Shahida Imani

Shahida Imani is co-founder and chief executive of Singular Photonics, a fabless semiconductor company spun out of the University of Edinburgh’s CMOS Sensors and Systems Group. She founded it with Professor Robert Henderson, Dr Aravind Venugopalan, now chief technology officer, and Dr Neil Finlayson. The company came out of stealth in January 2025, building on 20 years of research in Henderson’s group.

That research has a commercial record. Henderson designed one of the first single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) image sensors in nanometer CMOS technology in 2005, and time-of-flight sensors that followed in 2013 now provide autofocus assist in more than a billion smartphones, according to the university.

Sensors that do their own processing

SPAD sensors detect individual photons. Singular’s difference is to do the digital processing on the chip itself, where competitors typically handle it on separate circuit boards. The company was selling from the start. “We are in a unique position where we already have commercially available products and are generating revenue in our first year of incorporation,” Imani said at launch.

Those products have found industrial customers. Renishaw uses Singular’s Sirona sensor, a 512-pixel SPAD line sensor, in the time-resolved Raman spectroscopy option for its inVia confocal Raman microscope, announced in December 2025. Singular also developed its Andarta sensor with Meta for medical imaging.

Doubling sales and a new flagship

In August 2026 Singular closed an oversubscribed $2.15m (£1.6m) round led by ACF Investors, with Wren Capital, Cambridge Angels, Scottish Enterprise, Quantum Exponential and Old College Capital. Dr Dipesh Patel, a former chief technology officer of Arm, joined its board. “We’ve already doubled our 2025 sales, we’re approaching break-even, and our customers are telling us exactly what they want from future product,” Imani told Tech Funding News.

In September 2026 it launched Litavis, a 256 × 256-pixel photon-counting sensor that it says is the first SPAD sensor to run intensity, timing and histogramming modes at the same time. It is aimed at machine vision, robotics, physical AI, depth sensing and industrial automation, and the company reports significant pre-orders.

Why it matters to UK technology buyers

Robots, inspection systems and scientific instruments increasingly need sensors that capture timing and depth as well as images, without adding processing hardware downstream. Singular gives UK manufacturers, instrument makers and robotics developers a domestic source of that capability, from a company that says it is close to break-even.

Imani has turned a university research group’s output into a chip company with revenue, a blue-chip instrument customer and a new flagship product within two years of launch. Litavis will show whether Singular can move from specialist instruments into volume markets.