The University of Edinburgh spinout has raised $2.15m (£1.6m) from a syndicate spanning ACF Investors, Wren Capital, Cambridge Angels, Scottish Enterprise, Quantum Exponential and the university's own investment arm, and says it has already doubled its full-year 2025 sales.
Singular Photonics is a fabless semiconductor company building single photon avalanche diode (SPAD) image sensors with computation integrated onto the chip. It was founded in February 2024 by chief executive Shahida Imani, chief technology officer Dr Aravind Venugopalan, Professor Robert Henderson and Dr Neil Finlayson, spinning out of Professor Henderson's laboratory at the University of Edinburgh. It emerged from stealth in January 2025.
The round was led by ACF Investors and was oversubscribed at $2.15m, equivalent to £1.6m or €1.85m. Wren Capital, Cambridge Angels, Scottish Enterprise, Quantum Exponential and Old College Capital all participated. The stage was not formally labelled and neither valuation nor dilution was disclosed.
Old College Capital's presence is the notable line on the cap table: it is the University of Edinburgh's in-house venture investment vehicle, which means the institution retains direct equity exposure alongside the founder shareholding created at spinout. Scottish Enterprise adds public-sector capital to the register.
Dipesh Patel, formerly chief technology officer at Arm, has joined the board of directors as part of the transaction.
Conventional image sensors measure the intensity of light. SPAD sensors detect and time individual photons, which allows imaging systems to capture information ordinary cameras cannot resolve. Singular Photonics layers on-chip computation on top of that, so data is analysed at the point of detection rather than downstream — a design aimed at edge computing and physical AI applications where latency and power budgets are tight.
Two product families, Andarta and Sirona, are already commercially available and generating revenue. Customer engagements span machine vision, industrial automation, scientific instrumentation and medical imaging, and include a recent collaboration with Renishaw.
Imani said the company has already doubled its 2025 sales and is approaching break-even, and that the oversubscription lets it expand the sensor portfolio on customer timelines rather than its own.
Tim Mills, managing partner at ACF Investors, framed the thesis as a shift in the industry from capturing images to generating actionable insight directly from light.
The proceeds will scale engineering capacity and shorten time-to-market for new sensors. The raise lands against a strong year for the sector: UK semiconductor funding reached £237m in 2026 by mid-August, already ahead of the whole of 2025, with Scotland an increasingly visible source of deal flow.
Original source: UKTN
