ZEISS Ventures has taken part in a £1.7 million funding round for Illumion, a University of Cambridge spin-out that builds optical imaging tools for battery research and development. ZEISS announced the investment on 28 October 2026. Illumion's proprietary charge photometry technology lets researchers and engineers watch individual battery particles while a cell charges and discharges.
Foresight Group, Cambridge Enterprise Ventures, Parkwalk, Cambridge Angels, and YourVC also joined the round.
The technique relies on optical interference reflection imaging. It detects the light scattered by individual particles across an electrode. As ions move in and out of the electrode material, that scattering changes, and the change reveals each particle's local state of charge. According to Metrology and Quality News, the same view also tracks changes in particle morphology that affect battery performance, all in real time.
For quality and process engineers working on cells, the appeal is access to particle-level behavior inside a working battery. ZEISS says that kind of insight applies to both battery development and battery manufacturing.
Dr. Boris Hofmann, Head of ZEISS Ventures, said the company "aims to deepen researchers' understanding of battery materials and their behavior." Christoph Schnedermann, Co-founder and CEO of Illumion, called the round "an important next step" for turning research into practical battery development tools.
The money will go toward commercialization, Illumion's product roadmap, and work with researchers, battery developers, and industrial partners. That includes further development of illumionONE, which handles real-time particle-level battery analysis, and illumionX, a next-generation platform that ZEISS says is intended to address selected industrial use cases.
