78. Lumi: the startup turning a single lens into lab intelligence

Founder: Silas Adekunle and Chris Beck
Year founded: 2019
Website: lumi.systems

AI has had a lot of bad press of late. Yet its adoption by some industries is making for groundbreaking discoveries at a much faster rate than would have been possible with human teams alone – and this is particularly true in laboratories.

Silas Adekunle and Chris Beck had a lightbulb moment when they were asked to support a lab automation deployment during the pandemic. They started working on a robot arm that could augment scientists in labs and handle samples. But, they noticed that there was no data structure to help the robots make sense of the lab world – and there was a huge burden on scientists to manually capture data.

Enter Lumi – a visual lab intelligence platform created to enhance research and development (R&D) efficiency by streamlining lab monitoring, data analysis, and compliance.

As outsiders to the industry, (a big challenge) was getting access to labs to build the initial dataset and Lumi’s intelligence engine,

“As outsiders to the industry, [a big challenge] was getting access to labs to build the initial dataset and Lumi’s intelligence engine,” explains Adekunle. “We had to put together an advisory board to help us validate the problem space to make sure our hypothesis was correct – it was and they were delighted to see what we were building.”

Lumi works by using computer vision to capture, collate, and analyse experiment data safely and efficiently to help scientists save time, increase reproducibility, and ensure safety. It also captures raw data and sends it to a user-driven platform for analysis.

Adekunle notes launching a project for one of the big pharma players as a key achievement in the past financial year, adding that anything that’s visible is actionable for Lumi – while other companies are only working with specific applications.

We had to put together an advisory board to help us validate the problem space to make sure our hypothesis was correct – it was and they were delighted to see what we were building.

Looking to the future, Lumi’s cofounders hope to be running at the forefront of tangible scientific automation as one of the driving powers of accelerated and more insightful science.

By using AI to streamline lab data capture and analysis, Lumi is helping labs to accelerate R&D and push towards making the next groundbreaking discovery in science. Its own business invention is groundbreaking enough for us, and that’s why we’re naming it a top 100 startup for 2025.