LBS Incubator's 17th cohort: founders who know the industries they're fixing from the inside

Walk into the London Business School Incubator's new cohort, and you won't find twelve founders chasing a trend. You'll find twelve operators who spent years inside the industries they are now rebuilding with AI - a hotel trainer, a Thai food-factory boss, a restaurant-chain veteran - pointing frontier technology at problems they have lived, not researched.

Now in its 17th year, the Incubator, run by the Institute of Entrepreneurship and Private Capital (IEPC), remains open exclusively to startups co-founded by LBS alumni. It has backed 170+ companies to date, helped them raise more than £200m and create upwards of 1,500 jobs. Every venture accepted receives close to a year of mentorship, a desk at “the House” on the Regent's Park campus, and a bench of legal, financial, technical and marketing supporters to call on.

What ties the 2026/27 cohort together isn't a shared sector, or even the AI most of them use. It's who's building. Rather than another general-purpose productivity tool, this year's ventures point their technology at hotel staff training, tradespeople's paperwork, food-manufacturing operations, cap-table advisory work, buy-side research, hospitality decision-making, and M&A due diligence, alongside a patented piece of engineering, a regulated consumer product, and a category-defining spirits brand.

Osman Haneef, who heads the LBS Incubator, puts it simply: “What excites me about this cohort is how deep the founder-market fit runs. These aren't founders looking for a problem to solve. They've lived the problems, whether that's running a bakery factory, launching 250 restaurants, leading product and development teams in a unicorn startup, or building on the ground in Sierra Leone. Combine that with the pace at which they are shipping product, and it is a genuinely formidable cohort.”

The 2026/27 cohort

Magpie (Vibhu Mahendru, Astha Kalbag, MBA 2026) is a voice AI training platform for hotel front-line staff and hotel management schools. Role-play agents simulate difficult guest interactions in real time, with feedback and coaching built in. Five pilots are already running. [talktomagpie.ai]

HyCo Jet (Christine Ganshof, MiM 2025) is tackling the flow-versus-experience trade-off in showerheads. Swiss-engineered and patented, HyCo Jet has already shipped over 1,000 units across institutional operators, and is scaling into UK student accommodation and outdoor hospitality. [hycojet.com]

Unimount, founded by Jim Tang (MBA 2026), a founding member of UK tech unicorn Improbable, is a platform for building and running business-critical software. It combines AI-native delivery with the long-term engineering accountability that live products need, so organisations get software they can rely on without building an in-house engineering team. Unimount is post-revenue, with paying clients spanning startups, SMEs and larger institutions. [unimount.uk]

BOL Credit (Nelson Conteh, MBA 2026) is a micro-credit lender financing first smartphones for consumers in Sierra Leone. AI-embedded loan origination, self-service lock-screen collections, and a network of field agents across five regions have driven the venture past 1,000 loans originated and around 900 customers to date.

Dragonfly (Berat Hurriyetoglu, MiM 2025; Ece Ozdag) builds agentic systems for public-market funds, starting with frontier technology related coverage. Its first product turns early signals in a fund’s coverage into sourced investment theses, maps the impacted stocks and keeps each one current with persistent agents. As model adaptation increases, alpha comes down to what a fund can train on its own heritage, so Dragonfly embeds forward-deployed and builds toward the research and decision infrastructure public-market funds run on. Two months in, they work with some of the UK’s most renowned long-only and long/short funds, combined AUM over $10bn, with a long waiting list for their beta. [dragonflyalpha.com]

EVA (Zara Mogadasi, MBA 2025; Midhat Fatima, MBA 2025; Ali Mogadasi) is a voice-first mobile assistant that takes the admin, scheduling, invoicing, paperwork, off solo tradespeople’s plates. Winner of the HackLBS 2026 grand prize, it’s now in alpha with a working group of tradespeople.

Mo & Marine (Katie Jenkins, EMBA Global 2017) makes plastic-free baby hygiene products, riding the tailwind of the UK’s ban on plastic-containing wipes. Four months from launch, it has already picked up a Loved By Parents Platinum award, an Organic Baby Award, and a Project Baby Award. A member of 1% for the Planet and Vegan Society and Cruelty Free International-certified, Mo & Marine’s mission is to create great products that are also kinder to the planet. [moandmarine.com]

terraledge (Manish Prayaga, MBA 2023) is AI native services for cap table management. It helps startups and scale-ups automate the judgment workflows for equity management: option schemes, valuations and term-sheet analysis. It’s live with a UK scale-up pilot processing $2.5m of employee options. [terraledge.com]

OriSON is an operations platform for food MSMEs across the UK and EU, helping them grow without losing what makes them distinctive. Built by Parn Sertthin (Sloan 2025), who holds a PhD in engineering from Keio University and spent more than a decade running his family’s bakery factory in Thailand. OriSON won first prize at LBS LaunchPad 2026. [orisonsolution.co.uk]

Mythras (Dan Yates and Grant Soll, 1Y MBA 2026) runs financial due diligence for M&A as a service, not a product, AI underneath, sold with the engagement shape of a traditional advisory firm. Dan is a repeat founder and 2023’s Young Entrepreneur of the Year. [mythras.io]

Zvelto is an AI-native system for restaurant operations that turns operational data into decisions and actions. Co-founded by Nick Foskolos Christodoulou (MiM 2019) and Manos Mandrakis, the platform is live with two pilot restaurants and is finalising partnerships to bring on paying customers. Nick has launched 250+ restaurants and run £80m+ portfolios at Uber Eats, Amazon Business, REEF and Kout Food Group. Manos brings 10+ years of full-stack engineering experience, has owned and operated a café-bar, and worked with 100+ restaurant partners as a solo founder. [zvelto.ai]

Leve (Nicholas Latifi, Harsha Sankar, Cesar Carranza, MBA 2025) is a mid-strength agave spirit made in Jalisco, positioned between full-strength tequila and the growing no/low category. Live across UK DTC and on-trade in around 10 venues, with an F1 British Grand Prix partnership. [leveagave.com]

The cohort will spend the coming year at the House, working alongside mentors, supporters, and each other. Applications for the 2027/28 cohort open in the spring.