Singular Photonics raises £1.6M to bring computation onto single-photon image sensors

August 19, 2026

Singular Photonics, the Edinburgh-based fabless semiconductor company, has raised £1.6 million ($2.15 million) in an oversubscribed round led by ACF Investors, with participation from Wren Capital, Cambridge Angels, Scottish Enterprise, Quantum Exponential and Old College Capital.

Image sensors sit underneath almost every camera, industrial vision system and scientific instrument in use today, and nearly all of them work the same way: they measure how much light lands on each pixel. That approach is running out of headroom. Averaging intensity discards the information carried in when each photon arrives, which is precisely the information needed for depth measurement, fluorescence lifetime analysis and imaging through scattering or high-noise environments. Sensors built on single-photon avalanche diodes (SPADs) detect and time individual photons instead, but they generate enormous volumes of raw timing data that conventionally has to be shipped off-chip to be processed — a bottleneck that has kept the technology confined to research labs and a handful of smartphone autofocus modules.

Singular Photonics' approach is to put the computation where the light lands. The company integrates processing directly into the SPAD sensor die, so timing data is turned into a usable result on-chip rather than streamed out for external analysis. That cuts data transfer, shrinks system size and makes real-time operation viable at the edge. Two product families, Andarta and Sirona, are commercially available and generating revenue, sold into machine vision, industrial automation, physical AI, scientific instrumentation and medical imaging. Renishaw, the listed UK instrumentation group, built Singular's Sirona sensor into a time-resolved Raman spectroscopy module for its inVia confocal microscope, using the sensor's photon timing to separate Raman signals from fluorescence backgrounds that would otherwise swamp them.

The company has already doubled its full-year 2025 sales in 2026 to date and says it is approaching break-even. It sells directly to Nasdaq-listed customers in the US and to buyers in Japan, and has signed a European distribution partnership with AMS Technologies. The team currently numbers around ten and is expected to more than double. Singular was spun out of Professor Robert Henderson's CMOS Sensors and Systems Group at the University of Edinburgh in February 2024 — Henderson designed some of the first SPAD image sensors in nanometre CMOS in 2005 — and was co-founded by CEO Shahida Imani, CTO Dr Aravind Venugopalan, Henderson himself as scientific advisor, and Dr Neil Finlayson. It emerged from stealth in January 2025 and raised £1 million that March from the Scottish Venture Fund, Cambridge Angels and Old College Capital, bringing total funding to just over $3 million.

Alongside the round, Dipesh Patel — CTO of Arm until recently, after 25 years at the company — has joined the board. Existing shareholders met or exceeded their pre-emption rights, according to chairman Pete Hutton, and the round closed oversubscribed. The capital goes towards a tape-out for a next-generation sensor shaped by two and a half years of customer feedback, a fourth product line, and the engineering headcount to shorten time-to-market. "The industry is moving from capturing images to generating actionable insights directly from light itself," said Tim Mills, managing partner at ACF Investors.

Sources

Shahida Imani

Aravind Venugopalan

Singular Photonics