Zero Point Motion Emerges from Stealth

Sensor technology startup Zero Point Motion has closed a £4 million ($5.2 million) pre-series A funding round. The investment supports the company’s scale-up efforts and the expansion of its team as the company develops a scalable volume-manufacturable process for its next-generation positioning and navigation sensors. The investment round was supported by SCVC (the official funding arm of Science Creates), Foresight Group, Verve Ventures, and u-blox AG.

Zero Point Motion’s technology platform combines silicon photonics and MEMS to create high performance miniaturized accelerometers and gyroscopes suitable for defense, space, and autonomous systems. Courtesy of Zero Point Motion.

“We’re working with two of the world’s leading foundries to push MEMS performance beyond its limits,” said Lia Li, founder and CEO of Zero Point Motion. “We’ve also brought more integration and packaging R&D in-house, cutting iteration times from eight weeks to just one day.”

Zero Point Motion’s technology fuses silicon photonics and MEMS, taking inspiration from Nobel Prize-winning gravitational wave detection principles. The approach enables low-cost, low noise, miniaturized accelerometers and gyroscopes that are 100 times more sensitive compared to conventional MEMS sensors. The technology has applications in defense, space exploration, and autonomous systems.
The company raised a $15 million seed round in 2022, and has also secured major government and EU funding, including £1.3 million from the U.K.’s Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV) in 2023, followed by a €2.4 million grant from the European Innovation Council Accelerator program.

The funding comes amid a surge of activity for optics- and photonics-enabled positioning, navigation, and timing companies. Silicon photonics gyroscope technology developer ANELLO Photonics released its maritime inertial navigation system earlier this year, and Honeywell acquired optical gyroscopy specialist Civitanavi Systems in April.