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

Jan de Vries · 2026-07-31

Here's a number that might surprise you: over 70% of all defects in printed circuit board assembly (PCBA) trace back to a single step in the manufacturing process. That step is solder paste printing, and for decades, it's been the industry's dirty little secret. It's a problem that costs manufacturers billions every year, yet everyone just lived with it because nobody could actually solve it. Until now, that is. Keiron Printing Technologies, a deep-tech company based in Eindhoven, has just closed a $22.5 million Series A round to scale its laser-based solution that's turning the old playbook on its head. The funding round was co-led by Invest-NL, DeepTechXL, and Waves Capital, with participation from existing backers like Ramphastos Investments, ATUM Ventures, Cottonwood Technology Fund, and TNO Ventures. ### The Problem Nobody Could Fix To understand why this matters, you need to understand just how broken the status quo is. The global electronics assembly market is worth over $650 billion a year, and solder paste printing is its single biggest point of failure. The process involves applying solder paste onto a circuit board before components are placed, and if that step goes wrong, everything downstream suffers. For years, manufacturers have relied on stencil printers and jet printers, but these methods have inherent flaws. They're slow, they're imprecise, and they require constant inspection and rework. The result? First-pass yields that typically hover around 60%. That means nearly half of all boards need some kind of correction before they're usable, which drives up costs, extends lead times, and eats into profits. ### A Digital, Contactless Solution Keiron's answer is a technology called Laser-Induced Forward Transfer (LiFT), and it's a radical departure from everything that came before. Instead of using physical stencils or jets, the company's HF2 LiFT Printer uses a fully digital, contactless process to deposit solder paste with pinpoint precision. It's the world's first industrialized inline platform of its kind, and it replaces not just the stencil printer, but also the jet printer and the SPI inspection system with a single machine. The results are staggering. Keiron reports that first-pass yield jumps from the industry-typical 60% to above 95%. Production lead time is cut in half because there are no stencils to create or change over. Production uptime doubles, and programming becomes 10 times faster. For manufacturers operating in a high-mix, low-to-medium-volume environment, that translates into higher throughput, lower working capital, improved cash flow, and a much stronger EBITDA. ### Why This Matters for AI Hardware Nowhere is the payoff bigger than in next-generation AI hardware. Components like advanced chips can have up to 10,000 interconnects, and that density pushes conventional solder paste printing past its breaking point. Yields on these components have been extremely low, which is a major bottleneck for companies trying to scale AI infrastructure. Keiron's LiFT process was built to close that exact gap. "AI, defense growth, and increasing manufacturing complexity are accelerating the need for digital transformation in EMS," says 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. That's why we led the seed round and continue to back the company as it scales." ### The Road Ahead Keiron was founded in 2019 as a spin-off from TNO Holst Centre, a strategic collaboration between TNO and imec, and it's still developing its technology with TNO as its primary research partner. With this fresh capital, the company plans to aggressively scale production, expand its commercial and support operations across Europe, North America, and APAC, and accelerate R&D on its next-generation LiFT platform. Paul Rooimans, CEO and founder of Keiron, sums it up best: "Solder paste printing has been the industry's most expensive open secret for decades. This round lets us do exactly what the market has been asking for: put the HF2 on more lines, faster, without giving up an ounce of the precision that sets LiFT precision printing apart. Keiron isn't patching a problem the industry has lived with for decades. We're removing it, for good." If the company delivers on its promises, the electronics manufacturing world is about to get a whole lot more efficient. And that's a win for everyone, from the biggest AI chipmakers to the smallest contract manufacturers.