This Dutch Startup Raised $22.5M to Fix a $650B Manufacturing Problem

Jan de Vries · 2026-07-31

There's a dirty little secret in the electronics world, and it's been costing manufacturers billions for decades. It's not a chip shortage or a supply chain issue—it's solder paste printing. Yes, the humble act of applying solder paste to circuit boards is the single biggest cause of defects in electronics assembly, a market worth over $650 billion a year. Now, a Dutch deep-tech company from Eindhoven thinks it has finally cracked the code. Keiron Printing Technologies has just closed a $22.5 million Series A round to scale its laser-based printing technology and eliminate what it calls the industry's "most expensive open secret." ### The Funding Round and What It Means The round was co-led by Invest-NL, DeepTechXL, and Waves Capital, with participation from Ramphastos Investments, ATUM Ventures, Cottonwood Technology Fund, and TNO Ventures. This mix of strategic and financial backers signals strong confidence in Keiron's approach, especially given that DeepTechXL had already led the company's seed round. For Keiron, this capital isn't just about growth—it's about proving a point. The company's CEO and founder, Paul Rooimans, puts it bluntly: "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. This round lets us do exactly what the market has been asking for: put the HF2 on more lines, faster." ### The Problem: A $650 Billion Industry Held Back by 70% Defect Rates To understand why this matters, you need to know what's at stake. In the surface mount technology (SMT) industry, solder paste printing is the foundation of every electronic device you own. If that step goes wrong, everything downstream suffers. According to Keiron, solder paste printing is responsible for over 70% of all PCBA (printed circuit board assembly) defects. That's a staggering number when you consider the scale of global electronics manufacturing. It has quietly capped the reliability, speed, and yield of every manufacturer on the planet, forcing them to accept inefficiencies as normal. The traditional approach uses stencils and jet printers, which are mechanical, contact-based, and prone to errors. They wear out, they clog, and they require constant calibration. It's a legacy system that everyone has just learned to live with—until now. ### Keiron's Solution: The HF2 LiFT Printer Keiron's answer is a completely different paradigm. Instead of tweaking the old stencil-and-jet playbook, the company has replaced it entirely with a single digital, non-contact process called Laser-Induced Forward Transfer (LiFT). The HF2 LiFT Printer is the world's first fully digital, contactless solder-paste printing solution. It consolidates three separate machines—the stencil printer, the jet printer, and the SPI inspection system—into one platform. That's a massive simplification for any production line. The results are nothing short of 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 or change over. Production uptime doubles, and programming becomes 10 times faster. ### Why This Matters for AI Hardware and Industry 4.0 Nowhere is the payoff bigger than in next-generation AI hardware. Components with up to 10,000 interconnects push conventional solder paste printing past its breaking point, leaving yields extremely low. That's exactly the gap Keiron's fully digital LiFT process was built to close. As Hessel Mittelmeijer, Investment Manager at DeepTechXL, notes: "AI, defence 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." The technology originated at TNO Holst Centre, a strategic collaboration between TNO and imec, and is still being developed with TNO as Keiron's primary strategic research partner. This deep research pedigree gives the company a strong moat. ### What's Next for Keiron? The company plans to use the new capital to drive aggressive growth. That means scaling production of the HF2, expanding commercial and support operations across Europe, North America, and APAC, and accelerating R&D on next-generation LiFT platforms. For manufacturers stuck with legacy equipment, the pitch is simple: stop patching a problem you've lived with for decades. Remove it entirely. With this funding, Keiron is betting that the industry is finally ready to listen.