LONDON, UK, 29 July 2026 — In a sector crowded with gleaming hardware and bold promises, Kinematic Trees, a British robotics start-up is betting that the next breakthrough will come not from the machine itself, but from the software that gives it something like a mind.
Kinematic Trees, a company founded in 2025 by the neuroscientist Stuart Wilson and the robotics entrepreneur Daniel Camilleri, said it had raised £585,000 in pre-seed funding to expand its robot-agnostic software platform, which is designed to work across different machines and improve as robotics hardware advances. The financing came from Haatch, the D2N2 Early-Stage Angel Investment Fund and the British Business Bank’s syndicate fund.
The company, whose name nods to the branching structure of evolution, says its approach is inspired by the way brains adapt through different bodies and environments. In practical terms, that means software that can be reused, recombined and updated across robots in factories, warehouses, homes and other settings.
Wilson, who is a senior lecturer in computational neuroscience at the University of Sheffield, and Camilleri, an exited co-founder of Cyberselves Universal, first discussed the idea of a universal robot brain at a Stanford conference in 2017, while working on control systems based on animal learning. Their pitch now is that the robotics industry has spent decades improving hardware without solving one of its most persistent problems: making software portable enough to survive the next generation of machines.
“The technology has been 10 years away for about 40 years,” Camilleri said, arguing that robotics will not reach mass adoption until its intelligence layer becomes flexible enough to move between embodiments. Wilson said the company’s goal is to help robots become useful, safe and customizable at scale, while avoiding the fate of expensive machines that end up unused when software becomes obsolete or operators move on.
Haatch, the lead investor, said it was drawn to both the technical depth of the founders and the commercial potential of the product. Fred Soneya, a general partner and co-founder of the firm, said robotics hardware is advancing quickly, but wider adoption still depends on software that can work across different machines and environments.
Kinematic Trees plans to use the funding to build its commercial, robotics and software engineering teams across London, Nottinghamshire and Sheffield. The company also expects to announce customer factory deployments and deepen partnerships with robotics and automation providers in the second half of 2026.
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