Bristol medtech Siloton has secured an £8.4m two-year contract from Innovate UK to develop its handheld retinal imaging device, non-dilutive funding it says could cut up to two years from development and which it plans to follow with a new investment round.
Siloton is building GiraffeOCT, a binocular-style optical coherence tomography (OCT) system that shrinks the components of a tabletop eye scanner onto a photonic chip smaller than a £1 coin. The aim is to make retinal scans available in community clinics and patients' homes rather than only in hospitals and optometrists.
The contract
The £8.4m comes through Innovate UK's Contracts for Innovation: Quantum Missions Primer programme, which funds companies to solve specific public-sector problems through competitive procurement. It is a contract rather than an equity investment, so it adds no new shareholders to Siloton's cap table and causes no dilution for its founders or existing investors.
The money will be delivered over two years. It will fund the design of both in-clinic and at-home versions of the device, clinical trials of each, integration of the company's second-generation BlueJay chip and the cloud platform behind the service.
Sunderland Specialist Eye Hospital will run trials of the in-clinic device, giving patients across the North East and North Cumbria access to the technology during development. York Health Economics Consortium will use the trial data to refine estimates of potential NHS savings.
The equity angle
Siloton said it intends to raise further investment off the back of the contract win. Securing a large non-dilutive award before a priced round typically strengthens a company's negotiating position: it extends runway, de-risks the product roadmap and gives incoming investors evidence of a government customer.
The terms, size and timing of that round have not been disclosed. The new capital is earmarked in part for CheetahOCT, a second-generation device designed to measure different layers of the retina and widen the range of conditions it can detect.
Headcount is expected to grow to 16 by August 2028, with hires in photonics, electronics and software focused on miniaturising the system and planning UK manufacturing.
The NHS opportunity
Ophthalmology is the busiest NHS outpatient specialty, with about nine million attendances in England in 2023/24. At the end of July 2026, nearly 623,000 people were waiting for an eye appointment, 8.7% of all NHS waits.
Chief executive Alasdair Price said the contract would carry the company through the "valley of death" that stalls many early-stage healthcare businesses. He also said the NHS needs to adopt new technologies as soon as they are approved, rather than years later.
The award also supports the government's National Quantum Strategy mission of getting quantum sensing into NHS trusts by the end of the decade.
Original source: BusinessCloud — https://businesscloud.co.uk/news/8-4m-contract-to-accelerate-quantum-eye-medtech/
