- Dutch semiconductor startup Invisix, founded by ASML alumni, has closed a €20 million seed round.
- The cash injection came from Hitachi Ventures, Transition Ventures, and others. It will be used to scale up x-ray technology to spot errors in the manufacturing of semiconductors.
- Building on a decade of ASML research, co-founder and CEO Christina Porter says that her company’s technology is unusually de-risked for its stage.
Dutch semiconductor startup Invisix, founded by ASML alumni, has closed a €20 million seed round with cash from Hitachi Ventures.
Transition Ventures, imec.xpand, Doosan Investment Co., and an undisclosed tier-1 chip manufacturer also participated in the round.
Founded in 2025 and headquartered in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, Invisix was co-founded by Christina Porter, now CEO, and Sietse van der Post, now CTO, who are both PhD physicists and worked at ASML. The company is developing technology to spot errors in the manufacturing of semiconductors, the same fabs producing high-performance silicon that underpins the AI boom.
Chips are becoming more three-dimensional and nanoscale as AI workloads demand greater hardware complexity. It means that the chip manufacturing process needs to evolve.
Invisix likens modern chips to tiny skyscrapers. Engineers stack thin layers on top of each other and each one needs to be almost perfectly shaped and positioned to work. Before adding the next floor, the previous floor needs to be correct. If one tiny feature is in the wrong place, the entire wafer could be wasted.
However, the optical tools used to see inside a semiconductor’s structure and measure these placements are no longer fit for purpose. When optical tools fall short, manufacturers tend to use slower and destructive alternatives such as cutting the wafer open to assess the placement of features. This destroys the sample, and can only be done on a fraction of wafers.
In contrast Invisix’s technology fires an intense and ultra-short laser pulse at a gas, known as High Harmonic Generation (HHG), which causes the atoms to release soft x-rays. Those x-rays reach the chip’s buried layers and provide data on what’s inside. The company’s software then decodes that signal to build a precise 3D picture of the structure.
The underlying HHG physics earned Professor Anne L’Huillier of Lund University a Nobel Prize in 2023.
In all, it means chipmakers can better ensure that their chips will work by identifying those that won’t work more quickly. Invisix is specifically targeting advanced logic and memory chipmakers as customers.
Invisix’s competitors include KLA, Nova, and Onto, which are the main companies doing optical measurement today. “Nobody yet has a soft x-ray metrology tool on the market,” Porter tells Tech Funding News.
Dutch semiconductor dominance
Invisix has licensed a decade’s worth of soft x-ray development from Dutch semiconductor equipment manufacturer ASML, giving it “a level of technical de-risking that is unusual for a seed-stage hardware company and gives our customers a faster path to deployment,” Porter says.
The CEO could not comment further on the licensing deal with ASML, also a Dutch company. ASM International (ASMI), BESI (BE Semiconductor Industries), and Nexperia are also home in the Netherlands. The country “has a strong history of semiconductor hardware manufacturing and an impressive ecosystem to support it,” Porter says.
Meanwhile, ASML was initially a Philips and ASMI partnership, while upstream suppliers such as NTS, VDL, Settels Savenije, IBS Precision Engineering and Sioux are based in the same area, Porter says, crediting the country’s universities for some of this success.
“The Eindhoven area has become something of a ‘Silicon Valley’; drawing a lot of strong, international technical talent in engineering, physics, etc,” she adds. “We decided to build Invisix in Eindhoven first and foremost because this is where our team is located, and we wanted continuity, but that continuity is also supported by our knowledgeable supply chain in the area.”
“Invisix is one of Europe’s most promising semiconductor companies: they unlock a major bottleneck for manufacturing advanced chips that power AI training and inference. The technology is de-risked, the market is moving fast, and we’re thrilled to back them as they scale,” says Clara Ricard, partner at Transition Ventures, who notes the excitement of seeing talent come out of ASML and build their own companies. Transition just raised a $150 million fund to back AI infrastructure.
Invisix will use the fresh funds to develop its first shippable system, though Porter would not disclose the exact timing, and scale customer demonstrations. It has a current team of 17 full-time employees, and will grow towards the second half of the year.
On diversity, Porter acknowledges operating in a traditionally male-dominated field. It currently has two female board members and staff from nine countries. “We are deeply committed to creating an inclusive workplace for people of all backgrounds,” she says, adding that diverse leadership is central to that goal.
Like many in the semiconductor industry, Porter is watching the AI boom closely as it increases demand for compute. “This is a major driver for increasing the output of both the advanced logic and memory chips that our tool is made to help manufacture,” she adds.
