in two deep tech startups: Erly, a developer of urine test-based self-diagnostic devices, and Noah's Farm, an artificial intelligence-based flavor compound developer.
Erly, headquartered in London, is a digital healthcare startup developing devices that enable early home diagnosis of four major chronic diseases—cancer, kidney disease, heart disease, and diabetes—through urine testing. The device employs electrochemical sensing technology instead of conventional test strip methods, delivering higher analytical accuracy. Users can conveniently monitor their health status through a dedicated app. Co-founder and world-renowned designer Thomas Heatherwick personally participated in product engineering and device design, creating a user-friendly interface.
Noah's Farm is a food tech startup that discovers and designs flavor compounds determining the taste and aroma of food products. Using its proprietary AI model "N-Palette1," the company screens candidate compounds and generates formulation recipes from hundreds of millions of molecular combinations without individual laboratory testing. This dramatically reduces the time and cost required for developing new flavor compounds. Flavor compounds developed by Noah's Farm, including blueberry, Alpine white peach, and grape varieties, have achieved over 80% similarity to actual flavors in electronic tongue tests and evaluations. The company is also pursuing patent applications.
Crit Ventures has established deep tech as its future growth strategy and is actively pursuing investments in the sector. The firm has already secured promising deep tech startups in its portfolio, including AI semiconductor design company FuriosaAI and modular robotic automation platform developer Withpoints.
"Crit Ventures is actively investing in deep tech startups capable of transforming existing industry paradigms through independently developed technologies," said Song Jae-jun, CEO of Crit Ventures. "We will also support our portfolio companies' global expansion through our overseas network."