This Dutch Startup Just Raised $22M to Fix a $650B Manufacturing Problem

Jan de Vries · 2026-07-31

The electronics manufacturing industry has a dirty little secret that's been costing companies billions for decades. It's not a supply chain issue or a labor shortage—it's something much more basic: solder paste printing. A Dutch startup called Keiron Printing Technologies just raised $22 million to finally solve it. The Series A round, co-led by Invest-NL, DeepTechXL, and Waves Capital, with participation from Ramphastos Investments, ATUM Ventures, Cottonwood Technology Fund, and TNO Ventures, is a big vote of confidence in a technology that could change how every electronic device on the planet is made. ### The Problem Nobody Wanted to Talk About Here's the thing: solder paste printing is the process of applying the tiny dots of solder that connect components to circuit boards. It's been the industry's most expensive open secret for decades—a failure driver on a market worth well over $650 billion a year. Everyone knew it was broken, but no one could fix it. "Solder paste printing has been the industry's most expensive open secret for decades," said Paul Rooimans, CEO and founder of Keiron. "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." ### The Numbers Are Staggering To understand why this matters, you need to see the numbers. Solder paste printing is responsible for over 70% of PCBA defects. It has quietly capped the reliability, speed, and yield of every electronics manufacturer on the planet. - 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 aren't incremental improvements. They're game-changers. ### How Keiron's LiFT Technology Works Founded in 2019 as a spin-off from TNO Holst Centre, Keiron serves the Surface Mount Technology (SMT) industry with its Laser-Induced Forward Transfer (LiFT) industrialised inline platform. It's the world's first fully digital, contactless solder-paste printing solution. Instead of tweaking the old stencil-and-jet-printing playbook, Keiron replaced it entirely with a single digital, non-contact process. The HF2 LiFT Printer eliminates the problem outright, replacing the stencil printer, jet printer, and SPI inspection system with one platform. For electronics manufacturers, this means higher throughput, lower working capital, improved cash flow, and stronger EBITDA—especially in high-mix, low-to-medium-volume environments. ### Why This Matters for AI Hardware "Nowhere is the payoff bigger than in next-generation AI hardware," the company said in a press release. "Components with up to 10,000 interconnects push conventional solder paste printing past its breaking point, leaving yields extremely low to date—exactly the gap Keiron's fully digital LiFT process was built to close, carrying the legacy PCBA industry into Industry 4.0." As AI and defense applications demand more complex electronics, the old methods just can't keep up. Keiron's technology is designed for this new reality. ### What's Next for Keiron Hessel Mittelmeijer, Investment Manager and Sustainability Officer at DeepTechXL, said, "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 to solder paste printing. That's why we led the seed round and continue to back the company as it scales." With this fresh capital, Keiron plans to drive aggressive growth by increasing production, expanding commercial and support operations across Europe, North America, and APAC, and accelerating R&D on its next-generation LiFT platform. 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. For an industry that has lived with this problem for generations, Keiron's solution isn't just an upgrade—it's a revolution. And with $22 million in the bank, they're ready to scale.