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

Jan de Vries · 2026-07-31

Every electronics manufacturer knows the pain. You've got a production line humming along, components moving fast, and then it happens: a solder paste defect. Suddenly, you're looking at scrapped boards, rework costs, and missed deadlines. It's a problem so common that most people in the industry just accept it as the cost of doing business. But one Eindhoven-based company says that acceptance ends now. Keiron Printing Technologies has closed a $22.5 million Series A round to scale its laser-based solution to what it calls electronics manufacturing's most expensive open secret. ### The $650 Billion Headache Nobody Could Fix Here's the staggering part: solder paste printing is the single biggest point of failure in a global electronics assembly market worth well over $650 billion a year. According to Keiron, it's responsible for more than 70% of PCBA defects. For decades, that has quietly capped the reliability, speed, and yield of every electronics manufacturer on the planet. Think about that for a second. The most expensive problem in a massive industry, and nobody had cracked it at the root. Companies have tried tweaking the old stencil-and-jet-printing playbook, but those are just band-aids on a broken process. ### A Completely Different Approach The Keiron team, founded in 2019 as a spin-off from TNO Holst Centre, didn't try to improve the old way. They replaced it entirely. Their HF2 LiFT Printer uses Laser-Induced Forward Transfer (LiFT) technology to create a fully digital, contactless solder-paste printing solution. It's the world's first of its kind, and it eliminates the stencil printer, jet printer, and SPI inspection system in one fell swoop. The results are dramatic. Keiron reports that first-pass yield jumps from an industry-typical ~60% to above 95%. Production lead time gets cut in half because there are zero stencils to create or change over. Production uptime doubles, and programming becomes 10 times faster. What does that mean for the bottom line? Higher throughput, lower working capital, improved cash flow, and stronger EBITDA. In a high-mix, low-to-medium-volume environment, that's a game-changer. ### Why This Matters for AI Hardware "Nowhere is the payoff bigger than in next-generation AI hardware," the company noted in its press release. Components with up to 10,000 interconnects push conventional solder paste printing past its breaking point, leaving yields extremely low to date. That's exactly the gap Keiron's fully digital LiFT process was built to close. Paul Rooimans, CEO and founder of Keiron, put it bluntly: "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." ### Backing From Smart Money 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. It's a strong vote of confidence from investors who understand the space. Hessel Mittelmeijer, Investment Manager at DeepTechXL, explained the rationale: "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." ### What's Next? Keiron plans to use the capital to drive aggressive growth. That means increasing production capacity, 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 collaboration between TNO and imec, and TNO remains Keiron's primary strategic research partner. For electronics manufacturers, the message is clear: the era of accepting solder paste defects as inevitable might finally be over.