Espoo-based Agate Sensors, a startup developing smart sensors for material analysis, has raised €5.6M funding.
This funding round includes €4M in seed funding led by Voima Ventures and LIFTT, as well as €1.6M in grants from Business Finland.
Based out of Helsinki, Voima Ventures is a Nordic venture capital firm investing in science-based and deep tech startups across the Nordics and Baltics.
The VC supports early-stage companies emerging from university labs and research institutes.
With its recently launched €100M Fund III, Voima Ventures aims to back 25-30 high-impact startups that combine strong financial potential with transformative societal or environmental outcomes.
"Agate Sensors' platform is a leap forward in hyperspectral sensing: software-defined, scalable, and truly high-performance," says Niko Elers, Investment Director at Voima Ventures. "It holds immense potential to reshape industries that rely on precise optical measurement, and we are very excited to support the company on the journey ahead."
The company will use the funds to speed up the production of chip-scale sensors that enable any camera to instantly analyse its surroundings, from food and health checks to counterfeit detection and critical defence applications.
"This funding allows us to commercialise a technology that fundamentally changes how machines perceive the world," says Mikael Westerlund, CBO of Agate Sensors. "We're not just building sensors, but enabling a new layer of light-based intelligence."
Led by Tommi Leino (CEO), Andreas Liapis (CTO) and Mikael Westerlund (CBO), Agate Sensors was founded as a spin-out from over a decade of pioneering research by the Photonics Group of Prof Zhipei Sun at Aalto University's Department of Electronics and Nanoengineering.
The Finnish company is working to commercialise a breakthrough that makes spectral sensing as small as a single camera pixel.
Typically, spectral vision extends far beyond the three colour bands visible to the human eye.
By distinguishing hundreds of bands at once, Agate's sensors give machines a kind of "superhuman" vision, enabling them to perceive details and distinctions invisible to conventional cameras.
Tommi Leino says that they have created a smaller, affordable spectrometer that can be used outside of specialised labs.
This sensor can change its functions through software, making it useful for different tasks like health diagnosis and identifying materials.
Leino noted that this change will affect how people engage with the physical world.
With its technology, the Finnish company claims to change how we use everyday devices by improving image quality in mobile phones and adding new features.
Explaining it to Silicon Canals, Mikael Westerlund states, "For example, we will enable the capture of the sunset with the same colour dynamic and 'emotion', as you experience with your own eyes, and when captured with an analogue film camera."
The sensors will also track vital signs for sports and support new telemedicine uses in healthcare.
Additionally, users will be able to identify different materials with their mobile devices, making technology even more useful in daily life.
The company does all these by leveraging machine learning and AI to train its product to detect different materials.
"Considering the vast amounts of spectral data that our sensors will start to detect and utilise, we see a great opportunity to apply AI/ML type of capabilities both in analysing the data the sensors generate, but also for creating faster, more accurate and power-efficient edge compute algorithms for our sensors," he adds.
According to Westerlund, Agate is focused on maintaining affordability while ensuring high performance as it expands into consumer products.
He says, "We are building a sensor platform technology that scales from single pixel to multi-million pixel sensors. Being able to scale pixel matrix size, having a fully software-defined architecture and being able to produce these sensors on standard CMOS manufacturing lines assures our competitive advantage and rapidly scalable business model."
The company's platform expands the use of machine vision for various applications, including health monitoring in wearables, detecting counterfeit goods, identifying environmental hazards, and improving smart agriculture and forestry.
Talking about the challenges, Mikael Westerlund explains, "The current state-of-the-art spectroscopy equipment all use the same basic working principle, resulting in a low signal-to-noise ratio at the detector level. Implications of this are that the solutions are not performing well in low-light conditions, can not be miniaturised and thus do not scale."
To solve these problems, the Finnish company developed a new technology based on research from Aalto University.
"This working principle utilises all light energy(all available wavelengths), providing a greatly superior signal-to-noise, a software-defined device architecture without any mirrors or diffractive elements," he explains.
The company plans to start making initial chips by the end of this year.
This will allow them to create demonstration models in 2026, with the first commercial smart wearables expected to be released in late 2027.
The defence sector is expected to be one of the first markets for these products.
For example, the sensors can tell the difference between real leaves and fake camouflage, and can also identify different types of vehicles by their paint colours.
"We believe this innovation will play a critical role in strengthening Europe's technological sovereignty in defence and security," says Pierluigi Freni, Project Manager at LIFTT. "For the first time, we have a technology capable of mass deployment that allows machines to understand what they see. This changes everything we know about spectral data usability and usage. We confirm our trust and belief in the Finnish innovation ecosystem, in which we have decided to continue investing together with LIFTT Euroinvest, the investment vehicle we share with the European Investment Bank".