Edinburgh sensor company Singular Photonics has closed an oversubscribed $2.15m funding round, or about £1.59m, and says its sales so far this year are already double what it took for the whole of 2025, with break-even in sight.
The company also appointed Dipesh Patel, formerly chief technology officer of Arm, to its board. Patel spent 25 years at the Cambridge chip designer, ending as CTO with responsibility for research and digital IT — a signal of the calibre of industry figure the Edinburgh business is now able to attract.
ACF Investors led the round. Scottish Enterprise and Old College Capital, the University of Edinburgh’s in-house venture fund, both took part, as did Wren Capital, Cambridge Angels and Quantum Exponential. Chairman Pete Hutton said existing shareholders had followed the new investors in, “meeting or exceeding their pre-emption rights”.
Singular is a fabless semiconductor company, meaning it designs chips rather than manufacturing them. Its sensors are built on single photon avalanche diodes, or SPADs, which detect individual particles of light, and its distinguishing work is stacking computation directly beneath the sensor so that processing happens where the photons land. The money will go on engineering capacity and on getting new sensors to market faster, aimed at machine vision, industrial automation, physical AI, scientific instruments and medical imaging.
“This has been a phenomenal year for Singular Photonics,” said chief executive Shahida Imani. “We’ve already doubled our 2025 sales, we’re approaching break-even, and our customers are telling us exactly what they want from future products. This oversubscribed round means we can respond faster — expanding our sensor portfolio and bringing new features to market on our customers’ timelines, not just our own.”
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The company came out of stealth in January 2025, spun out of the University of Edinburgh’s School of Engineering. It was co-founded by Professor Robert Henderson with two former members of his lab, Dr Aravind Venugopalan, now chief technical officer, and Dr Neil Finlayson, now applications scientist, alongside Imani. Edinburgh Innovations, the university’s commercialisation arm, says Henderson designed the first SPAD image sensor on a silicon CMOS chip and that the technology is now in 170 different smartphone models. In December 2025 the company announced a collaboration on spectroscopy with Renishaw, the microscopy, metrology and analytical instrumentation group.
Scottish Enterprise’s director of company funding and investment, Derek Shaw, said the agency had backed the company “over several years” and that photonics, quantum, sensing and connectivity and semiconductors is “a key opportunity area for growth for Scotland”.
