Edinburgh's Singular Photonics raises £1.6M / €1.85M as its SPAD sensors find buyers across nine countries

Singular Photonics (Edinburgh) has raised £1.6 million (approximately €1.85 million) in an oversubscribed early-stage round led by ACF Investors, with participation from Wren Capital, Cambridge Angels, Scottish Enterprise, Quantum Exponential, and Old College Capital. The company did not label the round by stage. Alongside the capital, Dipesh Patel — former CTO of Arm — joins the board as a non-executive director.

Singular Photonics was founded in February 2024 as a spinout from the University of Edinburgh, specifically from the laboratory of Professor Robert Henderson, whose research group has worked on single-photon imaging for more than a decade. The four founders are Shahida Imani (CEO), Dr. Aravind Venugopalan (CTO), Professor Henderson, and Dr. Neil Finlayson.

What SPAD sensors see that conventional cameras cannot

A standard image sensor collects many photons per pixel and averages the signal to produce a picture. A SPAD (single-photon avalanche diode) sensor detects and timestamps individual photons. That single architectural difference produces capabilities that conventional cameras — CCD or CMOS — cannot replicate: imaging in near-total darkness, millimetre-precision distance measurement via time-of-flight, signal recovery from noise levels that would saturate a standard sensor, and capture of events that happen faster than any conventional frame rate can resolve.

The applications are not theoretical. Machine vision systems that need to see fine surface defects in challenging lighting; LiDAR arrays for autonomous vehicles and robotics; fluorescence lifetime imaging for medical diagnostics and drug screening; time-resolved spectroscopy for research instruments. In each case, the SPAD sensor does something no conventional imager can, which creates a market that is not competitive with existing camera hardware but additive to it.

Singular Photonics has two commercial product families in the market — Andarta and Sirona — both generating revenue since the company was founded roughly eighteen months ago. The company reports that it has doubled full-year 2025 sales in the course of 2026 to date, is approaching break-even, and has customers across nine countries. A confirmed commercial collaboration with precision engineering company Renishaw is publicly documented.

Dipesh Patel and the supply chain question

The appointment of Dipesh Patel to the board is more consequential than the capital raised. As former CTO of Arm — the company whose instruction set architecture is the backbone of the global mobile and embedded computing ecosystem — Patel's operational experience runs directly to the semiconductor IP licensing, foundry relationships, and ecosystem management that scaling a fabless chip company requires.

SPAD sensors are not made in commodity CMOS fabs. They require specialist fabrication processes — typically running in a small number of research-grade or specialty fabs worldwide — and access to the right process node at viable economics and adequate volume is the supply-side constraint that will determine whether Singular Photonics can convert growing customer demand into delivered silicon. The oversubscribed close on a round this size signals that existing investors competed for allocation — a positive indicator of product differentiation at a moment when European deep-tech is navigating genuinely tight capital conditions.

The £1.6 million will fund engineering team growth and accelerated product development across the company's roadmap. The 18-month question is not whether the technology works — the customer base across nine countries establishes that — but whether Singular Photonics can secure the foundry access and production capacity its demand pipeline requires.