This $22M Bet Could Fix Electronics Manufacturing's Costliest Bottleneck

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 called solder paste printing, and according to Eindhoven-based Keiron Printing Technologies, it's the single biggest point of failure in a global market worth over $650 billion a year. Now, Keiron has closed a $22 million Series A round to tackle this problem head-on. 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 Problem Nobody Could Fix Here's the thing about solder paste printing: it's been the industry's most expensive open secret for years. In fact, Keiron says it's responsible for over 70% of PCBA defects. That's a staggering number when you think about it. "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. "Keiron isn't patching a problem the industry has lived with for decades. We're removing it, for good." ### A Different Approach Keiron isn't trying to improve the old way of doing things. Instead, they've completely replaced it. Their HF2 LiFT Printer uses Laser-Induced Forward Transfer (LiFT) technology to do something no one else has done: eliminate the stencil printer, jet printer, and SPI inspection system entirely, replacing all three with one digital, non-contact platform. The results are pretty impressive on paper: - First-pass yield jumps from the industry-typical 60% to above 95% - Production lead time gets cut in half with zero stencils - Production uptime doubles - Programming becomes 10 times faster ### Why This Matters Now The timing couldn't be better. As AI hardware becomes more complex, components now have up to 10,000 interconnects. That pushes conventional solder paste printing past its breaking point, leaving yields extremely low. Keiron's fully digital LiFT process was built specifically to close that gap. Founded in 2019 as a spin-off from TNO Holst Centre (a strategic collaboration between TNO and imec), the company aims to enable autonomous, self-optimizing electronics manufacturing with minimal human intervention and maximum quality, speed, and flexibility. ### What's Next 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." With this fresh capital, Keiron plans to: - Scale up production capacity - Expand commercial and support operations across Europe, North America, and APAC - Accelerate R&D on the next-generation LiFT platform For electronics manufacturers stuck with the old way of doing things, this could be the shift that finally moves the industry into Industry 4.0. The question isn't whether Keiron's approach works – it's how fast they can get it onto more production lines. This funding round is more than just another startup milestone. It's a signal that the industry is ready for a fundamental change in how electronics get made. And with $22 million in fresh capital, Keiron has the resources to make that change happen.