Cambridge University’s innovation CamGraPhIC has recently raised £800,000 from Wealth Club clients via an Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS). Overall, the company has raised over £1.26 million, via an equity crowdfunding round from existing investors and new ones led by Frontier IP and Wealth Club. In the previous funding round, it raised £1.6 million in September, totalling the overall investment and company valuation at £7.2 million.
Paul Mantle, Chief Executive Officer, CamGraPhIC, said: “We are delighted to progress this funding round. Our graphene-based photonics technology has the potential to transform high-speed data and telecommunications. We look forward to evaluating the technology with customers and receiving the first results.”
The money was raised via an advanced subscription agreement, which means that the shares will be issued at a later date, as a part of future funding round or converted. CamGraPhIC is also developing a graphene-based photonics technology for faster, cheaper and scalable optical transceivers which are devices at the centre of high-speed data and telecommunications networks. The technology has the potential to become a core enabling technology for next-generation 5G networks and the transceivers are more energy efficient, which makes them cheaper to buy, build and run.
There are also other applications which include a 6G milimetre wave which will allow data to be transmitted at speeds up to 1 Tb per second, high-performance computing and networks to handle the growing demands of ML/AI. Proceeds from the last funding round will be mainly utilised for the development and completion of the fabrication and testing of the demonstration devices. The technology has generated interest from major MNCs in the semiconductor and telecommunications industry. CamGraPhIC is mainly aiming to avoid the bottleneck in network traffic by developing next-generation graphene and silicon chips that it claims could be a core technology to enable new-age telecommunications and data communications devices to operate at high-speed bandwidths.