Startup Summer Accelerator 

Startup Summer Accelerator Showcase 

The Startup Summer Accelerator programme is now underway and applications are closed for this academic year. Join us for the Showcase, where the 2026 cohort share what they've built over the past 12 weeks. These founders are tackling real-world challenges with fresh, ambitious ideas, across sectors including AI, medtech, edtech and more. Expect an afternoon of fast-paced pitches, insightful conversations and the chance to connect with others across Edinburgh's vibrant startup and innovation community. Taking place Thursday 27th August, 1pm-5pm at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. 

• Luke Berr – Undergraduate from the School of Engineering is building a folding cargo-utility bike with Boxd. 
• Benjamin Nkere – Postgraduate from the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences is developing Cohortize; a collaborative platform for secure, ethical and scalable psychological data processing. 
• Avantika Ghosh is a Postgraduate student from the School of Informatics with Dobby Layer which helps treasuries, DEX swaps and stablecoin transactions eliminate avoidable hidden costs and cross-border uncertainty by enforcing fair ordering across rollups. 
• Samuel Gibbon – research fellow from the School of Population Health Sciences and Borja Marin – Research Associate from the School of Neurological and Cardiovascular Sciences are building software for eye care professionals that aligns retinal images over time, enabling clinicians to easily compare changes and apply metrics and AI within routine workflows with Edinburgh Eye Sciences. 
• Kayla Wang a PhD students from the School of Regeneration and Repair and Jennifer Dong, a PhD students from the School of Engineering are working on HerBalance; a wearable hormone platform for real-time cortisol sensing to help women manage menopause-related stress and symptoms. 
• Tadas Kluonis PhD student, Eugene Shrimpton-Phoenix, Postdoctoral Researcher and Shivam Shukla Postdoctoral Researcher, all from the School of Biological Sciences are working on Lantern Fish. Providing an AI-driven pipeline generating de novo protein binders for fluorescence microscopy. 
• Alisa Tom a Postgraduate student from the Edinburgh College of Art is working on Modern Sanctuaries, a holistic interior design studio creating wellness-centred spaces for homes, workplaces and community environments by combining environmental psychology, health science, sensory design and digital offerings to help people reconnect with their wellbeing through their spaces. 
• Lachlan Hay, Postgraduate student in the Business School and Elijah Downs, a Postgraduate from the School of Biology are working on Tech Twin, a performance tech startup that turns wearable and biometric data into a digital simulation of the human body, allowing athletes to forecast the physiological impact of new training or nutrition plans before they commit to them. 
• Eveline Kuckmak, a Postgraduate student from the Business School with TheiaMuse is a B2B feasibility intelligence platform helping museums and touring exhibition producers assess exhibition-venue fit earlier, reducing wasted sales effort, planning risk and costly mismatches.
• Amirreza Sarencheh, a PhD student from the School of Informatics and Diego Gallegos are working on Tokenive which replaces document-based verification with instant, cryographic proof; eliminating manual review, forgery risk and operational cost for any institution that needs to verify who they’re dealing with. 
• Muhammad Bilal, a PhD student from the School of Engineering and Mohsin Raza are building an autonomous AI agent that fully automates the complex infrastructure of fine-tuning open-source LLMs and diffusion models handling GPU sourcing, execution and failure recovery to make training bespoke generative models as easy as developing an app: Train Forge. 
• Refilwe Digoamaje is a Postgraduate students from the Business School is working on Ulimi – a story-first indigenous language learning platform for children aged 3-15 using interactive narrated folktales and gaming and webtoons to restore mother-tongue confidence.