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The Venture Codex

Ascension

4th Floor, 20 Air Street, Soho, London, W1B 5AN, United Kingdom

Overview

Ascension is an early-stage VC built by exited entrepreneurs to back the next generation of tech and impact founders. Run by an experienced and diverse team of successful entrepreneurs, we have been relentlessly dedicated to finding the UK’s best Seed-stage startups since 2014. Ascension benefits from the active industry connections essential for the sourcing and development of deal-flow and due diligence. The team has co-invested with the UK’s leading angels and VCs, key to securing follow-on funding as the portfolio businesses move to their next stage of growth. We believe in building an inclusive, community driven brand that can benefit the wider UK tech ecosystem and strive to work with conviction, integrity, humour, and humility.

Total investments
41
Lead investments
13
Investments · 12mo
6
Active investors
9

Sector focus

  • Financial Services
  • FinTech
  • Venture Capital
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Investment portfolio

  • Qureight

    Participated · Series B · Jul 2026

    Qureight provides two integrated products for pharmaceutical clinical trials: Workflow, which speeds imaging decision turnaround from about two weeks to 48 hours, and AI Lung, which constructs detailed models of airways and blood vessels from chest scans. The company has built a general-purpose foundation model of the chest that enables development of disease-specific deep learning models in one to two months. Qureight is running global clinical trials with partners including AstraZeneca, Bristol Myers Squibb, and several biotech firms. Founded in 2018, the company combines clinical leadership—co-founder and CEO Dr Muhunthan Thillai continues clinical work—with a senior technical team recruited from industry and academia. Financially, Qureight has raised a £1.5 million seed in 2022 and the recent $20 million Series B to support lab build-out, therapeutic-area expansion, and headcount growth.

  • Saltroad

    Participated · Equity · Jun 2026

    Saltroad provides private access to NHS speech and language therapists, matching families with specialists tailored to each child's clinical needs and aiming to eliminate waiting lists. The service targets a large unmet need—about one in five children in the UK, or roughly two million, require support with speech, language and communication. Saltroad operates a network of over 1,000 therapists across the UK and positions its offering as lower-cost than traditional private therapy while maintaining 1:1 care. The company recently acquired Ogma, an AI documentation platform, to convert therapy session output into structured, clinically useful notes that cut after-hours admin and standardise record quality. Saltroad plans to embed AI tooling across its workforce to increase therapist capacity without compromising clinical quality or wellbeing. Its stated future plan is to build an AI-enabled SLT workforce that combines an associate model with purpose-built tools to free therapists to spend more time in therapy.

  • ManaMind

    Participated · Seed · Apr 2026

    ManaMind develops autonomous AI agents that continuously play through games to detect bugs, generate actionable reports, and automate repetitive QA tasks. The company has built proprietary visual models tailored for virtual environments and positions gaming as its launch market. ManaMind has formed design partnerships with Included Games and Crazy Labs, indicating early commercial traction. The founders are Emil Kostadinov and Sabtain Ahmad and the company is based in London. ManaMind plans to expand its technical team and accelerate model development with proceeds from its $1.5M pre-seed round. Over time the company intends to broaden its autonomous testing layer beyond games into other software and robotics applications.

  • Hosel

    Led · Seed · Mar 2026

    Hosel aggregates thousands of pre-owned golf clubs and accessories onto a single searchable platform, giving golfers transparent pricing, guaranteed authenticity, and an easier way to trade in equipment. By addressing pain points like counterfeit goods, price opacity, and fragmented supply, the company positions itself as the “Vinted for golf” within a global second-hand golf market valued at roughly $3 billion. Its technology underpins modern pricing, authentication, fulfilment, and customer-experience workflows that traditional resale channels such as eBay fail to offer golf enthusiasts. Co-founders Andrew McGinley (CEO) and Charles Harley (CTO) bring prior scale-up experience from Care Sourcer, Skyscanner, and FanDuel. Demand is buoyed by rising golf participation and a broader retail shift toward recommerce, giving Hosel a clear tailwind. The company has secured £500,000 in pre-seed funding to build out its platform, with an institutional round and U.S. expansion planned later in the year. Current operating metrics such as revenue or user counts were not disclosed, but the fresh capital provides runway to accelerate product development and market entry.

  • Kinfolk

    Participated · Seed · Feb 2026

    Kinfolk provides an AI-driven workforce operations platform that integrates autonomous agents directly into Slack and Microsoft Teams to automate HR and People Operations tasks such as drafting documents, updating HRIS records, and managing employee lifecycle changes. The system combines agentic AI with request management, lifecycle automation, and analytics, enabling HR teams to shift from manual coordination to autonomous execution. By replacing fragmented tools and legacy ticketing systems, Kinfolk aims to reduce repetitive administrative work, increase team capacity, and deliver consistent employee support without adding headcount. The company is positioning its offering as the foundation of a new “Workforce Operations” category that starts with HR but will expand to payroll and IT workflows. With fresh capital, Kinfolk plans to accelerate product development, bolster enterprise-grade capabilities, and scale its go-to-market teams. The London-based startup has raised a total of $8.5 million to date, including the latest seed round.

Team