Auralytica
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Safe. Simple. Scalable chemical sensing.

Chemical certainty. Every pack, everywhere.

Auralytica makes a smart material that changes colour with the chemistry around it. It needs no electronics, no batteries and no dyes, and any camera can read it. We are starting with food quality and safety. But our ambition is to provide chemical certainty in every pack, everywhere.

Talk to us about a pilot See how it works →
  • Proof of concept complete with a leading UK food manufacturer
  • 3 LOIs signed
  • Patent filed
Sensor inside a pot of hummus reflecting green, product in specification
Good product
Sensor inside a pot of hummus reflecting red, product out of specification
Bad product

Our sensor inside a sealed pot of hummus, during a proof of concept on a UK production site.

Backed by

  • Carbon13
  • Hermesa
  • IF
  • British Business Bank
  • Founders at the University of Cambridge
  • EIT Food, co-funded by the European Union

Our view

The future of chemical sensing is not electrical.

Measuring chemistry today means a probe, a power supply or a lab. So most products travel blind. We think the next generation of sensing is built from smart materials and read by the cameras that are already everywhere.

Electronic sensing

  • Needs power, wiring and a chip
  • Too bulky and costly to put inside every sealed pack
  • Usually measures a sample, then a proxy for the rest

Auralytica smart material

  • A passive film that changes colour with changing chemistry. Nothing to power
  • Small and cheap enough to sit inside every pack
  • Measures the product itself, every time it is seen

Why now?

Auralytica's patent-pending technology cuts the cost of manufacturing holographic hydrogel sensors by 100x. Finally, safe, simple and scalable sensing at the point of use.

Cameras already sit on every production line, in every pocket and on every robot. We give them the ability to see invisible chemical changes.

How it works

Colour without pigment.

Our sensor is a holographic hydrogel: a smart material that swells and shrinks with chemistry, and changes the colour of light it reflects as it does.

Think of a blue butterfly. Its wings hold no blue pigment. Their colour comes from nanoscale structures that reflect one wavelength of light. Wet the wing and the structure changes, so the colour changes. Our material works the same way, except we design the structure to respond to a chemical target.

  1. Sense

    The hydrogel is tuned to one target, such as pH. As the chemistry in the pack changes, the gel swells or contracts.

  2. Shift

    Swelling moves the layers inside the gel by nanometres, and the colour of light the gel reflects moves with them.

  3. Read

    Any colour camera measures that shift against a fixed reference. We can tune it to be visible to people, or visible only to cameras.

Change the chemistry

Illustration · pH sensor

Inside the gel

What the camera sees

pH4.2
GelContracted
Limit5.0
In spec

A simplified illustration. The limit shown is the pH 5.0 control used for some chilled ready-to-eat foods.

0.05 pHAccuracy across pH 3.5 to 9, working towards 0.001
No electronicsStructural colour, nothing to bleach or leach into food
6 monthsProven sensor lifetime, and it reads in both directions
Any cameraIncluding the label-check cameras already on food lines

A materials platform

One material. Many chemistries.

Swap the hydrogel chemistry and the same sensor detects a new target. The science is well published. What has been missing is a way to make these sensors cheaply at scale.

That is our breakthrough. Our patent-pending process builds holographic hydrogels on low-cost flexible film, at a price that reaches mass markets.

Starting with food

Is this food safe to eat?

The only question that matters in the food industry. But food manufacturers cannot see inside a sealed pack. They rely on proxies (temperature logs, sample testing and conservative shelf-life models) to guess at the answer.

Packs of raw meat moving along a food production line
33%

of the food industry's revenue is lost to food waste. That's $540 billion a year.

Source: CEBR and Avery Dennison report

Value across the chain

Sold once. Sensing always.

Manufacturers buy the sensor to cut scrap and testing costs. Once it is in the pack, it keeps reporting at every step after that.

Manufacturer

Check every pack

Replace destructive testing, catch bad seals before dispatch, and act before a recall.

Distribution

Verify on arrival

Confirm quality where cold-chain custody cannot be proven. One scan per pallet tells you far more than you know today.

Retail

Sell with confidence

Use real product data to extend use-by dates safely and mark down at the right time.

The data layer

Every read becomes an event

Each scan records the product, the time, the place and its chemistry, so quality can be tracked as the product moves. Together, these reads build the first dense chemical dataset from inside sealed packs.

Example · { product: "Chilled dip 200g", site: "Distribution centre", time: "06:42", pH: 4.31, status: "in spec" }

Impact

Measurable impact against the UN SDGs.

UN SDG · Food waste

12.3

Helping halve per-capita global food waste by 2030.

UN SDG · Zero hunger

2.1

Keeping safe food in circulation to help end hunger.

Our ambition

The gold standard for chemical certainty.

Supply chains of the future will be more flexible and stable because they will be better informed. That starts with chemical certainty in every pack, everywhere.

Now

Food

Safety controls, freshness and pack integrity, in every pack.

Next

Chemicals

Stability and shelf life of products in storage and transit.

Next

Personal care

Know when sunscreen or mascara has gone off.

Later

Medicine

Wound monitoring and the pharmaceutical cold chain.

The team

Science meets scale-up.

Anna Winter and Dr Sam Davies, co-founders of Auralytica

Anna Winter CEO

Chemical and process engineer who has taken technologies from lab to production floor at Johnson Matthey, across medical devices, hydrogen fuel cells and sustainable aviation fuel. Cambridge MBA.

LinkedIn ↗

Dr Sam Davies CTO

PhD in holographic hydrogels from Imperial College London. Former lead scientist at London deep-tech start-ups.

LinkedIn ↗

Advisors

ScienceDr Jeff Blythe
Product, IP and scale-upDr Neil Campbell
Food packaging and regulationEric Duncan

Get in touch

Let's talk.

We're working with food manufacturers, packaging partners and investors who want chemical data from inside the pack.

Anna Winter, CEO and co-founder anna@auralytica.co.uk London, United Kingdom