UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA SPIN-OFF CONTACT

Know the moment your cells change.

A microscope small enough to live inside the incubator, measuring the culture around the clock.

Working prototype, validated in published work.

We are building the productised instrument with a small number of research partners.

TALK TO US ABOUT YOUR SAMPLES
The XipScope prototype standing on the perforated steel shelf of a cell-culture incubator, with the incubator's inner glass door behind it.
On the shelf of a cell-culture incubator, where it stays with the sample.

01What it is

Live-cell imaging systems can already hold a culture under control for days. The limitation XipScope addresses is not getting into the incubator — it is that one optical system has to serve every sample, so wells are visited in turn and a culture that should be watched continuously is watched in rotation.

XipScope is a distributed architecture instead. Each sample gets its own compact module, fixed on the incubator shelf beside it. With no moving parts, nothing scans and nothing waits its turn: scaling means adding modules, not building a faster stage.

The optics do not care what the sample is. The same instrument has been used on angiogenesis assays, on developmental biology and on wine fermentation. We are pointing it at organ-on-a-chip, because those assays run in plates — and a plate is exactly what a per-module architecture is for. The design is moving toward one module per well.

The aim is not to give you more images. It is to give you the number the experiment depends on — tube length, junction count, cell density, or whatever yours measures — and to flag the moment it changes. Once the structure is traced, those numbers come out on their own.

Every assay reads a different structure, so we build the tracing for yours. That is why we work with a few groups at a time, rather than shipping one tool that measures everything approximately.

02What it sees

Everything below was imaged with the culture left where it was.

Against the benchtop standard

Tube length agrees to within 5%, junction counts to within 3%, and individual mesh areas correlate at Pearson r = 0.99 (n = 4).

Inverted microscope
A human endothelial cell network on a conventional inverted microscope, scale bar 500 µm.
XipScope, reconstructed
The same well imaged inside the incubator by XipScope and reconstructed, scale bar 500 µm.
Traced and quantified
The reconstruction with vessels traced in red and the enclosed meshes filled in blue and numbered.
Human umbilical vein endothelial cells forming a vascular network, 40 ng/mL VEGF-165, at 24 h. Left, the benchtop instrument the field trusts. Centre, the same well seen by XipScope without leaving the incubator — a raw hologram, computationally backpropagated. Right, the network traced on that reconstruction, tubes in red and the meshes they enclose in blue; the pipeline then measures it. Imaged in the wide-field mode: the same field as the benchtop microscope, sampled 4.4× finer. The tracing is still drawn by hand — the established tools were built for conventional micrographs, not for holographic reconstructions.

Continuous monitoring

3 h
The endothelial network three hours after seeding: many small meshes.
6 h
The same network at six hours, at its densest.
9 h
The same network at nine hours, beginning to coarsen.
12 h
The same network at twelve hours: fewer, larger meshes as the network regresses.
Reconstructions of the same well, imaged every 30 minutes over 18 hours without being touched, each frame traced and quantified the same way. Two independent experiments. Nothing in the instrument sets how long a run can be. The network peaks around 6 h and then regresses — a shape that a measurement at 24 h alone cannot see. This is the argument for staying in the incubator, and it is the reason the work exists.

How the image is made

Inside the device
The XipScope device, opened: an enclosure holding a microfluidic slide directly above the sensor, with a USB-C cable attached.
Raw hologram
The raw interference pattern recorded by the XipScope sensor, scale bar 1 mm.
Reconstructed
Computational reconstruction of the same sample, resolving rod-shaped cells, scale bars 150 µm and 20 µm.
The sample sits between a microLED array and a bare CMOS sensor, with no lens in between. Where it sits in that gap sets the trade between field and detail. What the sensor records is not a picture but an interference pattern; the image is computed from it. Here, Brettanomyces bruxellensis (CECT 1010). Note the differing scale bars — the hologram covers a wider field than the reconstruction.

