StirLight, an advanced manufacturing startup, has secured £1.3 million in pre-seed funding from Haatch Ventures, The British Business Bank, D2N2 and angel investors. The funding also includes grant support from Innovate UK and The Aerospace Technology Institute. It will be used to commercialise StirSense and support pilot deployments, hiring, and continued development of its technology platform.
It develops a proprietary process monitoring platform for friction stir welding, a method used in aerospace, automotive, defence and energy manufacturing. While the technique produces stronger and more repeatable joints than traditional welding, manufacturers have been unable to verify weld quality during production and instead rely on post-weld inspection. StirSense captures and analyses process-specific data to detect anomalies in real time and provide traceable quality records for each joint.
Funding includes over £750,000 in pre-seed investment and approximately £500,000 in grant funding across two research and development projects. The proceeds will support pilot deployments with industrial partners, the creation of engineering and data science roles, and further development of the core platform. StirLight is also seeking partnerships with manufacturers to integrate real-time quality assurance into friction stir welding operations. Grant-funded research through Innovate UK is supporting further development, including machine-learning enabled insight for advanced joining processes in high-value applications.
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. We are looking forward to putting this funding to work and showing what UK manufacturing innovation can deliver.
FSW inherently produces high-value, multi-sensor data streams. The missing piece has been the capability to fuse and interpret that data in real time. StirSense closes that gap, enabling in-process quality verification, fundamentally changing how weld integrity is assured.
