Innovate UK awarded Siloton an £8.4M contract over two years to develop GiraffeOCT, a handheld optical coherence tomography system built on a photonic chip. The Bristol company announced the award October 14 under the Contracts for Innovation: Quantum Missions Primer program. GiraffeOCT puts components that normally fill a tabletop onto a chip smaller than a £1 coin, in a binocular form factor for retinal disease monitoring. Siloton says the contract could cut up to two years off its development timeline.
The work covers an in-clinic and an at-home version, plus integration of the second-generation BlueJay chip. Sunderland Specialist Eye Hospital will run the in-clinic trials, and York Health Economics Consortium will turn the trial data into NHS cost estimates. Non-dilutive money at this size is unusual for a company that raised £470,000 in 2022 and still counts fewer than ten staff. Siloton expects to reach 16 people by August 2028 and plans an equity round behind its CheetahOCT second-generation device.