- The €40M Series A, led by Innovation Industries, brings total funding to €55M and funds the company’s first full in-house chip design team.
- eyeo’s nanophotonic chips split light instead of filtering it, recovering the 70% every image sensor on earth currently throws away.
- With 26 patents, tier-one customer engagements, and process validation at a commercial foundry, eyeo is seven years in the making and ready to ship.
eyeo, an imaging startup based in the Netherlands, has raised €40 million in Series A funding led by Innovation Industries.
The round was also joined by existing investors imec.xpand, Invest-NL Deep Tech Fund, QBIC fund, High-Tech Gründerfonds, and Brabant Development Agency.
eyeo was founded about 18 months ago by Jeroen Hoet, Gerd Van den Branden, Alden Carracillo, and Jan Genoe as a spin-out from imec, the Belgian semiconductor research institute. The company develops nanophotonic colour-splitting sensors to replace colour-filter technology that has not changed for 50 years. Its innovation aims to recover 70% of the light that current image sensors lose, according to the startup.
The global imaging sensor market is worth $30 billion, with about seven billion sensors shipped each year for smartphones, autonomous vehicles, XR headsets, industrial machines, and smart city infrastructure. eyeo says the main problem is that all current sensors block light. Traditional colour filters allow only red, green, or blue wavelengths to reach each pixel, blocking the rest. This means most of the available light never reaches the chip.
“Every modern device that sees the world — from smartphones to autonomous systems — is held back by the same 50-year-old constraint. eyeo removes it at the source,” says Hoet to Tech Funding News.
Hoet says the idea for the company started when he met the technology’s inventor at imec, where the science had been in development for seven years. He spent a year at imec as an entrepreneur-in-residence, building the founding team and finding early customer interest before launching the company.
eyeo’s nanophotonic colour splitting platform splits light instead of filtering it. A photonic structure captures incoming photons, guides them through a waveguide, separates the wavelengths, and sends each colour to the right pixel.
This method delivers three times the light sensitivity of standard sensors, enables very small pixels, and provides true colour accuracy without the extra processing required by software solutions. The technology is protected by 26 patents and works with existing sensor platforms, so manufacturers do not have to redesign their products to use it.
Hoet says eyeo stands out from competitors, including Admiral, AdSorcery, Invisit, and Alarum Technologies, as established sensor makers like Sony, Samsung, and OmniVision still use colour filter designs.
“Software-based approaches have many drawbacks: power consumption increases, quality is lower, and the market resists changing its image processing pipeline. We are the only ones who, in hardware directly inside the chip, have completely removed the colour filters,” he tells TFN.
eyeo is not sharing customer names yet, but Hoet says they are working with top customers in smart city, industrial, XR, and mobile markets. The company plans to offer an evaluation kit to select customers after summer 2025, and aims to launch its first commercial product in late 2025 or early 2026.
“eyeo is delivering the kind of foundational breakthrough that redefines an entire category. This is a powerful example of deep-tech innovation driving real structural progress in semiconductors, with implications that extend across the broader technology ecosystem. We’re excited to back this outstanding team and their superior technology, which is truly pioneering in its approach and sets a new benchmark for what’s possible in the field,” adds Nard Sinteni, partner at Innovation Industries.
Since its launch, eyeo has grown from 4 to 19 employees and expects to triple its team size over the next two years. Hoet says the team is about half male and half female, with people from around ten different countries.
“The best people mean a combination of expertise and different perspectives — gender, backgrounds, ethnicities. That’s when you come to the best possible solutions,” he notes.
The €40 million will go toward three main goals: expanding eyeo’s IC and system architecture team at its Antwerp sensor design centre, developing next-generation 3D-stacked CMOS image sensors, and building commercial partnerships with OEM customers worldwide.
