SCI Semiconductor has closed a heavily oversubscribed £5m round co-led by PXN Ventures and Mercia Ventures, both deploying Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund II capital, with cyber security seed specialist Osney Capital, US firm Black Opal Ventures and private investors also participating. The Sheffield company has already booked more than £2m of orders and £7.7m of government contracts.
SCI Semiconductor builds memory-safe processors. Conventional architectures let software access memory freely, which gives developers flexibility but leaves the openings that account for roughly 70 per cent of cyberattacks. SCI moves the protection into the silicon, dividing memory into trusted compartments and policing access at the hardware level.
Its ICENI range is the first commercial chip family built on CHERI, the government-backed memory-safety framework originally developed at Cambridge. The company has been appointed a core supplier under the UK government's Accelerated CHERI Adoption Programme.
The round is notable as much for its source as its size. Both leads are managing British Business Bank money: PXN Ventures runs NPIF II – PXN Equity Finance and Mercia Ventures runs NPIF II – Mercia Equity Finance. That places a Sheffield deep-tech balance sheet substantially in the hands of state-backed regional capital, days after the British Business Bank added £80m to PXN's NPIF II allocation, taking it to £180m.
Neither a valuation nor the equity stake taken was disclosed.
SCI was founded in 2022 by chief executive Haydn Povey, Silicon Valley executive Krishna Anne and former Microsoft Research specialist Dr David Chisnall, joined by academics from the universities of Cambridge and Manchester. It employs 35 people across its Sheffield headquarters and a Cambridge office, and plans to add 15 more roles over the next year.
Commercially, the company is further along than a £5m raise would ordinarily imply. It has fabricated its first devices, holds orders worth over £2m, has won £7.7m in government contracts and has agreed partnerships with Google Research and Microsoft.
Povey tied the demand to the changing threat picture. "As AI is identifying hundreds of critical vulnerabilities, it is clear that huge swathes of technology are open to attack," he said. "Additionally, with so much code generated by AI, the question is how much of it is fit for purpose and what risk that could pose to systems. Since unveiling our ICENI chip earlier this year, demand has been overwhelming."
Will Schaffer, investment director at Mercia Ventures, described the team as having "developed an elegant solution to a trillion-dollar problem — one that has so far eluded other players".
Regulation supplies the second tailwind. The National Cyber Security Centre has warned that software patching alone may not be sufficient protection and is pressing companies towards memory-safe technology, while the European Cyber Resilience Act, which comes into force this month, imposes reporting requirements that SCI says its chips help customers meet.
The money goes towards stepping up production and developing a next generation of chips in the UK.
Original source: Tech.eu — https://tech.eu/2026/09/09/sci-semiconductor-raises-ps5m-to-ramp-up-production-of-memory-safe-chips/
