top of page
4Artboard 3_2x_edited_edited.png

The UK’s home for tokenised equity. Independent news, insight and resources for founders raising capital, investors deploying it, and the firms supporting both — as the regulation, infrastructure and opportunity converge.

HexSeed Raises Over £600,000 Through Carbon13's SEIS Fund IX to Commercialise Diamond Coated Power Chips

  • Writer: Shawn Jhanji
    Shawn Jhanji
  • Aug 21
  • 3 min read
HexSeed Technology, a deeptech startup based in Banchory near Aberdeen, has raised more than £600,000 in early stage funding led by Carbon13, with participation from the Net Zero Technology Centre and Vento Ventures, backers confirmed this week. The round was written through Carbon13's SEIS Fund IX, the venture builder's ninth Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme vehicle for climate and deeptech founders. For a founder outside London with no warm introduction to a City fund, this is the story that matters more than the headline number. HexSeed was built inside Carbon13's venture builder programme, based in Cambridge with a national reach that has increasingly pulled in founders from Scotland and the north of England, places where the density of angel networks and institutional VCs thins out fast. SEIS, which offers investors up to fifty per cent income tax relief on investments into the very earliest companies, remains one of the most important levers for getting capital to founders who do not have that network. It was left untouched in the Autumn 2025 Budget even as EIS and VCT company limits were widened from April 2026, a sign of how central the scheme still is to the earliest stage of UK company formation.

HexSeed Technology, a deeptech startup based in Banchory near Aberdeen, has raised more than £600,000 in early stage funding led by Carbon13, with participation from the Net Zero Technology Centre and Vento Ventures, backers confirmed this week. The round was written through Carbon13's SEIS Fund IX, the venture builder's ninth Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme vehicle for climate and deeptech founders.


For a founder outside London with no warm introduction to a City fund, this is the story that matters more than the headline number. HexSeed was built inside Carbon13's venture builder programme, based in Cambridge with a national reach that has increasingly pulled in founders from Scotland and the north of England, places where the density of angel networks and institutional VCs thins out fast. SEIS, which offers investors up to fifty per cent income tax relief on investments into the very earliest companies, remains one of the most important levers for getting capital to founders who do not have that network. It was left untouched in the Autumn 2025 Budget even as EIS and VCT company limits were widened from April 2026, a sign of how central the scheme still is to the earliest stage of UK company formation.


HexSeed was founded in late 2025 by chief executive Mark Tandy, an Oxford MBA, alongside chief technology officer Dr Leonardo Santoni, who holds a PhD in chemistry from University College London, and chief operating officer Dr Michael Glerum, a Cambridge engineering PhD. The company has developed a low carbon, low temperature microwave plasma process that grows diamond coatings directly onto finished gallium nitride power devices without damaging them. The coating pulls heat away from the active regions of the chip, allowing it to run harder, last longer and use less energy, with data centre power conversion hardware as the initial target market.


The funding unlocks a provisional Innovate UK partnership grant awarded earlier this year, and will be used to demonstrate the coating process on commercial gallium nitride power devices and progress toward pilot customer engagements. As AI infrastructure spending pushes data centre operators to hunt for every available efficiency gain in power and cooling, a UK deeptech spinout solving part of that problem from a base near Aberdeen rather than Silicon Valley or Cambridge is itself a small data point in a bigger story about where useful engineering can now come from.


Carbon13 also confirmed this week that Auralytica, a separate portfolio company backed through the venture builder's earlier SEIS Fund VIII, closed a further £350,000 from investors including HERmesa. Two closes from the same venture builder in the same week is a reminder that SEIS backed regional deeptech is not a one off; it is a pipeline, built through a structured cohort model that recruits scientists and engineers into company formation rather than waiting for them to find their own way into a pitch room.


None of this is investment advice, and SEIS relief always depends on individual circumstances and HMRC's rules at the time of investment. But the mechanics of this particular round are a useful illustration of what the scheme is designed to do: get meaningful early cheques to technically strong founders who would otherwise struggle to get a meeting.


Key Takeaways


  • HexSeed Technology raised over £600,000 through Carbon13's SEIS Fund IX, with the Net Zero Technology Centre and Vento Ventures participating.

  • The Banchory based startup is developing diamond coated gallium nitride power devices aimed at data centre cooling and power efficiency.

  • The round unlocks a provisional Innovate UK partnership grant and will fund demonstration on commercial hardware.

  • SEIS remains untouched by the Autumn 2025 Budget changes to EIS and VCT limits, underlining its continued role as the primary lever for reaching founders without institutional networks.

  • Carbon13 also confirmed a separate £350,000 close for portfolio company Auralytica through its earlier SEIS Fund VIII, evidence of an active regional deeptech pipeline rather than an isolated raise.


Sources:

Comments

bottom of page