Opteran raised £2.1 million in seed funding in a round led by IQ Capital with Episode1, Join and Seraphim Capital also participating.

Opteran, a Sheffield UK-based Natural Intelligence company, announced completing a seed funding round of £2.1 million ($2.8M)

The money was raised from British investors led by IQ Capital with Episode1, Join and Seraphim Capital also participating. Following on from a pre-seed round from the Connecting Capabilities Fund of the British Business Bank, the latest funding round also includes angel investors and a CCF grant, a part of the Northern Triangle Initiative.

The proceeds will be used for more product research into the lightweight, low cost silicon-based approach to autonomy called Natural Intelligence as the company explores more product market fit solutions in areas such as autonomy in machines and robotics.

Opteran was founded in 2020 as an University of Sheffield spin-out based based research by Professor James Marshall and Dr. Alex Cope into insect brains as part of the Green Brain and Brains on Board projects. The company reverse-engineers biological systems onto silicon, enabling machines to see, sense, navigate and make decisions better than existing AI approaches.

The technology is weighing approximately 30g and is drawing less than a watt of power - the Opteran Development Kit (ODK) aims to be integrated into a wide variety of applications in the robotics market, autonomous vehicles, drones or mining robots.