Welcome to the October 2025 edition of our technology & business development newsletter. This month we secured new funding to accelerate our digital twin work, kicked off a local manufacturing collaboration, welcomed a new lead engineer to drive designs and R&D, and explored next-gen equipment during a productive European site visit.
We also connected with peers at a regional growth event and wrapped up Halloween with some fun 3D-printed creations from our placement team. We hope you enjoy this month’s updates and, as always, thank you for being part of the Vikela journey! 🚀
Digital Catapult’s Digital Twin Adoption Accelerator
We’re delighted to share that we’ve been awarded funding through Digital Catapult’s Digital Twin Adoption Accelerator. This milestone will help us accelerate our digital twin capabilities linking real-time production and testing data with virtual models to unlock smarter decision-making, improved efficiency, and more sustainable operations.
We’re equally excited to be partnering with local firm BMT on this project. Together, we’ll co-develop and trial a best-in-class digital twin. This collaboration showcases the strength of our regional ecosystem and brings us a step closer to delivering scalable, real-world impact for NI manufacturing.
Invest NI’s ‘Powering Your Purpose’
We had a fantastic time at Invest Northern Ireland Powering Your Purpose event. The sessions were packed with practical insights on purpose-led growth covering everything from scaling sustainably to accessing new markets and we left energised by the ambition across Northern Ireland’s business community.
A big thank you to the organisers and everyone we met on the day. We came away with new connections, fresh ideas, and a clearer roadmap for how we can align impact with performance in the months ahead. We’re excited to put those learnings into action and explore collaborations sparked at the event.
European Site Visit
Our founder Peter Gilleece recently returned from a productive site visit to Belgium, where he toured leading facilities and evaluated the latest machinery and equipment for our next phase of growth. From production process to quality control innovations, the trip gave us a clear view of what will help boost throughput, consistency, and scale our operations.
Equally valuable were the conversations behind the scenes. Peter spent time with industry experts and engineers, building strong relationships and comparing real-world lessons on scaling, maintenance, and integration. We’re excited to turn these insights into concrete upgrades over the coming months.
Other News
Team Growth
We’re excited to welcome Craig Daley to the team as our new Lead Engineer. Craig brings a strong track record in product development and manufacturing systems, and he’ll play a pivotal role shaping our engineering roadmap. His leadership will help us move faster from concept to prototype to production always with reliability, performance, and user value front and centre.
In his new role, Craig will focus on new designs and R&D, driving innovation. He’ll be working closely with our customers and partners while strengthening our core products and exploring the next wave of capabilities. Welcome aboard, Craig!
Halloween 3D-printed creations
To celebrate Halloween, we gave our placement student Harry a creative side project and he absolutely ran with it. He designed a series of 3D-printed pumpkin concepts, experimenting with CAD, textures, and modular stems to create playful, high-quality pieces that show off our rapid prototyping capabilities.
From first sketches to final prints on our in-house machines, Harry’s work was a brilliant blend of creativity and engineering. The results brightened the office and got us ready for the spooky season
Thank you for reading our latest newsletter and we’re looking forward to bringing you more updates over the next few months – as always get in touch with us if you want to book a chat or have any questions. If you know someone you think it would be good for us to have a conversation with, we would always appreciate being put in touch.
Look out for our next newsletter at the end of November and have a great month in the meantime,
The Vikela Team 👋
