ASML spinout Invisix raises €20M to see inside the chips optics can’t

Modern chips have a measurement problem that sounds almost philosophical: they have become too complex to look at.

As logic and memory devices stack into three dimensions and shrink to a few nanometres, the optical tools that check each layer can no longer resolve the structures buried inside.

Invisix, an Eindhoven startup spun out of ASML, has raised €20 million to fix that blind spot.

The oversubscribed seed round drew Hitachi Ventures, Transition Ventures, imec.xpand, Doosan Investment Co. and, in the company’s phrasing, a tier-1 semiconductor manufacturer.

That last, anonymous backer is a meaningful signal in a field where chipmakers rarely invest in tools they do not expect to use; earlier reporting has pointed to Samsung taking a stake in the company as it works on yields for its 2nm process. Invisix will use the money to grow its team, build its first shippable system, and run customer demonstrations from a new Eindhoven cleanroom.

The problem it targets is a yield problem, which in semiconductors is a money problem. Building a chip is a layer-by-layer process, and if you cannot confirm a layer printed correctly before adding the next, you are flying blind.

Today that often means slow, costly, sometimes destructive checks, slicing a finished wafer apart to inspect it. In a business where a marginal yield gain is worth billions and the race is won by reaching a new node first, that gap bites.

Invisix’s answer borrows the logic that drove lithography itself: to see smaller things, use smaller wavelengths. Its system uses high-harmonic generation, the physics recognised by the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Lund University’s Anne L’Huillier.

A short-pulse laser excites noble-gas atoms until they emit soft x-rays across many wavelengths at once, producing a richer 3D signal than a single-colour laser, which the company pairs with reconstruction algorithms and machine learning to rebuild a device’s internal structure without destroying it.

What makes the bet unusual for a seed-stage hardware company is how much of the risk is already retired. Invisix licensed a substantial soft x-ray technology package developed over more than a decade inside ASML, and its team is stocked with veterans of that programme alongside senior hires such as COO Roald Dogge, formerly of contract manufacturer NTS.

The company says it demonstrated the approach publicly in 2023 with Intel and imec, measuring features in gate-all-around transistors, among the hardest targets for existing metrology.

The wider context is a continent trying to hold onto the parts of the chip supply chain it leads. The Netherlands is home to ASML, and a cluster of Dutch and Belgian deep-tech funds, including imec.xpand, now backs the startups forming around it.

Invisix has the testbench, the pedigree and the cleanroom; the test ahead is the unforgiving one for any tool company, turning a demonstration into a system a fab will run at volume.