Budding British tech startup could help bring to life ultra-high quality semiconductors
Welsh startup Space Forge was tucked in a corner of the Goodwood Festival of Speed Future Lab building when I visited recently.
Its stand was quiet, with most of the visitors congregating around AMECA, the eerily looking lifelike humanoid presented by British company, Engineering Arts in partnership with the National Robotarium.
What Space Forge does though, underpins everything that Goodwood represents: technology in motion and it couldn’t be more exciting — here’s why.In the beginning was the seed
Every chip found in any electronic device — such as a robot — is likely to contain a metalloid, the most common being Silicon. A silicon chip will have been produced from a wafer that is obtained by slicing through a silicon ingot using diamond blades. That ingot, any ingot, is obtained from a seed.
The purer the crystal seed, the better the wafer. That’s what Joshua Western, the CEO and co-founder of Space Forge calls, ultra-high quality semiconductor substrates. This expertise, one observer told me anonymously, will attract a lot of attention from one particular deep-pocketed line of business: the military.
In May 2025, NATO Innovation Fund was the lead investor in a round that included World Fund, Business Business Bank and NSSIF and injected about $30 million funding.
For now though, the only public customer (and investor) Space Forge acknowledged is BT. “Space-made amplifiers can more than halve the total cell tower consumption”, Space Forge wrote on its website.
Over a decade and scaled up to the country’s estimated fleet of cell towers by 2035, that’s about 4.
