ARDHANN is rethinking the materials behind the hydrogen economy with a “smart” composite – a sensor-embedded laminate that can sense damage from the inside before it fails. Fresh off winning the Underrepresented Founders pitch competition at SCALE Expo & Summit 2026, we sat down with co-founder and CEO Dr Sangeeth Sivan Kumar to discuss the deep-tech breakthrough born out of his doctoral research with energy majors, the £500,000 pre-seed round funding pilots with Indian Oil and Airbus, and his hard-won advice for first-time and underrepresented founders raising against the odds.

Congratulations on winning the Underrepresented Founders pitch competition at SCALE. What did that moment mean to you?

It was meaningful for two reasons that don’t usually overlap. First, deep tech rarely wins generalist pitch competitions because the narrative is harder; you can’t demo a unicorn in three minutes when your product is a sensor-embedded composite laminate. Winning at SCALE told us the story is finally landing outside of materials science circles. Second, I grew up in South India, in a family that has run cotton textile mills for three generations. From there to Manchester is not a path investors typically pattern-match to. Being recognised at SCALE was a reminder that the route into deep tech can start anywhere, and that the network is starting to back founders who don’t fit the standard template.

Tell us about Ardhann and how you came up with the idea?

During my doctoral research years I worked with big energy majors like Petronas & Saudi ARAMCO on projects involving composites and graphene. Both companies were spending millions to solve the material two issues they were having, namely metal
corrosion and composite monitoring. My brother and I found a way to solve both those problems with a single material, a strong, safe and smart composite material. I took the idea to my Technical Transfer Office (TTO) at my university and they weren’t providing the support I was expecting, then along came Conception X who selected me into their cohort 8. That is the beginning of ARDHANN.

What is the core problem the business is looking to solve?

The world is converting to hydrogen and clean energy at scale. Major infrastructure programmes are underway across the UK, EU, US, and India, with new hydrogen pipelines, storage, and mobility infrastructure being built at pace. The infrastructure being built today still relies on metallic components designed for fossil fuels. In hydrogen environments, steel fails up to 10 times faster, costs 50 percent more to operate, and contributes to a global corrosion bill estimated at $2.5 trillion so far. Composites are the only viable structural replacement at scale, but they are themselves blind to internal damage. Inspection today is external, periodic, and reactive, so operators learn that a vessel is failing only when it fails.

Your technology combines hardware and software in a way that is quite unusual for this sector. Can you walk us through how it works?

Think of it as a material with a nervous system. The hardware is a new generation of composite that we manufacture with an automated, all-directional reinforcement process. During that manufacture we embed our own graphene-based sensor mesh at the fibre level, so the sensing is not bolted on or glued to the surface. It is in the structure of the material itself. The software is Material Intelligence, our physics-informed machine learning platform. The sensors stream live data on strain, pressure, temperature, and chemical activity from inside the part. The model combines that live data with the underlying physics of the material to monitor what is happening in real time, flag failure modes before they propagate, and feed performance data back into the design of the next generation of parts.

Most hardware-software companies in this space do one or the other. Sensor companies sit on top of someone else’s material. Composite companies sell parts that are blind. We are building both layers as one integrated stack, which is what unlocks the value, because the data only means something if the sensor is physically inside the right place.

You are currently raising a £500,000 pre-seed round. What will that capital enable?

The £500K takes us from where we are today to a seed-ready position in 18 months. Specifically, it funds the Gen 2 prototype of our sensor-embedded composite, two paid field pilots with our anchor customers, and the first commercial-grade build of the Material Intelligence platform. About 55 percent of the funds go into R&D and prototyping, 27 percent into our first two commercial FTE hires, and the balance into legal, compliance, IP filings, facilities, and contingency.

The two commercial hires are deliberate. Sanjay and I are technical founders, and the next milestone is converting pilot conversations into signed paid contracts, which needs dedicated commercial muscle alongside the engineering work. The number is sized to break the chicken-and-egg of deep-tech B2B sales. Once we have the IOCL Type V cylinder pilot operational and the Airbus engagement on a formal paid scope, the next tier of buyers can underwrite their decisions on those references, and we are in a position to raise a meaningful seed round on hard evidence rather than projections.

You mentioned pilot discussions. Can you tell us more about the traction you have so far?

