Funding
Earlier this month, Siloton — a startup developing an at-home monitoring service for the 25% of over 60s with age-related macular degeneration — announced it had received funding, totalling £470,000.
On the funding round, Alasdair Price, CEO of Siloton, said:
“The closing of Siloton’s first round of investment represents a new chapter in the company’s history. We have a strong management team with world-leading technical know-how. This knowledge is complemented by the considerable expertise contained within our investor base; including clinical, sector, and commercial experts. We are all deeply excited to begin working together and building a compelling product for patients with age-related macular degeneration.”
Founded in 2020 by Alasdair Price and Euan Allen, Bristol, UK-based Siloton is an alumnus of the Quantum Technologies Enterprise Centre (QTEC) incubator programme, and the startup’s new generation of diagnostic imaging device leveraging photonic integrated circuit (PIC) “allows Siloton to realize the order of magnitude reductions in size and cost while increasing device robustness.”
Siloton
Filing its first patent back in November 2020 that covers the design and integration of their revolutionary photonic chip, Siloton is utilizing technology that combines a next-generation diagnostic imaging device with cloud-based digital health tools. All this will contribute to alleviating the burden of treatment, ease pressure put on healthcare systems and — what could be the most important benefit of all — help patients retain their sight for longer.
This has been made possible due to technology called Photonic Integrated Circuits or PICs.
“PICs mean we can reduce the size of these integrated diagnostic systems by 10x, while at the same time making them extremely robust to accidental damage. This size reduction also facilitates the human factors driven design of ergonomic patient-centric systems, unlike in the traditional approach which is often constrained by bulky and fragile components,” said Euan Allen, Siloton’s CTO and second Co-Founder.
Prior to founding Siloton, CEO Alasdair Price had a career as an Undergraduate Researcher in Quantum Computing at the Ion Quantum Technology Group, University of Sussex, as well as — in his last post at the University of Bristol — the Commercialisation and Technology Development Lead for the SLOW MO Project where he explored the commercialization opportunities for a fibre-optic module that suppresses relative intensity noise in lasers down to the quantum limit and developed a portable demonstrator and carried out extensive market research across a range of sectors.
Sandwiched in between these posts, Price worked as a Photonic Design Engineer and Photonic Engineering Consultant at Bristol-based KETS Quantum Security, a startup focused on quantum-secured communications, including quantum key distribution (QKD) and quantum random number generation (QRNG).
He obtained his Ph.D. in Quantum Engineering from the University of Bristol.
Price’s Co-Founder is Euan Allen, a Research Fellow at the University of Bristol focusing on integrated and quantum optics with applications in sensing and machine learning.
Allen received his Ph.D. in Integrated and Quantum Optics for Sensing from the University of Bristol.
The recent funding, the leadership and the expertise of the founders leveraging the IP of photonic integrated circuits to develop a home-based optical coherence tomography system for patients with age-related macular degeneration is an exciting prospect.
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