Dutch deeptech startup Morphotonics has raised more than €40 million in a Series B+ funding round, and the news suggests a bit more than just another mid-stage scale-up.
Morphotonics makes the manufacturing technology behind fiendishly complex waveguides, one of the hardest components to produce in AR glasses and optical devices, but which are also crucial to the future of making datacentres run both faster and more efficiently.
The Veldhoven-based company builds large-area nanoimprint lithography platforms, which are used to manufacture these optical components with micro and nanoscale structures.
Waveguides are the transparent components that project digital images into a wearer’s field of vision. Basically, they make it possible to build devices like Meta’s Ray-Bans at scale.
This B-round was an extension of a 2024 round, and was backed by 3M Ventures, Innovation Industries, BOM, and Invest-NL. The European Innovation Council (EIC) Fund; Ernij Next, a Dutch family office; and the European Investment Bank (EIB) also participated.
Existing waveguide production methods are often slow, costly and hard to adapt across designs. Morphotonics is attacking this choke point in the AR hardware stack.
In a statement, CEO Hugo da Silva said the company’s role is to move nanoimprint lithography from specialist production into high-volume manufacturing.
The company also said revenue tripled in 2025 versus 2024, and that it has already installed several platforms for high-volume manufacturing worldwide. It is now working with device and component manufacturers across China, Taiwan, the US and Europe.
Morphotonics will use the new funding to expand production capacity for its Cypris platform, develop new products, grow its engineering and commercial teams, and build out supplier, manufacturing and after-sales support networks. Incredibly, Morphotonics is still only around 60 people.
But coming from Netherlands, there’s a decent argument to make that Morphotonics might be the next ASML, in some ways.
Why? Well, ASML is the global name in lithography (putting patterns onto silicon wafers), and Morphotonics nanoimprint lithography (NIL) is very much in the same ballpark, and there are so few companies in this space, and so few who can run at scale.
Meta uses a company called Lumusfied for its waveguide technology. Another company, Dispelix, may or may not supply Apple or Meta for these. We just don’t know. In other words, there’s a global race to make waveguides for the next wave (badum-ish!) of wearable computing.
And while smart glasses are just one way to use waveguides, waveguides are also crucial in data centres, where photonics could be employed to move data around servers and network equipment using light instead of electricity. Although Morphotonics has yet to enter this field, it has already validated the technology with customers, so there’s clearly much more to come from this development.