£585k · Pre-Seed · Software · Sheffield, UK
Kinematic Trees, a Sheffield-based developer of robot-agnostic deployment software, has raised £585,000 in pre-seed funding from Haatch across its SEIS Fund, D2N2 Early-Stage Angel Investment Fund and British Business Bank Syndicate Fund. The company said the capital will expand its commercial, robotics and software engineering teams, accelerate product development and support international deployment.
Portability is the product
Robotics hardware can become obsolete operationally long before the machinery itself wears out. Control software is often tied to a particular machine, while the people who understood an installation may move on. Kinematic Trees is building an integration layer that captures specialist robotics expertise in modular components, so providers can reuse, recombine and adapt capabilities across different hardware. Its initial focus includes factories, warehouses and advanced manufacturing, with longer-term applications in healthcare, education, creative industries and personal robotics.
The commercial proposition is not simply better robot programming. Kinematic Trees aims to make deployment knowledge portable: robotics providers can assemble integrated systems for customers, manufacturers can bring products to market without rebuilding a full software stack, and developers can commercialise specialised capabilities. If the modules transfer reliably between machines, each implementation can add reusable assets rather than starting from zero. That could shorten subsequent deployments and reduce dependence on one hardware vendor, but it also places a high bar on integration, safety and performance across very different machines and environments.
Factory evidence is the next test
Founded in 2025 by computational-neuroscience lecturer Stuart Wilson and robotics technologist Daniel Camilleri, the company traces its “universal robot brain” idea to discussions at a 2017 robotics conference. Kinematic Trees said it planned to announce partnerships for its first customer factory deployments in the second half of 2026. Those deployments are the important milestone: they need to show that portable intelligence can survive production requirements rather than only move between demonstrations. Haatch’s thesis is that robotics hardware is advancing quickly, while flexible software remains a barrier to adoption; the round funds the team’s attempt to turn that gap into repeatable infrastructure.
Explore this theme
Industrial robotics is a deployment problem, not just an AI challenge — EUVC · 15 October 2026. Its tests around reliability, deployment speed and repeatability are directly relevant to Kinematic Trees’ plan to make robotics expertise portable across installations.
Sources checked:
Kinematic Trees announcement · Haatch investment note · Tech.eu report · Kinematic Trees LinkedIn
Image: Kinematic Trees, via the company announcement.
