This Dutch Startup Just Raised $22.5M to Fix Electronics Manufacturing's Biggest Headache

Jan de Vries · 2026-07-31

Here's a problem that's been quietly costing the electronics industry billions for decades: solder paste printing. It's the step where tiny amounts of solder are applied to circuit boards before components are placed, and it's been a massive point of failure. Now, a Dutch startup called Keiron Printing Technologies thinks it has finally cracked the code. Keiron, based in Eindhoven, just closed a $22.5 million Series A round. That's about €20.7 million for our European readers. The funding was co-led by Invest-NL, DeepTechXL, and Waves Capital, with participation from Ramphastos Investments, ATUM Ventures, Cottonwood Technology Fund, and TNO Ventures. ### The Problem That Everyone Ignored Here's the thing about solder paste printing: it's not glamorous, but it's critical. The global electronics assembly market is worth over $650 billion a year, and solder paste printing is the single biggest point of failure in that entire ecosystem. In fact, Keiron claims it's responsible for over 70% of PCBA defects. That's a staggering number when you think about it. For years, manufacturers have just lived with this. They've patched the problem with stencil printers, jet printers, and inspection systems, but nobody has been able to fix it at the root. Paul Rooimans, CEO and founder of Keiron, calls it "the industry's most expensive open secret." ### The LiFT Solution Keiron's answer is something called Laser-Induced Forward Transfer (LiFT). It's a fully digital, contactless solder-paste printing solution that replaces the traditional stencil printer, jet printer, and SPI inspection system with a single platform. The company's HF2 LiFT Printer is the world's first fully digital, contactless solution of its kind. The results are pretty dramatic. Keiron reports that first-pass yield jumps from an industry-typical ~60% to above 95%. Production lead time is cut in half because there are zero stencils to create and change over. Production uptime doubles, and programming becomes 10 times faster. For manufacturers working in high-mix, low-to-medium-volume environments, this translates to higher throughput, lower working capital, and stronger EBITDA. ### Why This Matters for AI Hardware Here's where things get really interesting. The payoff is biggest in next-generation AI hardware. Components with up to 10,000 interconnects are pushing conventional solder paste printing past its breaking point. Yields have been extremely low, and that's exactly the gap Keiron's LiFT process was built to close. "AI, defence growth, and increasing manufacturing complexity are accelerating the need for digital transformation in EMS," said Hessel Mittelmeijer, Investment Manager and Sustainability Officer at DeepTechXL. "Keiron solves one of the industry's biggest production challenges with a scalable, digital approach to solder paste printing." ### What's Next for Keiron Founded in 2019 as a spin-off from TNO Holst Centre, a strategic collaboration between TNO and imec, Keiron is still developing its technology with TNO as its primary strategic research partner. The company plans to use this fresh capital to drive aggressive growth by increasing production capacity, expanding commercial and support operations across Europe, North America, and APAC, and accelerating R&D on its next-generation LiFT platform. The bigger picture here is about moving the legacy PCBA industry into Industry 4.0. Keiron isn't tweaking the old playbook; it's replacing it entirely with a single digital, non-contact process. Whether they can truly deliver on that promise at scale remains to be seen, but the investors seem to think they're onto something. For anyone watching the electronics manufacturing space, this is a company worth keeping an eye on. The problem they're solving is real, the solution is genuinely different, and the market is massive. Sometimes the biggest opportunities come from fixing the problems everyone else has learned to live with.