23. Untap: the world’s most disgusting health monitoring device

Founder: Claire Trant
Year founded: 2021
Website: untaphealth.com

It’s been a bad year for sewage. Reports of raw effluent being dumped into lakes and rivers, as well as the sea, have rightly led to outcry about the environmental and health impact. Sewage might not be all bad, though. It could even help us to prevent the next pandemic.

Or so Untap Health would argue. The startup has created the world’s most disgusting, but perhaps most effective, health monitoring device. The tool attaches to manholes to sample and test collective sewage for traces of disease (also known as “wastewater epidemiology”).

The UK’s less than desirable response to COVID-19 has accidentally provided the benchmark that Untap needed. Forget lateral flows; if someone in your community became sick with an infectious disease, Untap could theoretically know about it in the flush of a toilet.

The device could also be installed in places we now know are vulnerable to outbreaks, such as care homes, hospitals, and offices. According to Untap, its diagnostic tool can detect one infected person in 10,000 healthy people, with 95% sensitivity and 99% specificity. 

Untap might be dealing with microbes, but its business plan is decisively macro. Aggregating this data across a city, a country, or even the world, it says, would help to better guide global public health policy and ensure a more effective response to pandemic threats. 

That kind of forward-thinking approach has also guided Untap’s product design. Its device has been specifically made as a plug-and-play technology, so that the team can reprogram it to identify new pathogens of concern as and when they emerge (touch wood). 

Untap Health raised £100k from angel investors in 2022. In 2023, it won Best Technology Innovation at Europe’s largest pitching competition, and began its first customer pilots last year. Aptly, it’s cleaned up in the 2025 Startups 100 too. Just what could 2026 hold?