£5m · Other round · Semiconductors · Sheffield, UK
SCI Semiconductor, a Sheffield-based developer of memory-safe microcontrollers, has raised a £5m funding round co-led by Mercia Ventures and PXN Ventures through Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund II vehicles. Osney Capital, Black Opal Ventures and private investors also participated.
The company will use the capital to accelerate production, develop a new generation of chips and add 15 jobs over the next year. Investor Mercia says SCI has fabricated its first devices, booked more than £2m of orders and won £7.7m of government contracts, while working with Google Research and Microsoft. Those figures are reported traction rather than independently audited results.
SCI's ICENI microcontrollers are based on CHERI and CHERIoT technology. Instead of allowing software broad access to memory, the architecture assigns bounded capabilities and separates components into compartments, limiting what compromised or faulty code can reach. SCI says this can reduce exposure to memory-safety vulnerabilities while letting customers continue using established C and C++ code.
Orders move the challenge from chip design to repeatable supply
The round arrives after first silicon, so SCI's next risk is less about whether the architecture can be fabricated than whether it can be supplied, integrated and supported at customer scale. The chips target critical infrastructure, industrial, automotive, medical, aerospace and defence systems, where qualification cycles are long and customers need confidence in both hardware behaviour and software tooling.
That makes the reported order book important but incomplete evidence. Revenue conversion depends on customers moving from evaluation hardware into production designs, while SCI must coordinate design and packaging in the UK with fabrication in Germany. A memory-safe architecture also needs compilers, development tools and documentation that engineering teams can adopt without rewriting entire products.
Government contracts and research partnerships can help validate the technology and fund ecosystem work, but repeat commercial shipments will be the stronger signal. If ICENI gives manufacturers a practical route to contain memory errors in existing codebases, SCI can sell security as part of the processor architecture rather than another software layer. The £5m round funds the manufacturing and engineering capacity needed to test that proposition beyond early programmes.