Two anchor pilot discussions, both with tier-one customers. The first is with Indian Oil Corporation, India’s largest oil and gas company by revenue, on Type V hydrogen cylinders. The second is with Airbus on aerospace fuel-system sensing, through their
Innovation group. Both are at the technical scoping stage. Neither is paid yet, and we have been deliberately transparent about that with investors. The £500K is what funds the work that converts those conversations into signed paid pilots.

Alongside the customer pilots, we have £40,000 committed from the Conception X Angel Syndicate through an Advance Subscription Agreement. We are selected into the Royce Hydrogen Accelerator at the Henry Royce Institute, Hildrogen NEXT, and the UK Space Agency Accelerator. Our research base is the Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre at the University of Manchester, with DITF (Deutsche Institute für Textil- und Faserforschung) supporting the textile-composite manufacturing side.
The signal we value most is the Tech Nation Breakout 50 selection. That one came from external due diligence by Haatch and Symvan Capital, two well-known UK early-stage VCs. For a pre-revenue deep-tech company, that kind of third-party validation matters more than any in-house metric we could quote.

What does the broader market opportunity look like?

The market is large and being forced into motion. Globally, the addressable opportunity for advanced composites with embedded sensing and a machine learning platform in our target sectors sits at around £4.5 to 6 billion. The realistically serviceable portion, given geography and existing OEM lock-ins, is around £1 billion. By year five, we model a base-case ARR of £12 to 18 million from a manageable footprint of cylinder OEMs and aerospace pilots, which keeps the plan grounded rather than aspirational.
What makes the timing right is that buyers are no longer choosing whether to switch.

The UK has committed around £2.5 billion in revenue support across HAR1 and HAR2. The EU’s IPCEI Hy2Infra approved €6.9 billion of public funding and €5.4 billion of private investment in February 2024. The US Section 45V hydrogen tax credit was finalised in January 2025. India’s National Green Hydrogen Mission is funded at ₹19,744 crore and disbursing. Hydrogen cylinder, pipeline, and aerospace fuel-system buyers are moving inside specific certification windows, mostly 12 to 36 months, not multi-decade timelines. The point we make to investors is this: we are not betting on whether the market arrives. We are betting on whether ARDHANN gets to the qualified-buyer stage before the next entrant does.

As a first-time founder raising at the pre-seed stage, what has the experience been like so far?

Harder than the press releases suggest, and also better in ways I did not expect. The hard part is the asymmetry of information. Every investor conversation runs on a different mental model of what a deep-tech company at our stage should look like. Some
compare us to a software pre-seed where the team is the asset. Others compare us to a hard-tech Series A where the test data is the asset. We are neither, and learning how to translate between those frames in real time has been the biggest skill curve of the last
year.

The better-than-expected part is the people. The advisors who have given the most useful time have not been the loudest ones. They have been the ones who took twenty minutes to explain why a particular cap table choice would hurt us at Series A, or why we should hold a particular IP claim back from a pitch deck. Conception X, the Henry Royce Institute, the team at GEIC, and our Commercial Advisor Venkat Sethuraman, who has thirty years in oil and gas, have done more for ARDHANN than the funding figures alone would show.

The other thing I underestimated is how much the brother dynamic helps. Sanjay and I do not have to negotiate trust. That sounds soft, but in a long day where one of us is fighting the manufacturing problem and the other is fighting the investor pipeline, the
absence of friction is the actual asset.

What advice would you give to other underrepresented founders looking to raise their first round?

Three things that have actually moved the needle for us. First, do not try to compress yourself into the template. The investors who matter eventually figure out that there is no template anyway. We did not pretend to be a Cambridge spinout or an ex-VC second-time founder. We are two brothers from a south Indian textile family who built a composite sensor at the University of Manchester. The specificity of that story has done more for us than any attempt at polish.

Second, build the advisory bench before you need it. As a first-time founder without an inherited network, you have to construct one deliberately. The two best things we did in the first year were bringing on Venkat as Commercial Advisor and embedding at GEIC. Both gave us credibility we could not have generated on our own, and both did so before we had revenue, a deck, or any visible traction.

Third, find external validation that is identity-blind. Pitch competitions, Tech Nation programmes, government grants, accelerators that publish their selection criteria. Those signals carry the same weight whatever you look like or where you come from. When an investor is screening you against fifty other decks, an externally validated logo on slide one buys you the second meeting that your network would otherwise have to buy for you.

And finally, do not internalise the rejections. Most of them are about the investor’s mandate, not about you. We have been turned down for being too early, too late, too composite, too software, too UK, and too global. None of that means we are wrong. It means the matchmaking process is messy. Keep walking.

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