Kinematic Trees Raises £585K Pre-Seed to Build a Universal Robot Brain That Works on Any Hardware

Robot hardware is getting cheaper and more capable. The intelligence that controls it — the software — is not keeping up. Most industrial robots still require bespoke software that must be rebuilt from scratch when hardware changes. Kinematic Trees, a UK startup spun out of the University of Sheffield, is betting that a nature-inspired, modular software layer can change that.

The company has just raised £585,000 in pre-seed funding to prove its case. The round was led by Haatch through its SEIS Fund, with participation from the D2N2 Early-Stage Angel Investment Fund and the British Business Bank Syndicate Fund . Kinematic Trees plans to use the capital to scale product development, begin international deployments, and hire across commercial and engineering teams in London, Nottinghamshire, and Sheffield, with first factory deployments targeted for the second half of 2026 .

What Kinematic Trees Builds

Kinematic Trees describes its platform as a "robot-agnostic, nature-inspired software intelligence layer" . In plain terms, the company creates modular, reusable software components that capture specialist robotics and embodied AI knowledge — then allows that same intelligence stack to be deployed across different robot hardware without custom integration work for each machine .

CTO Daniel Camilleri has described the concept as "one mind evolving through multiple embodiments" . The platform is designed for manufacturing, healthcare, education, and creative industries .

The Software Bottleneck

The company's core thesis is that despite rapid advances in robot hardware and AI, software remains the key barrier to widespread robotics adoption . Robot intelligence is typically built bespoke for each hardware platform, creating high cost, fragility, and zero portability. Kinematic Trees aims to decouple intelligence from hardware entirely .

CEO Dr Stuart Wilson, a Senior Lecturer in Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sheffield, spent 15 years researching brain evolution before starting the company . The nature-inspired approach borrows from how biological intelligence adapts across different bodies — the same principle, applied to machines .

Founders and Origin

Kinematic Trees was founded in 2025 by Dr Stuart Wilson (CEO) and Daniel Camilleri (CTO) . Wilson brings a decade and a half of computational neuroscience and cognitive-architecture research from the University of Sheffield . Camilleri is an exited co-founder of Cyberselves Universal, which later became Bettering our Worlds (BOW) .

The two first discussed the idea of a "universal robot brain" at the Living Machines conference at Stanford University in 2017, where both were working on robot control systems based on theories of how animal brains adapt . Camilleri also spent years building learning algorithms for the iCub robot under the EU's Human Brain Project .

What the Funding Will Enable

Kinematic Trees says the new capital will support:

• Product development and scaling the platform
• International deployment of the software
• Expanding commercial, robotics, and software engineering teams across London, Nottinghamshire, and Sheffield
• Launching first factory deployments and securing new partnerships in H2 2026

Wilson noted on LinkedIn that with "the backing of Haatch we're now growing the UK team and building some inspiring international partnerships" .