Summary

• Living Optics has secured an oversubscribed $20 million financing led by BRV Capital Management.
• Strategic participants include Lockheed Martin Ventures, Applied Ventures and Lam Capital alongside the British Business Bank.
• Its cameras capture spectral information at video rates for applications including inspection, defence, healthcare and environmental monitoring.

Oxford spinout Living Optics has secured $20 million to scale hyperspectral cameras that capture far more information about a scene than the red, green and blue colour channels used by conventional imaging systems.

Living Optics says the oversubscribed financing was led by BRV Capital Management and includes new investment from Lockheed Martin Ventures, Applied Ventures, Lam Capital, GK Goh and the British Business Bank. Existing investors including Octopus Ventures, Foresight Group and OTIF Ventures also participated.

The investment will support wider deployment of the company’s computational hyperspectral camera platform across industrial inspection, defence, life sciences and environmental monitoring. Living Optics was founded in 2019 from research developed in the University of Oxford’s Physics Department.

The strategic investors connect the technology with markets beyond specialist scientific imaging. Applied Ventures is associated with semiconductor equipment company Applied Materials, Lam Capital is the venture arm of Lam Research and Lockheed Martin Ventures brings defence and aerospace relevance.

A conventional camera discards spectral information

Ordinary digital cameras reduce incoming light into a small number of colour channels that broadly correspond with human vision. That works well when the objective is to produce an image people can look at, but materials that appear visually similar can interact differently with different wavelengths of light.

Hyperspectral imaging separates a scene into many narrower spectral bands, so each pixel carries information about how an object reflects or absorbs light across wavelengths rather than simply recording its visible colour.

Those spectral signatures can reveal distinctions that are difficult or impossible to see with an ordinary camera. Food products can be assessed for characteristics associated with composition or freshness, materials can be separated during industrial sorting and vegetation can show changes connected with health or environmental conditions.

The technology has long been used in scientific and remote sensing applications, although hyperspectral systems have traditionally involved trade-offs around cost, size, speed and processing complexity. Capturing many wavelengths can require scanning a scene over time or using expensive specialist sensors.

Living Optics combines optical design with computation to make spectral imaging more practical in moving environments. Its current cameras capture visible and near infrared information at video rates and include local computing capability for analysis.

Machine vision can use information humans cannot see

The growth of computer vision creates a potentially larger market because the final consumer of an image is increasingly an algorithm rather than a person. A machine inspecting products on a production line does not benefit from a photograph looking natural; it benefits from receiving whatever measurements make defects or materials easier to distinguish.

Hyperspectral information can therefore become another input to automated decision systems. Living Optics lists applications including sorting, packaging inspection, quality control and robotic integration in industrial settings.

A food processor might use spectral differences to identify contamination or variations that ordinary cameras cannot distinguish reliably, while recycling equipment could separate materials with similar visible appearance but different chemical properties.

Those systems still require models capable of translating spectral data into a useful classification. Adding more information to every pixel increases the evidence available to an algorithm but also increases the processing and calibration work needed to use it.

Living Optics has consequently developed software alongside the camera hardware, allowing developers and engineers to capture and analyse spatial and spectral information using familiar computer vision workflows.

Defence investment broadens the commercial signal

Security and defence applications place different demands on spectral imaging because material signatures can help identify camouflage, detect anomalies and distinguish objects in conditions where ordinary colour information is insufficient.

Living Optics says its technology can perform computer vision inference locally at the network edge, which is useful where systems cannot rely on sending every frame to a remote cloud service. Defence and industrial environments can both involve bandwidth, latency or confidentiality constraints that favour local processing.

Lockheed Martin Ventures’ participation provides a strategic signal around that market, although investment does not establish that Living Optics technology has been selected for any particular Lockheed Martin programme.

Applied Ventures and Lam Capital provide a similar signal around semiconductors and advanced manufacturing. Inspection is a major requirement in semiconductor production because defects become more expensive as manufacturing processes move towards smaller geometries and more complex packaging.

The British Business Bank says its investment aligns with the UK industrial strategy and specifically identifies advanced manufacturing and semiconductors among the strategically important technologies behind its decision.

The commercial test lies beyond specialist imaging

Living Optics has already raised substantial capital, including a £20 million Series A completed in 2022 to develop its camera and software technology. The new financing therefore arrives after several years of product development rather than at laboratory prototype stage.

The next challenge is deployment across repeatable commercial applications. Specialist imaging can demonstrate strong technical performance without becoming straightforward for ordinary engineering teams to incorporate into production systems.

Hardware cost, calibration, lighting conditions, environmental robustness and integration with existing software all affect whether a sensor moves from trials into routine installations. Applications also differ enough that spectral signatures useful in agricultural analysis may have little relationship with those needed in semiconductor inspection or defence.

Living Optics is trying to reduce those barriers by packaging the camera, onboard compute and software tools together rather than leaving customers to assemble a research instrument into a production system themselves.

The $20 million round suggests investors see a wider opening as machine vision moves beyond reproducing what humans already see. Conventional cameras turned visual information into data; hyperspectral imaging gives machines another layer of information, provided Living Optics can make the additional complexity practical outside the laboratory.