The quantum physics lab has come to the helmet.
Cerca Magnetics, a Nottingham-based startup that builds wearable brain scanners using quantum sensors, announced in late April 2026 that it raised £3.8 million in Series A funding led by Guinness Ventures. The round valued the four-year-old company at £30 million post-money—a figure that reflects both investor enthusiasm for quantum technologies and, perhaps more unusually for research-grade medical devices, some actual commercial traction.
Cerca says it has sold 19 of its systems to neuroscience centers spread across a dozen countries. Revenue hit £6.4 million in 2024, and annual sales have grown north of 100% for three consecutive years. Not bad for a product that doesn't yet have regulatory approval anywhere and remains confined to research labs.
Shrinking a room-sized machine into a helmet
What Cerca is selling replaces something known in neuroscience circles as a SQUID—short for superconducting quantum interference device—a magnetoencephalography scanner that can weigh half a ton, requires liquid helium to stay cold enough to function, and generally demands its own dedicated room. These machines measure the faint magnetic fields generated by electrical activity in the brain, offering a window into neural function that MRI and EEG can't quite match.
Cerca's alternative uses optically pumped magnetometers, or OPMs, which are quantum sensors small enough to fit into a helmet that sits snugly on a patient's head. The proximity to the scalp—closer than SQUID arrays typically manage—theoretically improves signal quality. The company bills its Cerca OPM-MEG System as the world's first commercial, fully integrated wearable MEG device, though it's quick to note the research-only designation.
Current customers include Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children, which installed a 32-sensor system back in July 2021 to study autism in infants, Boys Town National Research Hospital in Omaha, and Yale BrainWorks. The UK Ministry of Defence is also in the mix, funding a separate project of over £3 million aimed at building what it describes as the world's first fully mobile OPM-MEG platform—designed to assess blast exposure effects on soldiers in the field. That project has a March 31, 2026 operational target, though anyone familiar with defense procurement timelines knows such dates can be aspirational.
Academic roots, industrial ambitions
Cerca spun out of the University of Nottingham's Sir Peter Mansfield Imaging Centre on July 24, 2020, building on wearable OPM-MEG work published in Nature two years earlier. The founding team reads like a physics department directory: Dr. Elena Boto as CTO, Dr. Niall Holmes as Chief Scientist, Dr. Ryan Hill as Principal Physicist. Professor Matthew Brookes, who led much of the foundational research, serves as non-executive chairman.
Running the business side is CEO David Woolger, whose previous gig was at Magnetic Shields Limited—a notable detail given that Cerca's sensors still require specially shielded rooms to block out ambient magnetic noise from, say, passing cars or elevator motors. Magnetic Shields is now a key partner supplying those optimized environments.
The company landed at #15 on the Sunday Times 100 Tech list in 2026, which pegged its compound annual growth rate around 107% over three years. It also collected the Institute of Physics Business Innovation Award in 2022 and a SPIE Prism Awards Catalyst Award, though the exact timing of industry accolades can blur together after a while.
The regulatory long game
Guinness Ventures' investment will fund what Cerca describes as clinical approval pathways now underway in the UK and United States, plus manufacturing scale-up and international expansion. The company acknowledged that clinical approval processes are in motion but declined to offer timelines—a sensible hedge given how unpredictable regulatory clearance can be, especially for novel quantum-based medical devices.
The competitive landscape is still forming. FieldLine Medical in the US and MAG4Health in France also sell research-only OPM-MEG systems, making this a small field of challengers chasing a larger incumbent. MEGIN dominates the broader MEG market with its TRIUX neo SQUID-based system, which holds FDA 510(k) clearance and serves clinical customers worldwide. MEGIN's machines are substantially larger and pricier, though—exactly the opening that quantum alternatives are designed to exploit.
There's government interest beyond the Ministry of Defence project. Cerca received £2 million in UK quantum funding announced in February 2024 for a dementia-focused deployment at Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity, suggesting Whitehall sees strategic value in backing homegrown quantum medical technology.
Whether wearable quantum brain scanners become standard clinical tools or remain research curiosities depends on clearing regulatory hurdles, proving clinical utility, and—eventually—convincing hospital procurement committees that the technology justifies the investment. For now, Cerca appears to be threading that needle: deep enough in the research market to generate meaningful revenue, ambitious enough to chase clinical approval, and well-funded enough to see where the technology leads.
Or, at the very least, to keep the helmets coming.
