CSignum has raised £2.6m to expand commercial deployment of wireless communications technology designed to transmit data through water, ice, and ground where conventional connectivity can be difficult or impractical.
The Bathgate-headquartered Scottish technology company will use the funding to support commercial expansion and manufacturing scale-up of its EM2 product portfolio across water monitoring, utilities, maritime operations, offshore energy, and other infrastructure applications.
Investors include Archangels, PXN Ventures, Scottish Enterprise, the British Business Bank, and a group of US angel investors.
The latest round follows a £6m investment completed in April 2025. Since then, CSignum says it has moved from pilot programmes into volume deployments with UK water utilities and international customers.
New chief executive John Nicholls said: “My focus now is turning that potential into large-scale deployments.”
The company’s technology is intended to close a connectivity gap around sensors positioned beneath water or underground. Conventional radio technologies perform poorly in some of these environments, while wired systems can be expensive to install and maintain.
CSignum’s commercial proposition is tied to the expansion of remote monitoring. Utilities, energy companies, infrastructure operators, and environmental organisations are installing larger numbers of sensors as they seek continuous data on assets and conditions that previously required manual inspection.
Regulation is contributing directly to demand in the UK water market. CSignum points to monitoring requirements around combined storm overflows and sewage discharge points during the AMP8 investment period. Utilities are expected to monitor 25% of more than 14,000 combined storm overflows in England during AMP8, with the balance moving into the subsequent AMP9 period.
The company already has deployments with several UK water utilities. It is also working on a smart-buoy project in the Gulf of Mexico, has completed pilots with two US water-quality organisations, and is supporting through-ground sensing for a large critical-infrastructure project in Asia.
Those projects demonstrate the breadth of the potential market while also showing the difficulty of scaling an industrial communications business. Different sectors have separate technical standards, procurement cycles, environmental conditions, and regulatory requirements.
Manufacturing capability becomes increasingly important once a company moves beyond pilots. Early deployments can often be built and supported individually, whereas volume customers require repeatable production, quality control, installation processes, documentation, and after-sales support.
CSignum has appointed Nicholls as chief executive for that commercial phase. He succeeds Jonathan Reeves, who is moving into the role of chief strategy officer. Nicholls has worked across photonics, quantum technology, space, semiconductors, electric-vehicle infrastructure, fundraising, and international sales.
The company describes its wider opportunity as enabling AI in the physical world. The underlying infrastructure issue is simpler: analytical systems can only act on physical assets when reliable data can be collected from them. Sensors in inaccessible environments therefore depend on dependable communications technology before advanced analytics can add value.
CSignum was founded in 2020 and continues to add staff across the UK, US, and EU. The £2.6m round is modest beside the largest software and AI financings, but the capital is directed towards a more physical scaling challenge involving manufacturing and deployment.
The next stage is to convert regulation-driven water monitoring and international pilot activity into repeatable commercial volumes. That will determine whether CSignum’s difficult-environment communications technology remains a specialist product or develops into a broader infrastructure layer for remote sensing.
You must be logged in to post a comment.