Quick Read:
- Pre-seed investment from Haatch Ventures, The British Business Bank, D2N2 and angel investors alongside grant funding from Innovate UK and The Aerospace Technology Institute (‘ATI’)
- Proceeds to accelerate commercialisation of StirSense, a proprietary quality assurance platform for friction stir welding (‘FSW’) across aerospace, automotive, defence and energy supply chains.
StirLight has secured £1.25 million to commercialise its technology and accelerate the adoption of advanced manufacturing processes at scale by major industrial original equipment manufacturers.
The funding comprises over £750,000 in pre-seed investment from Haatch Ventures, The British Business Bank, D2N2 and angel investors, alongside approximately £500,000 in grant funding from Innovate UK and The Aerospace Technology Institute (‘ATI’) across two R&D projects.
Proceeds will support pilot deployments of StirSense with industrial partners, the creation of highly skilled engineering and data science roles, and the continued development of StirLight’s core technology platform.
The Company is actively seeking partnerships with manufacturers in aerospace, automotive, defence and energy who want to integrate real-time quality assurance into their friction stir welding (‘FSW’) operations.
Friction stir welding produces stronger, lighter, more repeatable joints than traditional fusion welding, with no filler materials, no shielding gas and significantly lower energy consumption.
Adopting the technique enables manufacturers to increase productivity and reduce reliance on a shrinking skilled workforce.
While used by leading manufacturers in aerospace, automotive and defence, wider industrial adoption has faced a persistent challenge: the inability to verify weld quality during production. Manufacturers have had to rely instead on costly, time-consuming post-weld inspection.
The StirSense proprietary process monitoring platform addresses this directly. It captures and analyses process-specific data to provide in-process anomaly detection and traceable quality records for every joint.
Grant-funded R&D through Innovate UK is supporting further technology development and machine-learning powered insight enabling the use of advanced joining processes in high-value applications.
Toby S-Yu, Chief Executive Officer of StirLight, said:
“FSW produces some of the best joints in the world. The problem has always been proving it at scale, and that is what StirSense solves.
“We are delighted by the support from Innovate UK, ATI, and our pre-seed investors who moved quickly to back this critical technology.
“We have been building this company over the last two years and the team’s work to get us here has been exceptional. We are looking forward to putting this funding to work and showing what UK manufacturing innovation can deliver.”
Jeroen De Backer, Chief Technology Officer of StirLight, said:
“FSW inherently produces high-value, multi-sensor data streams. The missing piece has been the capability to fuse and interpret that data in real time. StirSense closes that gap, enabling in-process quality verification, fundamentally changing how weld integrity is assured.”
StirLight has been trading since March 2024, building its capability and generating revenue from FSW services and contract manufacturing for clients in the aerospace, automotive and nuclear sectors. The Company is based at its facility in North Derbyshire.
Pre-seed advisors to StirLight included gunnercooke, Innovate Growth UK and Venture.Community.
