Northern Gritstone invests £2.5 million into University of Sheffield spinout Pixel-Flo
The £5.25 million Seed round has a strong investor syndicate including European tech investor High-Tech Grunderfonds (HTGF)
Northern Gritstone has made an £2.5 million investment into Pixel-Flo, a University of Sheffield spin-out addressing a critical bottleneck in MicroLED display manufacturing with its proprietary Continuous-Flow Mass Transfer technology. The £5.25 million Seed round was led by Northern Gritstone with additional investment from SCVC, the Parkwalk Northern Universities Venture Fund, and German investment firm, HTGF.
Pixel-Flo is developing the cost reduction breakthrough critically needed for MicroLED display manufacturing, through its highly scalable, cost-efficient approach. MicroLED is the next wave of display technology, offering 2-5x higher brightness and 2-4x greater efficiency than traditional displays. However, volume adoption of microLED is currently limited by the fundamental scalability challenges of mechanical mass transfer techniques. By comparison, Pixel-Flo’s proprietary fluidic self-assembly technology offers extremely high continuous throughput, delivering the high-performance of MicroLED at radically reduced processing and material cost. This will allow MicroLED enabled products from smartwatches to TVs to be made available at mass market price points.
Pixel-Flo was founded by Dr Rick Smith, Dr Suneal Ghataora, and Simon Jones. The company builds on novel semiconductor photonic research in Dr Smith’s lab, drawing on long-running LED research from the University of Sheffield's School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, and Simon Jones's extensive display-industry commercial experience. The latest oversubscribed funding round will support Pixel-Flo’s transition from laboratory development towards industrial scale-up, expanding their team and relocating to new lab and office space. Pixel-Flo’s international expansion ambitions are underscored by its recent hiring of a Taiwan-based Business Development VP, Sanger Hsu, focused on early customer engagement in a critical market for display technologies. Last year, Pixel-Flo was part of the NG Studios cohort, Northern Gritstone’s deeptech venture builder.
Rick Smith, CEO and Co-founder of Pixel-Flo, said: “This investment allows us to expand our team and demonstrate our unique technology on a commercial coating system, enabling partnership and evaluation by display manufacturing partners. We are proud to have a fantastic international consortium of complementary investors led by Northern Gritstone supporting our international ambitions to enable huge new market opportunities for microLED.”
Duncan Johnson, CEO of Northern Gritstone, said: “Pixel-Flo is a great example of the deep-tech innovation with global ambitions emerging from the Northern Arc that Northern Gritstone strives to support. As a graduate of our NG Studios venture building program, the company combines world-class science with a clear path to commercial impact. By developing a scalable, lower-cost solution, Pixel-Flo’s MicroLED mass transfer assembly process has the potential to unlock MicroLED displays for the mass market.”