News: Suppliers
19 August 2026
HexSeed raises over £600,000 in early-stage funding
HexSeed Technology Ltd of Banchory, near Aberdeen, Scotland, UK has raised more than £600,000 in an early-stage funding round led by Carbon13, with participation from Net Zero Technology Centre and Vento Ventures. The cumulative investment unlocks a Partnership Grant from overnment agency Innovate UK (part of UK Research and Innovation), awarded on a provisional basis earlier this year.
HexSeed was founded in late 2025 by CEO Mark Tandy (Oxford MBA), chief technology officer Dr Leonardo Santoni (PhD in chemistry from University College London) and chief operating officer Dr Michael Glerum (PhD in Engineering from Cambridge).
Picture: HexSeed’s founders (from left to right) Leonardo Santoni, Mark Tandy and Michael Glerum.
Together with University of Bristol researchers including professors Paul May (an expert in diamond materials) and Martin Kuball (a specialist in semiconductor devices and heat management), HexSeed is developing a low-carbon, low-temperature microwave plasma process that grows diamond coatings directly on finished gallium nitride (GaN) devices without damaging them, pulling heat away from the active regions so that they run harder, last longer, and use less energy.
The funding will be used to demonstrate the coating process on commercial GaN power devices and progress toward pilot customer engagements, with data-center power conversion hardware as the initial target market.
“Data centers are on track to consume a significant share of UK grid capacity within the decade, and a large proportion of that energy is lost as heat in power conversion,” says Tandy. “This funding will allow us to take our low-temperature diamond coating technology which we are developing from laboratory demonstration to working GaN devices.”
