UK chipmaker SCI Semiconductor said on September 9 it had raised £5 million to scale up production of its ICENI family of "memory-safe" chips, reporting strong demand for the technology since the product line's launch earlier this year, according to a statement from investor Mercia Ventures.
Built on Cambridge's CHERI research
SCI Semiconductor, founded in 2022 and based in Sheffield with an office in Cambridge, builds chips on CHERI (Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions), a hardware security architecture developed at the University of Cambridge and backed by UK and US government research funding. CHERI embeds memory protections directly into a chip's architecture, dividing memory into compartments designed to block bugs such as buffer overflows and out-of-bounds memory access, which Mercia Ventures said are a factor in around 70 per cent of cyberattacks. Co-founder Dr David Chisnall previously worked at Microsoft Research, and the company has academic ties to the universities of Cambridge and Manchester, according to Tech.eu.
The new round was led by two funds managed under the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund II, PXN Ventures and Mercia Ventures, with additional backing from cybersecurity investor Osney Capital, US-based Black Opal Ventures and private investors, according to the Mercia statement and the Tech.eu report. It follows a £2.5 million round from the same NPIF II managers roughly a year earlier.
Government contracts and rising demand
SCI Semiconductor, which describes ICENI as the first memory-safe chip range built on CHERI, says it has secured more than £2 million in customer orders and £7.7 million in UK government contracts, and struck partnerships with Google Research and Microsoft. The company has also been named a core supplier under the UK government's Accelerated CHERI Adoption Programme. Its target markets include critical infrastructure, defence and medical device makers, sectors facing tightening security reporting obligations under the EU's Cyber Resilience Act, which Tech.eu said takes effect this month. The outlet also cited the UK's National Cyber Security Centre as having said that software patching alone may not be sufficient to close memory-safety gaps, and pointed to 2024's CrowdStrike-linked outages as an example of how a single coding error can cascade into widespread system failures.
"The problem of memory safety is finally being taken seriously," said chief executive and co-founder Haydn Povey, who added that demand has been overwhelming.
Alongside Povey, the company's founders include Krishna Anne and Chisnall, according to Mercia Ventures.
What happens next
The company plans to use the funding to scale production of its current chips, develop its next generation of devices, and grow its headcount from 35 employees to around 50 within a year. SCI Semiconductor did not disclose a valuation for the round.