Winner · Manchester · January 2026
Build Like a Pro: Scale Stream
A clean sweep: first place across every judged result in the Scale Stream. £1 million of investment interest followed.
Institutional proof
Awards, backers, and research partners.
Winner · £15,000 · Round 27
Scottish EDGE: Wildcard Winner
Beat every pre-trading business in the country to take the Wildcard category outright at Scottish EDGE Round 27, on stage at the Royal Bank of Scotland.
Research partners
University of StrathclydeUniversity of EdinburghHeriot-Watt UniversityUniversity of Aberdeen
Over £100,000 of R&D across identity matching, the legal framework ORIGIN runs on, and the synthetic-content datasets it's tested against.
Supported by
TechscalerCodeBaseThe Data LabCreative UKScottish EnterpriseInterface
Milestones
Techscaler programme completedExhibited at London Tech WeekIndependent technical assessment, University of Edinburgh
Founders
Building together since they were 12.
Leo and Ziyad started out curating playlists together, built Mamba Sounds into an independent label and distributor, and started XYNQ the month that system turned on them.
Co-founder & CEO
Leo Fakhrul
Leo comes from an economics and finance background, with hands-on KYC and AML understanding from working in high-compliance bureau operations, and turned playlist curation into a company: Mamba Sounds, the independent label he ran as executive director, built as an investment vehicle for music IP, and grew to 10 million listeners with no outside money. He led the business to its Innovate UK Creative Catalyst win (£50,000). When the platforms wrongly blacklisted Mamba in September 2025 and nobody could tell him what had been decided or why, he wrote the legal method that became ORIGIN. He is now at the University of Strathclyde on a scholarship from The Data Lab, where his research focuses on governance by design for automated content ingestion. He has given evidence on AI to the Scottish Parliament's Economy and Fair Work Committee, on the record, and speaks regularly: the Scottish Music Industry Association, the All African Music Awards, and the African Union.
Co-founder & CTO
Ziyad Alrasbi
Ziyad built the audience first: the Afrobeats playlist he curated grew to 535,000 followers out of Edinburgh, making him an early pioneer of Afrobeats' rise worldwide. At Mamba Sounds he led A&R and product development, working independently on records with billions of cumulative streams, including Skepta, Jae5, Shakira, Burna Boy, Wizkid, Davido and Drake. He is also the engineer. First-Class Honours in Computer Science from Heriot-Watt University, then years at Publicis Sapient building governed, auditable automation for global energy trading and financial operations, where every decision has to be explainable, traceable and defensible. He led XYNQ to its hackathon win at Build Like a Pro, was nominated for Scotland's Young Software Engineer of the Year award, and leads ORIGIN's engineering.
Team
Founder's Associate
Sameeha Rehman
Before XYNQ: Chief of Staff at a privacy-first enterprise AI company and Chief of Staff in the UK Parliament. Law and Politics with International Relations at the University of Strathclyde, then an MBA with Distinction from Imperial College London.
Sameeha runs XYNQ's operating structure as the company scales.
What XYNQ is about
Turn automated decisions into evidence.
We started in music because we know the industry and we lived the problem: a fraudulent AI track uploaded under our own label triggered takedowns we had no way to fight. XYNQ exists so nobody else has to lose an argument they were right about.
Mission
Prove the decision.
Turn every automated content decision into a signed, tamper-proof record, so platforms can show exactly why they approved or blocked anything, to anyone, at any time. The Evidence Pack is the unit: a signed data structure that pseudonymises the private detail, so the signal can be shared without exposing the data.
Vision
The trust layer for digital content.
Every creator and every asset verified before it enters the system, and every decision defensible after it. Competitors cooperating on fraud because the fraud hurts all of them.
Where this goes
Music first. Every regulated industry next.
Music has the messiest metadata in any regulated industry, and it's where streaming innovation has always started. Solve it here and it spreads everywhere software makes calls about people's work and money: user-generated content, marketplaces, financial services.
Advisors
The advisors behind XYNQ.
Advised by operators who built and policed the systems distributors answer to. Backed by angel investors who built trust and safety at YouTube, TikTok, PayPal, eBay and Mozilla.
Partnerships & Pilots
David Mogendorff
Twenty years across MTV, YouTube and TikTok. Former Head of UK Music Operations at TikTok and Head of Artist Relations EMEA at YouTube. David leads XYNQ's partnerships and pilot execution across platforms, distributors and labels.
Audit, Risk & Compliance
Matthew Burrows
Former Chief Compliance Officer at UBS, now a non-executive director on several fintech boards. Matthew builds the audit frameworks behind ORIGIN's evidence outputs, so they hold up to enterprises and regulators.
Commercial Strategy
Anneliese Harmon
Thirty years across music and entertainment: V2/Virgin, Def Jam, and former General Manager of the Music Managers Forum. Co-Chair of the Scottish Music Industry Association and a Creative UK board member.
FAQ
The questions we get on every first call.
If the answer to one of these is why you're not sure yet, this section is for you.
Could we build this ourselves?
You could build the signing and the storage. That part is commodity. What you can't build alone is recognition: a record only helps in a dispute if the other side accepts the format. And no single distributor catches fraud rings that hop between companies. An internal tool says "our system decided." A shared network says "the industry decided."
Why not just share a ban list?
A list is a promise. A signed match record is proof. The network shares the signal without any distributor seeing another's catalogue: when the same actor comes back under a new name, every member sees it. Members set the thresholds. We run the infrastructure.
What about privacy? Isn't hashing enough?
Hashing hides the name, but under GDPR the data still counts as personal, so it doesn't take you out of scope. ORIGIN treats catalogue data as personal data from the start: the raw data never leaves your own environment, and only the signed match signal crosses the network. We've completed a full data-protection impact assessment and will share it.
Do we have to rip out our existing detection stack?
No. ORIGIN sits on top of detection. It doesn't replace the scanner. You keep the fingerprint match, the AI-generated-audio detector, the sanctions screen, whatever you already run. We give you the record. You make the call.
How long does integration take?
Typical integration is measured in days, not quarters. SDKs are drop-in. If your pipeline can't call an API, we support webhook-first intake so the change lands in one team, not five. A 30-day shadow read runs against your live traffic before anything binds.
What happens to our Evidence Packs if we stop paying?
They stay verifiable. Every pack checks out against a public verification page that stays online whether or not you're a customer, so your counterparties can still validate every record you ever issued. The records are yours, customer or not.
Where is the data stored?
Tenant-isolated by default. EU region deployment on request. Full data-flow map available under NDA on the diligence call. Nothing about your catalogue leaves your tenant boundary; only the signed match records cross the network.
Book a 15-minute demo. Live product, no slides.
We'll run your catalogue through a policy and show you the decision, the Evidence Pack, and the audit trail. Your data. On your call.