Insider Brief
- Kinematic Trees raised £585,000 in pre-seed funding to build its nature-inspired robotics software platform and expand its UK team.
- Haatch backed the round through its SEIS Fund, D2N2 Early-Stage Angel Investment Fund and British Business Bank Syndicate Fund.
- The startup said the funding will support hiring, product development, international deployment and planned first customer factory deployment partnerships in the second half of 2026.
Kinematic Trees has raised £585,000 in pre-seed funding to build out its nature-inspired robotics software platform and expand its team in the UK.
According to the startup, the round was backed by Haatch through its SEIS Fund, D2N2 Early-Stage Angel Investment Fund and British Business Bank Syndicate Fund. The funding will support hiring across Kinematic Trees’ commercial, robotics and software engineering teams in London, Nottinghamshire and Sheffield.
The UK startup said the money will also support product development, international deployment and work tied to advances in robotics hardware.
Kinematic Trees said it is developing nature-inspired, robot-agnostic software designed to work across different robots and hardware systems. The company describes the platform as a software infrastructure layer for scalable robotics.
The company was founded in 2025 by Stuart Wilson, Ph.D., chief executive and a senior lecturer in computational neuroscience at the University of Sheffield, and Daniel Camilleri, chief technology officer and an exited co-founder of Cyberselves Universal, which later became Bettering our Worlds.
“We are creating the software needed for one mind to evolve through many different embodiments,” Camilleri pointed out. “In doing so, we want to bring advances in industrial robotics into emerging businesses and the growing consumer space.”
Wilson and Camilleri first discussed the idea for a “universal robot brain” while attending Living Machines at Stanford University in 2017, where they were working on robot control systems based on theories of how animal brains adapt, according to the company.
“Advances in sensors, motors, and AI are now bringing robotics to people and businesses at exceptionally low cost,” Wilson noted in the announcement. “We’re providing the intelligence layer to make those robots useful, inherently safe, and — perhaps most importantly — customizable. Robots should be able to do whatever we want them to, rather than what any particular company thinks we might want them to.”
Kinematic Trees is building modular software components that can be reused, recombined and adapted for new deployments. The company indicated it is working with robotics providers on an asset store and is targeting use cases across factories, advanced manufacturing, healthcare, education and creative industries.
“The approach has an added benefit,” Wilson added. “Factory floors and research labs across the world are littered with hardware gathering dust because the original software no longer works or the people trained to use it have moved on. We can bring those robots back to life and ensure they never gather dust again.”
The startup also works on research projects tied to embodied AI and cognitive architectures. It said its long-term goal is to support wider adoption of personal robotics in the UK, EU and U.S.
Kinematic Trees pointed out that it plans to announce partnerships for first customer factory deployments in the second half of 2026. The company also expects to advance commercial work with software developers, robotics and automation providers, make commercial and engineering hires and continue academic discussions with international technology institutes and research centers.
Image: Kinematic Trees co-founders Stuart Wilson, CEO, and Daniel Camilleri, CTO. (Credit: Kinematic Trees)
