About Grouse Fibre

Our Story


Grouse Fibre was founded in 2024 by Dr Tom O'Haire to make advanced fibres from proteins.


We use protein templates to build hollow-core optical fibres, a new route to fibres that guide light through air rather than glass. We are developing these fibres for data and AI infrastructure, lasers and sensing, where lower latency, lower loss and new fibre geometries matter.


Our protein comes from dairy side streams, casein recovered from surplus milk on Scottish farms. That gives us a low-cost, abundant and traceable feedstock, and a platform that also produces fibres for textiles and technical applications.


Our team combines materials science, protein chemistry and fibre engineering. We are now supported by significant funding to develop this technology and we work with university and industry partners across the UK.


Our motivation

 

We have been iterating with protein fibres to find applications where the peptides have the greatest added value. We think we have found a challenge that will have significant impact.


The world is running out of room in its fibre. AI and data centres are pushing more data over longer distances than ever, and conventional glass fibre is close to its physical limits. Hollow-core fibre, which guides light through air, is one of the few technologies that can move data faster and with less loss. 


Today it is hard and expensive to make.


Nature is very good at building precise structures. Proteins assemble into ordered shapes at the nanoscale, at low temperatures and with little energy. We use that ability to template the fine internal structure an optical fibre needs. This opens a new manufacturing route for hollow-core fibre and fibre designs that existing methods cannot make.


We also want new materials to be built on sustainable foundations. Our protein comes from dairy side streams, so a resource that is often wasted becomes the starting point for high-performance fibre.

Most new fibres never leave the lab. The gap between a promising result and a fibre that can be made reliably, at length and at volume, is where good ideas stall. 


Our goal is to close that gap, taking new materials from early scientific promise to reproducible pilot fibres in under twelve months.


We want to hear from photonics companies, research groups and investors working on the next generation of optical fibre.

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