Bristol tech start-up Zero Point Motion has raised £2.58m in a seed funding round to build a state-of-the-art lab in the city as it develops a new kind of navigation and motion-sensing microchip.
The investment also means that Zero Point Motion founder and CEO Dr Ying Lia Li, pictured, can return to her home town as she accelerates research and development of the firm’s photonic inertial sensor chips. 
The firm, one of only a handful of UK fabless silicon chip companies aiming to compete with major Silicon Valley players, will initially target the fast-growing drone and robotics market.
Zero Point Motion’s chips use optical sensing techniques from the research area known as ‘cavity optomechanics’ that has already revolutionised gravitational wave detection and quantum research.
By integrating these techniques into smartphones, cars and game controllers, sensitivity and performance can be improved 100 times, so reducing positioning error, enabling longer tracking without global navigation satellite systems and increasing stability in hand-held or head-mounted devices.
Dr Lia Li has more than a decade of academic research experience in cavity optomechanics, combined with inertial sensor expertise from the defence industry.
She has chosen to return to Bristol, where she lived from the age of 3 to 18, to set up the company rather than remain in London, where her academic research was based. The investment will initially create around 10 jobs.
Dr Lia Li sees Zero Point Motion’s cavity optomechanics as a natural evolution for the $15bn inertial sensing market.
Dr Lia Li, who recently won an Innovate UK Women in Innovation award to coincide with International Women’s Day, said: “With proven capability to detect motion smaller than the size of a single electron sees, cavity optomechanical sensing has already had extraordinary benefits for fundamental physics research.
“Now, we are harnessing this power to improve the inertial sensing devices we’ve come to rely on, bringing untold new potential to drones, VR/AR, indoor navigation and imaging stabilisation.”
The £2.58m seed round was led by Foresight-Williams Technology together with Verve Ventures and u blox – a global technology leader in positioning and wireless communication and services.
After launching in 2020, Zero Point Motion won a UCLQ Quantum Science and Technology Institute InQuBATE grant and gained pre-seed investment from u-blox to file patents and develop their commercial roadmap.
Gordon Aspin, who previously co-founded chipset and software companies TTP Communications and Cognovo, joined the founding team last year as chairman.
Although its type of technology has never been commercialised before, Zero Point Motion’s vision is to bring together expertise in photonic integrated circuits (PICs), micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) engineering and application specific integrated circuits (ASICs).
It is now seeking ambitious and visionary engineers to work as part of a team developing its first commercial products.
Coinciding with the investment Chris Wiles of Foresight-Williams Technology and Dr Tony Milbourn of u-blox – bot with experience in hardware and deep-tech ventures – will be joining the firm’s board.
