UK startup StirLight has secured £1.25 million to commercialise its technology and accelerate the adoption of advanced manufacturing processes at scale by major industrial original equipment manufacturers. The company combines friction stir welding expertise with StirSense, a proprietary real-time process-monitoring and quality-assurance platform.
StirLight serves R&D engineers and production teams in the nuclear, aerospace, defence, automotive and energy sectors through consulting and contract manufacturing. Friction stir welding produces stronger, lighter, more repeatable joints than traditional fusion welding, with no filler materials, no shielding gas and significantly lower energy consumption.
Adopting the technique enables manufacturers to increase productivity and reduce reliance on a shrinking skilled workforce.
While used by leading manufacturers in aerospace, automotive and defence, wider industrial adoption has faced a persistent challenge: the inability to verify weld quality during production.
Manufacturers have had to rely instead on costly, time-consuming post-weld inspection. The StirSense proprietary process monitoring platform addresses this directly. It captures and analyses process-specific data to provide in-process anomaly detection and traceable quality records for every joint.
StirLight is led by three co-founders: Dr Jeroen De Backer (CTO), Dan Lord CEng (COO) and Toby Savage-Yu (CEO).
The funding comprises over £750,000 in pre-seed investment from Haatch Ventures, The British Business Bank, D2N2 and angel investors, alongside approximately £500,000 in grant funding from Innovate UK and The Aerospace Technology Institute (‘ATI’) across two R&D projects.
StirLight has been trading since March 2024, building its capability and generating revenue from FSW services and contract manufacturing for clients in the aerospace, automotive and nuclear sectors.
Proceeds will support pilot deployments of StirSense with industrial partners, the creation of highly skilled engineering and data science roles, and the continued development of StirLight’s core technology platform. The Company is actively seeking partnerships with manufacturers in aerospace, automotive, defence and energy who want to integrate real-time quality assurance into their friction stir welding (‘FSW’) operations.
According to Toby Savage-Yu, CEO of StirLight, FSW produces some of the best joints in the world. The problem has always been proving it at scale, and that is what StirSense solves:
“We are delighted by the support from Innovate UK, ATI, and our pre-seed investors who moved quickly to back this critical technology.
We have been building this company over the last two years and the team’s work to get us here has been exceptional.
The team is looking forward to putting this funding to work and showing what UK manufacturing innovation can deliver.”
Lead image: The StirLight Team L/R: Toby Savage-Yu, Jeroen De Backer, Alex Bennett, Dan Lord, and Sri Ranga Sai Tulasi.
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