This Dutch Startup Just Raised $22.5M to Fix Electronics Manufacturing's Costliest Bottleneck

Jan de Vries · 2026-07-31

Electronics manufacturing has a dirty little secret, and it's been costing the industry billions for decades. The problem isn't chips, software, or assembly robots. It's something far more mundane: solder paste printing. Keiron Printing Technologies, a DeepTech company based in Eindhoven, just closed a $22.5 million Series A round to tackle this head-on. 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 $650 Billion Problem Nobody Could Solve Here's the context. The global electronics assembly market is worth over $650 billion a year. And according to Keiron, solder paste printing is the single biggest point of failure in that entire ecosystem. It's responsible for more than 70% of PCBA defects. That's not a minor inefficiency; that's a massive drag on reliability, speed, and yield for every electronics manufacturer on the planet. For decades, companies have lived with this. They've tweaked stencil printers, adjusted jet printers, and added inspection systems to catch mistakes after they happen. But nobody fixed the root cause. Paul Rooimans, CEO and founder of Keiron, puts it bluntly: "Solder paste printing has been the industry's most expensive open secret for decades." ### A Completely Different Approach Keiron isn't trying to improve the old playbook. Instead, they've replaced it entirely. Founded in 2019 as a spin-off from TNO Holst Centre, the company developed the HF2 LiFT Printer. It uses Laser-Induced Forward Transfer (LiFT) technology to print solder paste without any physical contact. No stencils. No jets. Just a fully digital, non-contact process. This one machine replaces three separate systems: the stencil printer, the jet printer, and the SPI inspection system. And the results are striking: - First-pass yield jumps from an industry-typical 60% to above 95% - Production lead time is cut in half (zero stencils to change or clean) - Production uptime doubles - Programming becomes 10 times faster For manufacturers, that translates into higher throughput, lower working capital, improved cash flow, and a stronger EBITDA. Especially in high-mix, low-to-medium-volume production environments where flexibility is everything. ### Why AI Hardware Makes This Urgent This isn't just about making existing processes a bit better. The next generation of AI hardware is pushing conventional solder paste printing past its breaking point. Components with up to 10,000 interconnects simply can't be handled reliably by traditional methods. Yields drop to extremely low levels. That's exactly the gap Keiron's LiFT process was built to close. Hessel Mittelmeijer, Investment Manager and Sustainability Officer at DeepTechXL, sees the bigger picture: "AI, defense growth, and increasing manufacturing complexity are accelerating the need for digital transformation in EMS. Keiron solves one of the industry's biggest production challenges with a scalable, digital approach." ### What's Next for Keiron The $22.5 million in fresh capital will be used to scale aggressively. The company plans to increase production capacity, expand commercial and support operations across Europe, North America, and APAC, and accelerate R&D on its next-generation LiFT platform. Keiron's technology originated at TNO Holst Centre, a strategic collaboration between TNO and imec, and TNO remains the company's primary strategic research partner. That deep research foundation gives Keiron a moat that's hard to replicate. ### The Bottom Line For anyone in electronics manufacturing, this is a story worth watching. The industry has accepted solder paste printing failures as a cost of doing business for way too long. Keiron is betting that a fully digital, contactless approach can finally remove that cost from the equation. With this funding round, they now have the resources to prove it at scale.