Morphotonics Raises €40M Extension From 3M Ventures, EIC Fund

Morphotonics, a Dutch supplier of nanoimprint lithography equipment, has raised €40 million as an extension to a round that began in 2024. According to TechCrunch, the backers are 3M Ventures, Innovation Industries, BOM and Invest-NL, with the European Innovation Council Fund, the European Investment Bank, and Ernij Next, a Dutch family office, also participating.

What the company sells: "stamps" pressed into photosensitive material to make waveguides, the transparent optical layers layered inside augmented-reality glasses. Morphotonics' equipment shows up in AR displays for Meta Ray-Ban Display, Even Reality, and Magic Leap, and the same nanoimprint technique goes into privacy screens for vehicles and co-packaged optics for data-center photonic integrated circuits.

CEO Hugo Da Silva, who joined in September 2024, has taken headcount from roughly 30 to 60 in the year since, with a stated target of 70 to 75. He wants the installed base to grow from 10 to 15 systems globally today to 50 within two to three years, and a next-generation machine capable of producing more than six million waveguides annually is due to ship in early 2027. "Typically, display manufacturers would acquire our equipment as part of the supply chain, and we integrate it into the entire manufacturing process," Da Silva told TechCrunch. "We teach them the process, we provide the chemicals, and they can manufacture that."

Roughly 90% of revenue comes from hardware sales today. Da Silva emphasises Asia, saying "strong local presence is very important," and cites teams in China, Taiwan, South Korea and the United States. China reported that smart-glasses sales in the country doubled in the first eight months of this year, and IDC expects shipments of display-equipped smart glasses to reach 12.2 million by 2030. That is the demand curve the €40M is built against, and a rare hardware bet in a stretch where the vast majority of our recent funding coverage has been software.