- Morphotonics raises €40M+ Series B to scale AI glasses waveguide manufacturing.
- Invest-NL joins 3M, Innovation Industries and BOM as revenue tripled in 2025.
- Waveguides remain AI glasses’ costliest bottleneck; Morphotonics builds the machines for them.
Everyone building AI glasses has the same problem, and it isn’t the AI. It’s a transparent sliver of glass no bigger than a lens, covered in patterns too small to see, that most manufacturers still can’t produce cheaply enough to put in a $300 pair of glasses. Morphotonics, a Dutch deep-tech company, has just raised more than €40 million to change that.
Its revenue tripled in 2025 compared with 2024, according to the company. The expanded round — first opened with a $10 million-plus close in September 2024 — has grown into the largest raise in Morphotonics’ history, bringing in Invest-NL as a new backer alongside returning investors 3M Ventures, Innovation Industries and Brabant Development Agency (BOM), plus the European Innovation Council Fund and the European Investment Bank.
Morphotonics, based in Veldhoven within the Netherlands’ Brainport high-tech cluster, makes the equipment used to manufacture waveguides — the optical components that beam digital images into a wearer’s field of vision in devices like Meta’s Ray-Ban Display.
It was founded in 2014 by Onno Lint, Rob van Erven, Jan Matthijs ter Meulen and Bram Titulaer, a team that spun out of Philips’ optical-disc division, the group that helped invent and manufacture the CD. Hugo da Silva took over as CEO in 2024; ter Meulen now serves as CTO.
Why waveguides are the bottleneck
Waveguides work by etching nano- and microscale structures into a surface. This needs to be done across large panels, at speed, without defects, for a fraction of the cost. Existing production methods struggle with all three at once.
Morphotonics’ answer is nanoimprint lithography: pressing patterns into a liquid resin with a mould, then curing it with UV light, and replicating across large substrates. Its Cypris platform is built specifically for high-volume waveguide production, and the company says it has already installed several such platforms with manufacturers worldwide.
A crowded field, working a different layer of it
Morphotonics isn’t the only European deep-tech company chasing the AI-glasses supply chain, but it’s attacking a different part of it. Swave Photonics, which raised €27 million in a 2025 Series A and a further €6 million follow-on, is trying to eliminate waveguides altogether with holographic displays. Dispelix, a Finnish rival that has raised €43.2 million to date, designs its own single-layer waveguides. eyeo, which closed its own €40 million Series A in May, is solving a related but separate problem: getting more light into camera sensors, not projecting it back out.
Morphotonics doesn’t design optics for any device. It sells the manufacturing line other companies need to build theirs at volume — closer to an equipment supplier than a component maker.
The capital will go toward Cypris’s production capacity, product development, and the expansion of its engineering, commercial, and after-sales teams.
“Everyone is talking about AI glasses right now. But these and similar devices will not reach mass adoption unless the optical components inside them can be manufactured at consumer-electronics scael,” said Hugo da Silva, CEO of Morphotonics.
Johan Stins, senior investment manager at Invest-NL, framed it similarly: “The company has made significant progress in a short time, and this investment will support its move from technology development into broader industrial deployment.”
Mark Copman, senior vice president at 3M’s New Growth Ventures, added that the firm was “pleased to continue to support the company’s growth.”
The bigger number behind the bet on optics
Consumer wearables are forecast to generate more than $1 trillion in cumulative revenue between 2026 and 2032, with smart eyewear alone reaching $44 billion by 2032, according to Counterpoint Research. Every dollar of that depends on components manufacturers can actually produce at scale. AI models can iterate in software; optics can’t.
Whether Morphotonics ends up as the default manufacturing layer for AI glasses or one of several competing standards will depend less on its technology than on how quickly the rest of the industry needs it. For now, the AI-glasses race is being run as much in fabs as it is in labs.
