- Singular Photonics has attracted $2.15 million in an oversubscribed funding round led by ACF Investors.
- Dipesh Patel, who used to be the CTO of Arm, has now been appointed to the board as the company is progressing with on-chip processing.
- The company states that its projected sales for 2025 have almost doubled this year and are therefore nearing the break-even point.
Traditional cameras measure and average the amount of light reaching each pixel, but Singular Photonics considers this method outdated. Instead, its sensors count individual photons, and this approach has been supported by the recent appointment of a former chief technology officer at Arm to the board.
The company, based in Edinburgh, has completed a $2.15 million funding round led by ACF Investors, which was oversubscribed. Among the other investors are Wren Capital, Cambridge Angels, Scottish Enterprise, Quantum Exponential, and Old College Capital, the venture fund of the University of Edinburgh.
“We’ve already doubled our 2025 sales, we’re approaching break-even, and our customers are telling us exactly what they want from future product,” Shahida Imani, the startup’s co-founder and chief executive, tells Tech Funding News.
SPADs, or single-photon avalanche diode sensors, are currently used in most smartphones as part of facial recognition systems, but these chips only register when photons arrive and do not process the data in real time. Singular aims to carry out computation directly within the sensor, just as a microprocessor functions inside a computer.
From research to intelligent chip development
Singular Photonics was established in February 2024 by members of the CMOS Sensors and Systems Group at the University of Edinburgh, a research initiative carried out over many years by Professor Robert Henderson, who co-founded the company with Aravind Venugopalan and Neil Finlayson.
As Dipesh Patel, former CTO of ARM, pointed out, “Singular Photonics is turning image sensors from passive imaging devices into intelligent sensing platforms. Although SPADs have always been considered highly sensitive photon-counting devices, Singular is now demonstrating that a much greater opportunity has emerged,” he said.
Sony, STMicroelectronics, and AMS OSRAM have already developed SPAD sensors for use in the consumer market, whereas Imani emphasises that Singular is distinguished by the particularity of its architecture rather than by its size.
As Imani notes, cooled sensor alternatives cannot be introduced into high-volume markets because cooling is very difficult, meaning they can’t be used in consumer applications and result in higher manufacturing costs.
Of the other manufacturers competing with us, all of them read the information off the sensor and then process it on the PCBs, outside the chip; since we carry out all the processing on the chip, this is indeed our main advantage over the competitors.
This advantage allowed one company to succeed: in 2025, Pi Imaging Technology, the Swiss manufacturer of SPAD cameras, was acquired by Zeiss rather than choosing to grow independently. Singular, on the other hand, is concentrating on on-chip computation for use in machine vision, industrial automation, and physical AI, with the aim of establishing a broader market presence and remaining independent.
Renishaw, an instrumentation company listed in the UK, is Singular’s first strategic partner. Imani states that the company currently sells directly to customers listed on the Nasdaq in the United States as well as to buyers in Japan.
The next step will be to establish a formal distributor network and to open a satellite office abroad, just as other Edinburgh startups have done when commercialising university research.
The money, the market, and what’s still open
This funding round follows a £1 million investment in March 2025 from the Scottish Venture Fund, Cambridge Angels, and Old College Capital, bringing the company’s total funding to just over $3 million.
Derek Shaw, who is responsible for company funding and investment at Scottish Enterprise, put it in regional terms by saying, “The photonics, quantum, sensing and connectivity, and semiconductors sector is a key area of opportunity for growth in Scotland.”
The money obtained will be used to carry out a tape-out for a next-generation sensor that has been shaped by two and a half years’ worth of customer feedback. A fourth product is also due to be launched. The team, which is now made up of about 10 people, is expected to grow by more than 100%.
Tim Mills, the managing partner at ACF, has before backed UK companies including Gousto, Ebury, and Form3, and referred to the deal as “an exciting addition to our portfolio, combining world-leading sensor science with genuine commercial promise.”
It will be the next funding round that demonstrates whether on-chip SPAD processing confers a lasting advantage to Singular or whether larger sensor companies will eventually include this feature in their own products.
