Illumion’s £1.7m round puts an optics group behind its battery imager

On 28 October Zeiss said its corporate venture arm, Zeiss Ventures, had taken part in a £1.7m funding round for Illumion, a University of Cambridge spinout that makes an instrument for watching battery materials as they charge and discharge. Foresight Group, Cambridge Enterprise Ventures, Parkwalk, Cambridge Angels and YourVC joined the round, according to the Zeiss release, which does not name a lead investor.

Illumion was incorporated at Companies House on 23 June 2022. Its own account says it was founded that year at the university by chief executive Dr Christoph Schnedermann and head of R&D Dr Alice Merryweather, building on research by two further co-founders: Clare Grey at the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry and Akshay Rao at the Cavendish Laboratory. The technique it sells is charge photometry, which Zeiss describes as letting researchers and engineers observe individual battery particles during charging and discharging. The first product, illumionONE, launched in September 2024, according to the Faraday Institution.

The new money follows a £2.1m seed round that Illumion announced in November 2024, led by Foresight’s Ventures team with Cambridge Enterprise Ventures, Parkwalk Advisors and Cambridge Angels. BusinessCloud reports that Foresight provided follow-on investment this time. Across the two announced rounds, Illumion has raised £3.8m. Zeiss Ventures and YourVC were not among the backers named in 2024.

The new round is smaller than the seed, and it brings in the venture arm of an instrument maker. Illumion makes a laboratory instrument. Zeiss, by its own description, develops and sells microscopy for materials research and systems for industrial metrology and quality assurance, and it reported revenue of almost €12bn (about £10bn) in the fiscal year to 30 September 2025. Illumion now wants to reach battery makers’ development and quality-control work, and Zeiss already sells measurement and quality-assurance systems to industry.

Who uses the instrument today

Illumion’s named users are mostly research organizations. In January 2025 it announced the installation of an illumionONE at the Helmholtz Institute Münster, in the research group of Gunther Brunklaus. Its product page carries endorsements from Laura Wheatcroft, a scientist at the battery company Nyobolt, Dr Ashok Menon of WMG at the University of Warwick and Stefan Ingenhoven of the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE. Wheatcroft called it “One of the most user-friendly devices for in-operando battery testing I’ve ever used”, adding that the technique had been “used to inform cell development”.

The partner logos on Illumion’s website add the battery companies Echion Technologies and E-Magy alongside universities including Michigan, ShanghaiTech and the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences. The instrument is sold abroad through distributors, among them Quantum Design offices in the US, China, Japan, India and South Korea, NewSpec in Australasia and SFR in Canada. Illumion describes illumionONE as a compact bench-top system for battery materials discovery and optimization, with an optically accessible coin cell, a magnetic loading cartridge and an integrated potentiostat – a format built for the materials lab.

The step from lab to industry

The funding is meant to carry the company past that setting. The Zeiss release says it will support further commercialization, the product roadmap and collaboration with researchers, battery developers and industrial partners. That includes continued work on illumionONE and on illumionX, a next-generation platform “intended to address selected industrial use cases”. BusinessCloud reports that illumionX is meant to help industrial battery teams toward “faster development cycles and better quality-control decisions”.

Illumion frames the problem as one of time. Its seed announcement said battery material development methods had not fundamentally changed in 50 years and that turning a new material into a commercial product could take a decade. Dr Boris Hofmann, head of Zeiss Ventures, put the investor’s case in research terms: “By helping to visualize dynamic processes within batteries at the particle level, the company aims to deepen researchers’ understanding of battery materials and their behavior.” Neither company has said when illumionX will be available or who its first industrial customers will be.

What the new shareholder brings

The release says Zeiss Ventures invests in deep-tech startups with the potential to shape future technologies, markets and business models “beyond ZEISS’ core business”, and that alongside capital it offers portfolio companies access to the group’s technological and industry expertise and its global network. It mentions no distribution, supply or development agreement between Zeiss and Illumion.

Illumion’s board already includes a former instrument-industry chief executive. Dr Ian Barkshire, chief executive of the scientific instrument maker Oxford Instruments from 2016 to 2023, became non-executive chair in November 2024, and Companies House lists Andrew Bloxam of Foresight as a director since September 2024. Schnedermann said: “We are excited to continue advancing our technology with the support of ZEISS Ventures, Foresight, and our existing investors.”

Illumion is a one-product instrument maker whose named users are mostly institutes and universities, and it now counts among its shareholders the venture arm of a group that sells microscopes and metrology to the materials labs and factories it is trying to reach. Part of the £1.7m goes to illumionX, and whether battery makers take that platform into their development and quality-control work will decide whether a Cambridge research tool becomes an industrial product.