Edinburgh spin out raises £730,000

The technology commercialisation and investment management company, Braveheart plc led a second round funding of GBP 730,000 in Spiral Gateway Ltd. Imperial Innovations, Bank of Scotland Corporate and Scottish Enterprise's Scottish Co-investment Fund, also invested in the round.

Spiral Gateway spun out of Edinburgh University in 2004 to commercialise a computer processing platform known as Reconfigurable Instruction Cell Architecture (RICA), a method for processing multimedia, wireless and broadband computing tasks. The company aims to incorporate the technology onto microprocessors, initially targeting the Image Signal Processing (ISP) market in mobile phones with in built cameras.

Spiral Gateway has a licensed exclusive rights to RICA from the university, and recently released a silicon-based demonstration of the technology. This allowed to advance discussions with potential customers in the ISP market.

This funding is designed to provide interim support for Spiral Gateway whilst it develops its technology and advances discussions with key commercial partners.

Geoffrey Thomson, Chief Executive of Braveheart said, “RICA is an exciting processing platform that will appeal to numerous markets when fully developed. Spiral Gateway has recently strengthened its management team with the appointment of a new chairman and CEO and we are pleased to be able to demonstrate our commitment to the company with this funding.”

Thomson added, “This is the first occasion where we have invested alongside Imperial Innovations and we are delighted to be working with them.”