Dr Tony Hooley is a fellow commoner of Clare Hall, Founder and CEO of Hooley Research, and Founder of Cambridge Mechatronics, a world leader in the design and control of Shape Memory Alloy (SMA) actuators. Its technology has shipped in over 70 million products to date, including several of the world’s top-ranking smartphone cameras, and has over 700 patents pending and granted.

Cambridge Mechatronics announced the closing of a funding round totalling over $40m to enable rapid expansion of its actuator and controller IC product portfolios. The oversubscribed funding round was led by Atlantic Bridge. Intel Capital and Supernova acted as co-leads with further participation from Sony Innovation Fund.

The rise of social media and video sharing means that smartphone camera performance is vitally important to smartphone brands and their customers. The SMA technology generates a high force in a very compact form-factor, providing in a slim phone-body, world leading optical image stabilization (OIS) for photos and videos, free of motion-blur; and as it produces zero magnetic fields, without interfering with adjacent cameras and loudspeakers.

Read more about Cambridge Mechatronics here.