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

Jan de Vries · 2026-07-31

Electronics manufacturing has a dirty little secret that's been costing the industry billions for decades. And one Eindhoven-based startup just secured the funding to finally wipe it out. Keiron Printing Technologies, a DeepTech company specializing in precision solder paste printing, has closed a $22.5 million Series A round (€20.7 million). 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 Expensive Problem Nobody Could Solve Here's the thing about solder paste printing: it's been the single biggest point of failure in a global electronics assembly market worth over $650 billion a year. The company claims it's responsible for more than 70% of PCBA defects. That's not a small hiccup—that's a massive drag on reliability, speed, and yield for every electronics manufacturer on the planet. "Solder paste printing has been the industry's most expensive open secret for decades—a failure driver on a market worth well over $650 billion a year that everyone lived with because no one could fix it," said Paul Rooimans, CEO and founder of Keiron. "We're not patching a problem the industry has lived with for decades. We're removing it, for good." The old approach relied on stencils and jet printing. It worked, sort of, but it was never great. Companies just accepted the inefficiency because no one had a better answer. Until now. ### Keiron's Solution: A Fully Digital Approach Founded in 2019 as a spin-off from TNO Holst Centre, Keiron set out to enable autonomous, self-optimizing electronics manufacturing. The company's HF2 LiFT Printer replaces the stencil printer, jet printer, and SPI inspection system with one digital, non-contact platform. It's the world's first fully digital, contactless solder-paste printing solution. The results, according to the company, are impressive: - First-pass yield jumps from an industry-typical ~60% to above 95% - Production lead time is cut in half with zero stencils - Production uptime doubles - Programming becomes 10 times faster These improvements translate into higher throughput, lower working capital, improved cash flow, and stronger EBITDA for electronics production, especially in high-mix, low-to-medium-volume environments. ### Why This Matters for AI Hardware The timing couldn't be better. Next-generation AI hardware is pushing conventional solder paste printing to its breaking point. Components with up to 10,000 interconnects simply can't be handled by traditional methods, leaving yields extremely low. "Nowhere is the payoff bigger than in next-generation AI hardware," the company noted in its press release. Keiron's fully digital LiFT process was built to close that gap, carrying the legacy PCBA industry into Industry 4.0. ### Backed by Strategic Partners The technology originated at TNO Holst Centre, a collaboration between TNO and imec, and TNO remains Keiron's primary strategic research partner. That deep technical foundation gives the company credibility in a space where precision is everything. Hessel Mittelmeijer, Investment Manager and Sustainability Officer at DeepTechXL, explained why investors keep backing Keiron: "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 to solder paste printing." ### What's Next for Keiron With this fresh capital, Keiron plans to accelerate growth by increasing production capacity, expanding commercial and support operations across Europe, North America, and APAC, and pushing forward R&D on its next-generation LiFT platform. The company isn't just tweaking an old playbook—it's replacing it entirely. And for an industry that's been quietly losing billions to a fixable problem, that's a big deal.