This $22.5M Bet Could Fix Electronics Manufacturing's Costliest Problem

Jan de Vries · 2026-07-31

There's a dirty little secret hiding inside almost every electronic device you own. It's not the chips, the screens, or the batteries. It's the tiny dots of solder paste that connect everything together — and for decades, they've been the single biggest source of failure in electronics manufacturing. Keiron Printing Technologies, a DeepTech company based in Eindhoven, just raised $22.5 million (€20.7 million) in a Series A round to finally solve this problem. 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. ### The Problem Nobody Talked About Here's the thing about solder paste printing: it's been the industry's most expensive open secret for a long time. We're talking about a global electronics assembly market worth over $650 billion a year, and the printing process is its biggest point of failure. According to Keiron, it's responsible for more than 70% of PCBA defects — that's printed circuit board assembly defects, for the uninitiated. "Solder paste printing has been the industry's most expensive open secret for decades – a failure driver on a market worth well over €600 billion a year that everyone lived with because no one could fix it," said Paul Rooimans, CEO and founder of Keiron Printing Technologies. "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 old approach relies on stencils and jet printers — a playbook that's been around forever. It's slow, it's imprecise, and it caps the reliability, speed, and yield of every electronics manufacturer on the planet. Nobody could fix it at the root, so everyone just lived with it. ### A Completely Different Approach Keiron, founded in 2019 as a spin-off from TNO Holst Centre, took a different path. Instead of tweaking the old methods, they replaced them entirely. Their Laser-Induced Forward Transfer (LiFT) technology uses a fully digital, contactless process to print solder paste. No stencils, no physical contact, no mess. The company's HF2 LiFT Printer is the world's first fully digital, contactless solder-paste printing solution. It replaces three separate pieces of equipment — the stencil printer, jet printer, and SPI inspection system — with a single platform. And the numbers are pretty 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 AI Hardware Makes This Even More Urgent The timing couldn't be better. Next-generation AI hardware is pushing conventional solder paste printing past its breaking point. Components with up to 10,000 interconnects are simply too complex for traditional methods, leaving yields extremely low. That's exactly the gap Keiron's LiFT process was built to close. "AI, defence growth, and increasing manufacturing complexity are accelerating the need for digital transformation in EMS," said 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 technology originated at TNO Holst Centre, a strategic collaboration between TNO and imec, and Keiron continues to develop it with TNO as its primary strategic research partner. ### What's Next for Keiron With this fresh capital, Keiron plans to move fast. The company will increase production, expand commercial and support operations across Europe, North America, and APAC, and accelerate R&D on its next-generation LiFT platform. The goal is simple: get the HF2 onto more production lines, faster, without sacrificing any of the precision that sets LiFT apart. If they pull it off, the electronics industry might finally stop living with its most expensive open secret.