StirLight has secured £1.25m to accelerate the commercialisation of StirSense, its proprietary quality assurance platform for friction stir welding (FSW) for aerospace, automotive, defence and energy supply chains.
Friction stir welding produces stronger, lighter, more repeatable joints than traditional fusion welding, with no filler materials, no shielding gas and significantly lower energy consumption. Adopting the technique enables manufacturers to increase productivity and reduce reliance on a shrinking skilled workforce.
The new funding comprises over £750k in pre-seed investment from Haatch Ventures, The British Business Bank, D2N2 and angel investors, alongside £500k in grant funding from Innovate UK and The Aerospace Technology Institute (ATI) across two R&D projects.
Proceeds will support pilot deployments of StirSense with industrial partners, the creation of engineering and data science roles, and the continued development of StirLight’s core technology platform.
The company is actively seeking partnerships with manufacturers in aerospace, automotive, defence and energy who want to integrate real-time quality assurance into their FSW operations.
While used by leading manufacturers in these sectors, wider industrial adoption of FSW has faced a persistent challenge – the inability to verify weld quality during production. Manufacturers have had to rely instead on costly, time-consuming post-weld inspection.
StirSense aims to address this, capturing and analysing process-specific data to provide in-process anomaly detection and traceable quality records for every joint.
“FSW produces some of the best joints in the world,” says Toby Savage-Yu, CEO at StirLight. “The problem has always been proving it at scale, and that is what StirSense solves.
“We are delighted by the support from Innovate UK, ATI and our pre-seed investors who moved quickly to back this critical technology.”
