- Pixel-Flo has raised £5.25 million in seed funding to solve microLED’s biggest manufacturing challenge: mass transfer.
- The University of Sheffield spinout has developed a Continuous-Flow Mass Transfer process that allows for fast, nonstop assembly where traditional mechanical methods fall short.
- Northern Gritstone led the funding round, with SCVC, the Parkwalk Northern Universities Venture Fund, and Germany’s HTGF also investing.
MicroLED technology is often seen as the future of displays, promising brighter and more efficient screens than what we have now. But so far, it has mostly been used in labs and high-end TVs. Pixel-Flo hopes to change that with its new £5.25 million funding.
Northern Gritstone led the round, with SCVC, the Parkwalk Northern Universities Venture Fund, and HTGF participating.
“This investment allows us to expand our team and demonstrate our unique technology on a commercial coating system, enabling partnership and evaluation by display manufacturing partners. We are proud to have a fantastic international consortium of complementary investors led by Northern Gritstone supporting our international ambitions to enable huge new market opportunities for microLED,” says Rick Smith, CEO and co-founder of Pixel-Flo.
Industry-wide, mass-transfer yields for features smaller than ten microns are still below sixty percent. This shortfall has slowed the launch of AR headsets and high-density panels. Mordor Intelligence estimates the microLED market will grow from $0.56 billion in 2026 to $2.17 billion by 2031.
Moving from lab research to commercial production
Pixel-Flo was founded in 2025 by Smith, Suneal Ghataora, and Simon Jones, and is based at the University of Sheffield’s Innovation Centre. The team brings together Smith’s background in semiconductor photonics, the university’s LED research, and Jones’s experience in the display industry.
Before this funding round, Pixel-Flo took part in Northern Gritstone’s NG Studios venture-builder program, just like another Sheffield spinout, AmpliSi.
Pixel-Flo’s technology uses fluidic self-assembly to keep microLED panels moving continuously, so there’s no need to stop and reload wafers, stamps, or carriers like with mechanical methods. This process works with current industry coating tools, letting manufacturers make different panel sizes on the same line without switching equipment.
How the industry is tackling the bottleneck
Pixel-Flo isn’t the only company working on this problem. Porotech in Cambridge raised £3 million in seed funding in 2021 and £15 million in Series A in 2022 to improve microLED display performance. Kubos Semiconductors got a £700,000 Innovate UK grant in 2023 to boost red microLED efficiency, and Smartkem received a £900,000 Innovate UK grant in 2024 for rollable, transparent displays.
While these companies focus on improving materials, Pixel-Flo is tackling the assembly process, which is the main bottleneck.
“Deep Tech is full of breakthrough technologies looking for a problem to solve. Pixel-Flo inverted that — an elegant solution to the bottleneck that has held microLED back, a display technology that outperforms on every metric. The syndicate around them reflects what the management team has already built,” says John Williams, general partner at SCVC.
“From my experience in displays and printed electronics, I know all too well how challenging it is to scale new display technologies. Pixel Flo’s approach targets precisely this critical bottleneck in the micro-LED market — and this team has what it takes to deliver a key technology for the next generation of displays,” adds Anne Umbach, senior investment manager at HTGF.
“Pixel-Flo is a great example of the deep-tech innovation with global ambitions emerging from the Northern Arc that Northern Gritstone strives to support. As a graduate of our NG Studios venture building program, the company combines world-class science with a clear path to commercial impact. By developing a scalable, lower-cost solution, Pixel-Flo’s MicroLED mass transfer assembly process has the potential to unlock MicroLED displays for the mass market,” says Duncan Johnson, chief executive of Northern Gritstone, whose firm has also backed Sheffield’s Sitehop and recently closed a £20 million round of its own backed by the British Business Bank.
What’s coming up next
Pixel-Flo plans to use the funding to move from lab development to industrial scale-up, grow its team, and relocate to new lab and office spaces. The company has named Sanger Hsu, who is based in Taiwan, as vice president of business development to connect with display manufacturers in Asia, where most panels are made.
The adoption of Pixel-Flo’s process as the industry standard for mass transfer will depend on its performance in manufacturers’ production lines rather than in laboratory settings.
