iGii raises £22.7M Series B to grow carbon, not mine it

iGii, the Stirling advanced-materials company behind the Gii carbon nanomaterial, has raised a £22.7M Series B led by the Scottish National Investment Bank, with £11M from Scottish Enterprise and follow-on from existing investors PXN Ventures and Archangels, to push Gii from pilot production into industrial-scale supply.

Europe’s deep tech still leans on public money long after the science is proven – and yet this week keeps showing that the money does show up, and at the stage where it hurts most. Below, I lay out the round, the material, the market it sells into, and what a 55-person team in Stirling tells us about how advanced materials get funded on this side of the Atlantic.

£22.7M, and almost all of it public

The round, announced on 16 September, is led by the Scottish National Investment Bank, which put in £11.7M according to Daily Business (16 Sep 2026). Scottish Enterprise added £11M, and existing backers PXN Ventures and the angel syndicate Archangels came back in, per the company’s announcement. Both EU-Startups and Daily Business label it a Series B; iGii itself calls it a funding package.

The money goes where materials money should: expanding manufacturing capability for large-scale production, deepening engagements with major manufacturers and converting them into long-term supply agreements, and growing the team from 55 today to close to 70 by the end of the year, per the announcement.

“Every industrial revolution has been enabled by a breakthrough in materials, and this funding means iGii can help enable the next one,” said CEO Jean-Christophe Granier in the announcement. Founders say this sort of thing often; a company that has spent ten years on one material has earned the right to.

Grown in Stirling, not mined anywhere

iGii – formerly Integrated Graphene – has been at this since 2016. Gii is a three-dimensional porous pure carbon nanomaterial, and the manufacturing claim is the interesting part: the company says it is grown, not printed, in a continuous, electricity-driven, reel-to-reel process with no mining, no cleanroom and no toxic chemicals, at its site in Stirling.

What is it for? Electrodes for human and veterinary diagnostics, microheaters, flexible printed battery electrodes, environmental monitoring and smart labels, per the company. The team includes 17 PhDs – a research department that happens to have a factory attached, now being asked to become the reverse.

The good news is this round did not come from nowhere. The Bank, PXN Ventures and Archangels were already investors, per Daily Business, and the company raised £8.8M as recently as June 2024, per its own announcement at the time. This is a syndicate doubling down, not a rescue.

A graphene market finally growing into its Nobel

Remember when graphene was going to change everything by 2015? Mostly it changed conference agendas. The sizing now suggests the patience is starting to pay: the global graphene market was worth USD 1.00bn in 2024 and is forecast to reach USD 3.58bn by 2030, a 24.0% CAGR (MarketsandMarkets, November 2025). Those are finally commercial numbers, not laboratory ones.

Against our own fundraising database, £22.7M sits in the quiet middle of Europe’s deep-tech week: EUCLYD raised more than €200M for AI chips out of Eindhoven, and Fortaegis took $50M for secure processors. Advanced materials rounds run smaller than silicon rounds at the same stage – the capex arrives later, when a supply agreement demands volume. Which is exactly what this round is built to reach.

What Scotland’s quiet deep-tech bench tells us

Look at the cap table again: £11.7M from the Scottish National Investment Bank, £11M from Scottish Enterprise. In the US, a materials company with 17 PhDs and manufacturer engagements would be fielding calls from growth funds; in Scotland, the two biggest lines in the package are public. It is tempting to read that as a failure of European venture. I read it differently.

Materials companies live on ten-year clocks, and patient public capital is structurally better suited to that clock than a fund that needs its exit inside seven. Scotland has quietly built the machinery for it – a national investment bank willing to lead a Series B, an enterprise agency writing eight-figure cheques, and an angel syndicate like Archangels keeping private conviction in the round. The pattern to watch is not who led this round but what Gii ends up inside: the first named long-term supply agreement with a major manufacturer will tell us more than the next fundraise ever could.

We spent a decade joking that Europe turns science into papers and America turns it into products. Stirling is 55 people betting the other way – and the capital, for once, arrived on time. Let’s watch what they build with it.