CoSTAR Ideate company SAIReco nominated for prestigious Tech Impact Award

SAIReco, one of the companies who took part in this year’s CoSTAR Ideate programme, has been shortlisted for Best Innovation in Accessible Tech at the prestigious Tech Impact Award 2025. 

The company was nominated for their groundbreaking AI desktop application called VAS (Video Analysis Suite) that makes pre-recorded and live videos accessible for people with sensory or cognitive disabilities. 

The start-up was founded just over a year ago by Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP)PhD student Asmar Nadeem, Armin Mustafa, and Mahrukh Awan.

Since finishing the CoSTAR Ideate programme in September SAIReco has more than doubled in size, built an on-prem solution, forged partnerships with Google Cloud, AI4ME and PAI and showcased its MVP at the 2025 International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) in Amsterdam.

SAIReco CEO Asmar believes that the support the Ideate programme provided was pivotal to the nomination: “This structured programme helped us to get here."

“Access to AI compute was available to us through CoSTAR for training our models, I think that played a very big role. We wouldn’t have been able to test our models or data pipelines without that. Also, the external and internal showcases were also very useful in preparing us to take our prototype forward." 

“We also got a lot of support through our mentors – we met them every two weeks, so they were able to really push us to pursue new partners and build on-prem solutions too. They were also good at helping us to use our weaknesses as opportunities.”

The SAIReco team felt that their nomination was the direct result of the traction provided by IDEATE along with their strong team of co-founders, COO Mahrukh and Chief Scientist Armin, a TechWomen100 Award 2025 and Novi 2025 Award in Education and Academic Excellence winner.

The SAIReco VAS MVP has already attracted engagement from business to business clients. Anyone interested in finding out more about SAIReco’s Video Analysis Suite can book a demo on their website.

The CoSTAR Ideate team will be sharing a table with SAIReco at the Tech Impact Award 2025 taking place on 2 December in central London at an event hosted by TV personality Edith Bowman – watch this space to find out how the team get on.