Pixel-Flo raises £5.25M seed to scale MicroLED manufacturing
July 9, 2026
Pixel-Flo, a University of Sheffield spinout developing a cheaper way to manufacture MicroLED displays, has raised £5.25 million (around $7 million) in a seed round led by Northern Gritstone.
MicroLED is widely seen as the next step for screens, promising several times the brightness and a marked efficiency gain over the LCD and OLED panels in most devices today. Its adoption has stalled on a single manufacturing hurdle: moving millions of microscopic LEDs from the wafer they are grown on to a display backplane, a step the industry calls mass transfer. Existing mechanical methods are too slow and costly to scale, keeping MicroLED confined to laboratories and high-end televisions.
Pixel-Flo's answer is a process it calls Continuous-Flow Mass Transfer. Rather than picking and placing each LED individually with robotics, the company suspends the chips in a fluid and uses patterned surfaces and fluid forces to guide them into position through self-assembly. The technique runs continuously and plugs into standard industry coating tools, letting a manufacturer produce different panel sizes on one line while cutting processing and material costs. The approach draws on semiconductor photonics research by co-founder Dr Suneal Ghataora in the lab of chief executive Dr Rick Smith, with commercial input from co-founder Simon Jones, a display-industry veteran.
The company was spun out of the University of Sheffield's School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering and came through NG Studios, Northern Gritstone's deep-tech venture builder. It recently appointed Taiwan-based Sanger Hsu as vice president of business development to build early relationships with display manufacturers in Asia, where most of the world's panels are made.
The oversubscribed round also drew SCVC, the Parkwalk Northern Universities Venture Fund and German investor HTGF. Pixel-Flo plans to use the money to move from laboratory development to industrial scale-up, expand its team and relocate to larger lab and office space. "This investment allows us to expand our team and demonstrate our unique technology on a commercial coating system," said Smith, framing the raise as a step toward evaluation by manufacturing partners.
Sources
Thank you to our Patrons & Partners:
