3M Ventures and Invest-NL put €40M into a 50-person Veldhoven nanoimprint toolmaker

The first closing of the Series B, in September 2024, brought in over $10M, described as roughly €9M, from 3M Ventures, Innovation Industries and BOM ^[5]. This round is €40M, with Invest-NL added to those three ^[1]. Call it about 4.4 times the earlier check ^[15]. Spread across a staff of 50 to 60, it comes to between €670,000 and €800,000 per current employee ^[2][13].

The pitch is area. The roll-to-plate system stamps microscopic structures onto substrates as large as 1.1 by 1.3 meters ^[6], which is 1.43 square meters per stamp ^[12], and what it leaves behind are lenses, prisms and waveguides ^[6]. The founders learned the technique making optical discs at Philips ^[7].

Morphotonics says the capital goes to manufacturing capacity, headcount, and two adjacent markets at once: data center optics and advanced semiconductor packaging ^[14]. It has also opened an office in China and set up a contract manufacturing network ^[10]. In the data center the case is that photonics is replacing copper to move data faster with less energy ^[8]. The commercial anchor cryptobriefing names is Leia, a 3D display company in consumer electronics ^[3].

Revenue grew three to four times year over year in 2025, the first full year under Hugo da Silva, who became CEO in October 2024 ^[9]. The report gives no revenue figure and no data center customer ^[11].

The investor mix is the informative part. According to cryptobriefing, 3M Ventures brings materials science and manufacturing at scale ^[16], and Invest-NL is a Dutch state-backed fund that has been selectively deploying into companies it considers strategically important for Europe's tech independence, particularly in semiconductors and photonics ^[4]. All three of the 2024 backers returned, and the state fund joined them ^[1][5].

The likeliest version, in my view, is that display and augmented-reality waveguide work pays the bills for a while, and data center optics stays a qualification programme; the 2024 tranche was already earmarked for the packaging pivot ^[5], which makes packaging the older of the two adjacent bets. A second version has panel-level imprint winning packaging work and never getting near an interconnect. What would settle it is a named transceiver maker or operator as a customer, or imprint tools shipping into a packaging line. Until then, the data center half is a use-of-funds statement ^[14].