Prior to founding Zero Point Motion, CEO Dr Ying Lia Li joined the University of Bristol’s quantum pre-incubation programme, QTEC in 2019 as an Executive Fellow.

Joining QTIC provides Zero Point Motion with all the benefits of a serviced workspace suitable for facilitating the R&D of deep technology, plus access to a community of similar photonics enabled start-ups in Bristol. 

The company

Global Navigation Satellite Systems such as GPS are not as reliable or secure as you would believe, and can easily be jammed, spoofed or denied. Zero Point Motion’s technology builds upon CEO Dr Ying Lia Li’s PhD in optomechanics and her experience of working with micro-electro-mechanical systems at the Advanced Technology Centre, BAE systems, to develop sensors that will enable precise position sensing when GPS is unavailable, for instance within indoor or underground environments.  

The team at Zero Point Motion are redefining the limits of inertial sensors to enable high precision positioning and navigation. The current market for inertial sensors is split into expensive and often bulky high-performance gear or low-cost but imprecise sensors. Zero Point Motion harnesses the ultra-low properties of light and combines it with the mass volume production capabilities of hybrid micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) to build inertial sensors that are precise, chipscale and affordable. The team is targeting 100x improved precision which will translate into sub-millimeter precision for short term positioning and result in navigation errors of less than 0.5% final distance error over distance travelled.  

The team

CEO Dr Ying Lia Li has nearly 15 years of experience in fibre optics, optomechanical sensing, and chip design. She trained as a physicist at Imperial College before working at the Advanced Technology Centre at BAE Systems. Lia then went on to complete a PhD at University College London. In 2021 Dr Ying Lia Li won the Clifford Paterson Medal and Prize for her pioneering quantum sensing work and for her drive to build a more diverse and supportive research community.  

Executive Chairman Dr Gordon Aspin joined the Zero Point Motion team in June 2020. In the 1980s he was a co-founder of The Technology Partnership, a pioneering technology development consultancy, still a successful privately held business today. In the 1990s, with three colleagues, he founded a pioneering mobile phone technology licensing spinout (TTP Communications) and built it into a publicly quoted global business with over $100M revenue and 700 staff. And in the 2000s Gordon founded and led Cognovo, a spin-out of vector processor technology from ARM, before selling the business in 2012 to u-blox, a Swiss fabless chip and module manufacturer. 

VP of Operations Pascal Herczog joined the Zero Point Motion team in June 2021. He has over 25 years of experience in developing communications products, with a strong focus on patented innovation in systems architecture, security and AI/ML, for lower cost effective IoT solutions. Prior to joining Zero Point Motion, Pascal was VP Cellular Modem Development and Head of Cellular Technology at u-blox. 

Zero Point Motion at QTIC  

CEO Dr Ying Lia Li said: “There’s a lot of excitement in returning to QTIC after completing the QTEC pre-incubator programme and making our business plans come to life. Community is everything at the start of anyone’s entrepreneurial journey, and I’m lucky to be surrounded by great deep tech startups, seeing old friends and feeling a sense of belonging as we set up our lab and start to recruit.  

“Bristol is where I grew up, so I’m proud to setup Zero Point Motion in this vibrant city and start transforming navigation and positioning!”