Angiogenesis panels adapted from Moncada-Madrazo et al., Biosensors and Bioelectronics 2026, 303, 118579. How the image is made, adapted from Benito-Altamirano et al., Biosensors 2025, 15(1), 40. Both are open access under CC BY 4.0. Panels were cut from the published composites and rescaled; no image content was altered.

03Published work

Peer-reviewed work by the founding team at UB, predating the company.

  1. [1]

    Moncada-Madrazo, Canals, Caravaca-Müller, Moreno, Castro, Ramón-Azcón, Vilà, Diéguez — In-incubator continuous and endpoint monitoring of angiogenesis using a chip-sized holographic microscope — Biosensors and Bioelectronics, 303, 118579, 2026 — doi.org/10.1016/j.bios.2026.118579

  2. [2]

    Moncada-Madrazo et al. — Chip-Sized Lensless Holographic Microscope for Real-Time On-Chip Biological Sensing — Sensors, 25(17), 5247, 2025 — doi.org/10.3390/s25175247

  3. [3]

    Benito-Altamirano et al. — MicroVi: A Cost-Effective Microscopy Solution for Yeast Cell Detection and Count in Wine Value Chain — Biosensors, 15(1), 40, 2025 — doi.org/10.3390/bios15010040

  4. [4]

    Diéguez et al. — Chip-Sized Microscopy for Continuous Monitoring: White Wine Fermentation and Yeast Cell Counting via Deep Learning — Eng. Proc., 78, 1, 2024 — doi.org/10.3390/engproc2024078001

  5. [5]

    Vilà, Moreno, Canals, Diéguez — A Compact Raster Lensless Microscope Based on a Microdisplay — Sensors, 21(17), 5941, 2021 — doi.org/10.3390/s21175941

  6. [6]

    Canals et al. — A Novel Approach for a Chip-Sized Scanning Optical Microscope — Micromachines, 12(5), 527, 2021 — doi.org/10.3390/mi12050527

  7. [7]

    Moreno et al. — Pursuing the Diffraction Limit with Nano-LED Scanning Transmission Optical Microscopy — Sensors, 21(10), 3305, 2021 — doi.org/10.3390/s21103305

  8. [8]

    Franch, Canals, Moro, Vilà, Prades, Diéguez et al. — Nano illumination microscopy: scanning with an array of individually addressable nanoLEDs — Optics Express, 28(13), 19044, 2020 — doi.org/10.1364/OE.391497

04Who we are

XipScope was incorporated in Barcelona in 2026 as a University of Barcelona spin-off.

Founders

Dr. Sergio Moreno

CEO & Co-founder

Has been developing the platform since its early stages in 2018. Combines a technical background in single-photon (SPAD) sensor design and microelectronics with company building and product strategy. Leads strategy, investor relations and operations. PhD in Engineering and Applied Sciences, UB, and MSc in Microelectronic Design.

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Dr. Joan Canals

CTO & Co-founder

Has worked in microelectronic design and optoelectronic system integration for biomedical applications since 2006. Principal architect of the platform from the outset. Leads R&D and the technical roadmap. Electronics Engineer and PhD in Engineering and Applied Sciences, UB.

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Advisors

Mattia Nuti

Strategic Advisor

More than fifteen years of experience scaling technology companies. Advises on fundraising, go-to-market and international expansion, with a focus on organ-on-a-chip in Europe and the US.

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Dr. Anna Vilà

Scientific Advisor — Microscopy

Full Professor at UB, head of the Instrumentation and Communication Systems group; computational imaging and lensless microscopy.

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Dr. Ángel Diéguez

Scientific Advisor — CMOS & VLSI

Full Professor at UB, head of the Microelectronic Design group; CMOS sensors and VLSI for biomedical applications.

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Dr. Juan Daniel Prades

Scientific Advisor — MicroLED

Humboldt Professor at TU Braunschweig, former Full Professor at UB; semiconductor nanotechnology and microLED fabrication.

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