Defence tech start-up gets £7bn boost for robot factories network

A exertion start-up that wants to assistance re-arm Britain with factories of automated robots has raised £7m from investors.

London-based Isembard, named aft the revered civilian technologist Isambard Kingdom Brunel, was founded past twelvemonth by entrepreneur Alexander Fitzgerald.

The institution is processing high-tech factories that tin rapidly and cheaply manufacture precision components for captious industries specified arsenic defence and aerospace.

Most of these are presently made by a legion of tiny businesses that provender into the processes of larger companies, specified arsenic motor shaper Rolls-Royce oregon defence contractor BAE Systems.

But Mr Fitzgerald, an Army reservist who antecedently founded challenger broadband supplier Cuckoo, said the marketplace is highly fragmented, with galore of the firms not making usage of the latest technologies oregon automation techniques.

Many tiny manufacturers are besides losing a increasing fig of machinists to status – creating skills gaps that indispensable beryllium filled.

It comes arsenic request for precision components is surging arsenic Britain and its European allies scramble to ramp up accumulation of defence instrumentality including missiles, drones and ammunition successful the aftermath of Russia’s penetration of Ukraine.

Mr Fitzgerald said Isembard aims to tackle the occupation by mounting up a web of factories that run modular instrumentality tools linked unneurotic by the company’s in-house machine software.

This volition let the institution to remotely plan parts, nutrient them and perchance assemble them arsenic well. The modular quality of the factories should besides mean accumulation lines tin beryllium rapidly reconfigured oregon scaled up.

Mr Fitzgerald said British manufacturing presently relied connected “a agelong process of family-run instrumentality shops” but warned: “The existential menace we look is that the mean property of the owners of these businesses is approaching retirement.

“So determination is simply a immense hazard that capableness starts to drop, conscionable arsenic request from captious industries specified arsenic defence is truly starting to ramp up.

“Rather than physique a azygous ample factory, we deliberation the reply is to physique a web of smaller factories.”

According to MakeUK, the manufacture group, 60pc of the manufacturing workforce successful Britain is aged 50 oregon above.

There is besides an acute shortage of workers known arsenic machine numerical power machinists, who power the robots that instrumentality oregon process parts, with astir 1 5th of vacancies taking up to a twelvemonth to fill.

Isembard is besides hoping to pat into greater request for the “reshoring” of manufacturing domestically, pursuing planetary proviso concatenation chaos caused by the Covid pandemic and the US-China commercialized war.