Bristol’s Siloton wins €9.98 million Innovate UK contract to develop its handheld eye imaging system
Siloton, a Bristol-based MedTech startup specialising in miniaturised optical technology for medical imaging, has been awarded a €9.98 million (£8.4 million) contract to accelerate development of its handheld eye imaging system, which makes detecting and monitoring retinal diseases more accessible to patients.
Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), awarded the contract through its Contracts for Innovation: Quantum Missions Primer initiative. The programme helps public sector organisations solve some of their most complex challenges by running competitive funding opportunities to develop new technologies.
Alasdair Price, CEO of Siloton, said, “Winning this Innovate UK contract allows us to accelerate the development of our systems, explore manufacturing and assembly in the UK, and help a groundbreaking new technology be adopted by the NHS more quickly.
“Many early-stage companies struggle to get beyond the well-known ‘valley of death’ in developing new products – particularly in healthcare – but this will support us through that crucial phase, bringing the Siloton system closer to being in patients’ hands and building a technology that can be used worldwide.”
Siloton was founded in April 2020 in Bristol, UK and is an alumnus of the Quantum Technologies Enterprise Centre (QTEC) incubator programme. The company is on a mission to ensure people with eye disease can receive sight-saving eye scans wherever and whenever they need them.
The company says it specialises in miniaturised optical technology for medical imaging, using photonic chips and OCT to detect and monitor major diseases. Its products are built around Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT), a technique widely used to detect and monitor some of the world’s most prevalent diseases, including age-related macular degeneration and glaucoma. It can also detect conditions such as multiple sclerosis, diabetes, and certain types of cancer.
OCT uses light to create detailed images of the inside of the eye, helping clinicians identify a range of health conditions and monitor their progress over time, Siloton explains.
However, according to the company, OCT systems are confined to specialist environments because the underlying optical hardware is large and fragile, limiting access.
Siloton claims that its photonic chip technology compresses a tabletop’s worth of heavy, expensive, and fragile components, such as mirrors, lenses, and fibre-optics, onto a single piece of material smaller than a coin. The UK startup notes that, like the chips that power phones, these are mass-manufacturable and can be used anywhere on or off planet Earth.
The company also notes that its GiraffeOCT is designed as an easy-to-use, binocular-style system that makes diagnosing and monitoring a range of treatable retinal diseases more affordable and accessible.
The company’s photonic chips are instrumental in delivering OCT at scale and power its new generation of portable eye scanners. Its core focus is on developing a complete ophthalmic OCT system for use in the clinic, community, and home.
The UK startup also highlighted that since 2025, it has started to make its chip technology available for use in other market segments through its OCT-Chip Development Kits.
The contract, delivered over two years, will help Siloton accelerate the design of the in-clinic and at-home versions of its GiraffeOCT optical coherence tomography (OCT) device, as well as complete trials on both systems. The startup expects the funding could cut the development process by up to two years.
Siloton will work with Sunderland Specialist Eye Hospital on clinical trials over the course of the contract for its in-clinic device, giving patients across the North East and North Cumbria access to the technology during its development. York Health Economics Consortium will also use this data to refine its cost-saving estimates for the NHS.
The startup expects the project to create several high-skilled jobs over the next two years, with the Siloton team expected to grow to 16 by August 2028. The roles will support the miniaturisation of the systems’ electronics, product development, and manufacturing plans across specialisms including photonics, electronics, and software development.
It plans to raise further investment following the contract win, strengthening its cash position for the next few years and supporting the development of its second-generation CheetahOCT device, designed to measure different retinal layers and expand the number of conditions it can detect.
“Developing the in‑clinic and at‑home versions of the system will help the government meet its ambitions of moving care into the community and bringing quantum technologies into the NHS. The contract will also allow us to expand our technology to cover a wider range of diseases, integrate our second‑generation BlueJay chip – the same architecture used in our system for astronauts – and build out the cloud platform that underpins the service,” added Price.
In August 2024, the company secured €1.02 million (£860k) in funding, and in 2022 announced the first closing of its investment round, totalling €558.4k (£470k). It is supported by key players in the ophthalmology space, including Moorfields Eye Hospital and the Macular Society. Its customers include the European Space Agency, which needs a long-term solution to monitor eye problems that astronauts frequently develop while in space.
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