Siloton, GBP 8.4M Innovate UK contract
Siloton has an £8.4 million (€9.98 million) contract from Innovate UK for a handheld eye scanner. EU-Startups lists two earlier funding announcements for the Bristol company: £470,000 in 2022 and £860,000 in 2024. Together that is about £1.33 million (our arithmetic), so the contract is roughly six times as large. That sum leaves out any earlier Innovate UK contract. The company's release was published on 14 October 2026.
It is a contract, not equity and not a grant. Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation, buys research and development services at a fair market value in its Contracts for Innovation competitions, with no match funding required, according to the published terms. The company names the programme as the Quantum Missions Primer. An Innovate UK competition with a similar name, the Quantum Sensors and PNT Missions Primer, capped first-phase contracts at £1.5 million including VAT and seven months. This contract runs two years and is 5.6 times that cap (our arithmetic). No source says that the two are the same programme or which phase this is. On 11 November 2025, UK Research and Innovation listed Siloton as lead on one of 14 projects in the competition, £14.8 million in total, with no per-project amounts.
Siloton was founded in Bristol in April 2020, according to EU-Startups. The company says it compresses the optical parts of an OCT eye scanner onto a single chip smaller than a £1 coin. Its GiraffeOCT is a binocular-style device in in-clinic and at-home versions. The company says ophthalmology is the busiest NHS outpatient specialty, with nearly 623,000 people waiting at the end of July 2026.
The limits: the sources announce no investor money, and the company says it plans to raise further investment after the contract. No regulatory approval is mentioned, and the NHS cost savings are estimates to be refined, not results. EU-Startups reported the contract on 19 October 2026, five days after the company's release.
What the money pays for: designing the in-clinic and at-home versions of GiraffeOCT and completing trials on both, including trials with Sunderland Specialist Eye Hospital, plus work on a second-generation device, a cloud platform and UK manufacturing. The company expects its team to grow to 16 by August 2028.