Silveray

Silveray is a deep-tech spin-out originally founded at the University of Surrey in 2018, now headquartered in Greater Manchester. The company is developing Digital X-ray Film (DXF) — a flexible, printable detector that converts X-rays directly into digital images at the point of use, replacing the analogue film still widely used across industrial and medical radiography today.

Despite decades of digital transformation, many industries — from pipeline inspection and aerospace to oil & gas — still rely on analogue radiographic film that must be chemically processed and physically stored before images can be reviewed. Existing digital flat-panel detectors are rigid, expensive, and can't navigate tight spaces, leaving a significant portion of the market stranded on outdated workflows.

Silveray's core innovation is a nanoparticle-based semiconductor ink that can be coated onto a flexible electronic backplane, creating a direct-conversion detector that wraps around pipes, feeds into confined spaces, and connects directly to a laptop via USB-C. Unlike indirect conversion systems that trade off image resolution against radiation dose, Silveray's direct conversion approach delivers superior image quality without compromise — and at a cost point competitive with analogue film.

The company raised £4M in a seed extension in November 2024, led by Northern Gritstone with co-investment from ACF Investors, Empirical Ventures, Deeptech Labs, and Hamamatsu Ventures. The funding will support the company's first product launch for the industrial radiography market in 2025, with a longer-term ambition to bring the technology into medical imaging including flexible mammography detectors.