Zero Point Motion Raises £4M Pre-Series A to Commercialise Quantum-Inspired Navigation Sensors

March 13, 2025

Zero Point Motion, a Bristol-based deep-tech sensor startup, has closed a £4 million pre-Series A funding round as it emerges from stealth mode after years of confidential product development. The round was backed by SCVC — the official venture capital arm of Science Creates, Bristol’s deep-tech ecosystem — Foresight Group, and Verve Ventures. Seed round investor u-blox AG, the Swiss precision positioning specialist, remains a key strategic partner and customer. The company was founded by Dr Ying Lia Li, an award-winning physicist who became an Executive Fellow of the University of Bristol’s quantum pre-incubation programme QTEC in 2019 and is a member of the University’s Quantum Technologies Innovation Centre. The capital will fuel team expansion and scale-up of volume production processes for Zero Point Motion’s next-generation navigation sensors.

Precise positioning and navigation are foundational to autonomous systems, yet global navigation satellite systems such as GPS are unavailable in many of the environments where autonomous technology is most needed: underground, indoors, underwater, in dense urban canyons, and in contested environments where signals can be jammed or spoofed. The fallback in GPS-denied conditions is inertial navigation — using accelerometers and gyroscopes to track motion relative to a known starting point — but conventional micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) sensors accumulate errors rapidly, limiting how long and how precisely they can navigate without an external reference fix. Higher-performance inertial sensors exist, but are typically large, expensive, and impractical for consumer and autonomous systems applications.

Zero Point Motion’s breakthrough is a radical fusion of silicon photonics and MEMS, inspired by the Nobel Prize-winning gravitational wave detection principles developed to measure the most minute vibrations in the universe. By applying opto-mechanical cavity sensing — where light is used to detect infinitesimal displacements rather than conventional capacitive electrical sensing — the company has produced accelerometers and gyroscopes that are 100 times more sensitive than conventional MEMS sensors, at low cost and in a miniaturised, volume-manufacturable form factor. The sensors deliver unprecedented performance in GPS-challenged environments, enabling longer dead-reckoning capability and opening up autonomous navigation for drones, autonomous vehicles, wearables, and robotics.

The company has already secured major non-dilutive validation alongside its investor backing: £1.3M from the UK’s Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles in 2023, followed by a €2.4M grant from the European Innovation Council Accelerator programme. It has also been named one of Sifted’s 16 Bristol-based Startups to Watch. With u-blox — a global leader in positioning modules with annual revenues exceeding $700 million — as both investor and customer, Zero Point Motion enters commercialisation with significant industry credibility.

SCVC co-founder Harry Destecroix, who led the deal alongside partner John Williams (founder of Kudan, a visual positioning company), described Zero Point Motion as a category-defining technology unlocking massive potential across autonomous vehicles, robotics, and consumer electronics. Foresight’s Chris Wiles, who backed the company from as early as 2021, noted the growing market need for accurate navigation in challenging environments as a key driver behind the follow-on commitment. The £4M will enable Zero Point Motion to begin scaled commercial production, accelerate partnerships with automotive and defence OEMs, and build the team required to support customer deployment at volume.

Sources