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Pixel-Flo, a University of Sheffield spinout, has raised £5 million in seed funding to commercialise its proprietary Continuous-Flow Mass Transfer technology — a scalable, cost-efficient manufacturing process designed to solve the critical bottleneck preventing MicroLED displays from reaching mass market.
The round was led by Northern Gritstone, with participation from SCVC — Science Creates' investment arm —, Parkwalk Northern University Venture Fund, and German-based HTGF.
MicroLED offers 2–5x higher brightness and 2–4x greater energy efficiency than conventional display technology, but existing mass transfer methods have proven difficult to scale. Pixel-Flo's approach extends industry-standard coating tools, reducing costs with panel size and improving wafer utilisation across all display segments.
Founded by Dr Rick Smith, Dr Suneal Ghataora, and Simon Jones, the company draws on long-running LED research from the University of Sheffield's School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, combined with extensive commercial display industry experience. The funding will support the team's transition from laboratory development to industrial scale-up, including expansion into a new facility and the hiring of a Taiwan-based Business Development VP to drive early customer engagement in a key global market.
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.”"
John Williams, General Partner at SCVC, said:
"Deep Tech is full of breakthrough technologies looking for a problem to solve. Pixel-Flo inverted that — an elegant solution to the bottleneck that has held MicroLED back, a display technology that outperforms on every metric. The syndicate around them reflects what the management team has already built."
SCVC is Science Creates' investment arm, specialised in early-stage Deep Tech companies in the UK from pre-seed to series A, using our ‘technology-product fit’ model to guide teams through technical and commercial de-risking.
