Kwik-Fit founder Sir Tom Farmer and Stagecoach chief executive Brian Souter have pumped "a significant amount" of cash into a £2m funding round for Elonics, a semiconductor design firm based in Livingston, to develop a new microchip for mobile TV.

The funding round was led by Braveheart, the Scottish angel investor syndicate now listed on the Alternative Investment Market - but Geoffrey Thomson, Braveheart's chief executive, declined to be specific about how much Farmer and Souter had invested.

Thomson said: "We already do quite a bit of work with Brian Souter and Tom Farmer. It is these kind of high net-worth individuals who have taken the place of venture capitalists when it comes to early-stage investment in companies such as Elonics."

David Srodzinski, Elonics' chief executive, said the new money would be used to take the company's unique silicon-based radio frequency microchip, called DigitalTune, from prototype to commercial development.

The idea behind DigitalTune is to provide a low-cost tuner chip that will place it in an ideal position to take advantage of future growth in the market for mobile TV.

The company's natural market is the manufacturers of portable and hand-held devices, such as smart phones and laptops, and Srodzinski said negotiations are ongoing with firms in the US, South Korea and Taiwan.

"The product has been out in the market in its prototype stage now for about 12 months, and the feedback has been extremely good," Srodzinski said.

He added that the company has struck an outsourcing manufacturing deal with IBM in upstate New York.