UK-headquartered deep tech company StandardX has raised £10 million in seed funding to build an accelerator-based refinery designed to increase production of rare isotopes used in medicine and energy.
The round was led by Vsquared Ventures and East X Ventures, with additional backing from firstminute capital, UKI2S (the UK Innovation and Science Seed Fund), Brevan Howard Macro Venture and Geometry.
Isotopes are forms of chemical elements with specific properties. StandardX says global production capacity is constrained and fragmented, relying on ageing facilities and output-limited machines concentrated in a handful of locations. It says isotopes needed for a new generation of cancer treatments, particularly targeted alpha therapies, are so scarce that clinical trials have been paused or delayed in the UK, Europe and elsewhere.
The company is developing a proprietary accelerator system which, it says, can manufacture the full portfolio of isotopes at commercial scale on a standard industrial footprint. That would allow production to be sited close to demand, rather than relying on isotope-specific infrastructure. StandardX describes the system as the world’s first scalable isotope refinery.
Production will begin with isotopes for cancer diagnosis and therapy. StandardX plans to supply its first isotopes to a medical research partner in 2027, ahead of industrial-scale production from 2029. The same platform is intended later to produce isotopes for other industries, including tritium, a fuel for fusion energy. The company says it has signed agreements with fusion developers to manufacture tritium.
The funding will grow the team, secure the company’s first industrial site in London and advance the design and build of its first isotope refinery system. StandardX was founded in 2025 by chief executive Richard Pearson and chief technology officer Ross Allen, both nuclear engineers, and has a team of 15 scientists, engineers and operators.
Pearson said: “Isotopes underpin the next era of innovation across several key sectors, but all share the same constraints around supply. Shortages are most acute in cancer medicine, already impacting patients today, and stalling progress in the development of next-generation treatments.”
Allen said: “This raise moves us from concept into engineering, physics into hardware, and conversations into delivery. Our immediate priority is our industrial site in London, where we will deploy our first isotope refinery system and work closely with clinicians and researchers to start building a reliable supply chain.”
Lise Rechsteiner, general partner at Vsquared, said: “Radiopharma is approaching an extraordinary inflection point, but isotope supply simply hasn’t kept pace.”
Theodore Mollinger, general partner at East X, said: “StandardX is tackling a supply problem that matters enormously today in medicine, while building a platform that could become critical infrastructure for fusion tomorrow.”
