This $22.2M Round Could Fix Electronics Manufacturing's Costliest Problem

Jan de Vries · 2026-07-31

When you think about electronics manufacturing, you probably picture gleaming factories, robotic arms, and flawless assembly lines. But behind the scenes, there's a dirty little secret that has cost the industry billions for decades: solder paste printing. It's the process of applying solder to circuit boards, and it's been a massive point of failure for as long as anyone can remember. Now, a Dutch startup called Keiron Printing Technologies has raised $22.2 million to finally solve this problem. The Series A 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 is a big deal for anyone who cares about how the things we use every day are built. ### The $660 Billion Problem Nobody Could Fix Here's the thing: the global electronics assembly market is worth over $660 billion a year. And according to Keiron, solder paste printing is the single biggest point of failure in that entire market. It's responsible for more than 70% of PCBA (printed circuit board assembly) defects. That's not a small problem. It's a massive, industry-wide headache that has quietly capped the reliability, speed, and yield of every electronics manufacturer on the planet. Paul Rooimans, CEO and founder of Keiron, put 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 $660 billion a year that everyone lived with because no one could fix it." ### A Completely Different Approach What makes Keiron different? They're not trying to tweak the old stencil-and-jet-printing methods. Instead, they've thrown the playbook out entirely. Their technology, called Laser-Induced Forward Transfer (LiFT), uses a fully digital, contactless process. It's the world's first of its kind, and it replaces three separate machines – the stencil printer, jet printer, and SPI inspection system – with one single platform. This isn't just an incremental improvement. The company reports some pretty stunning numbers: - First-pass yield jumps from an industry-typical ~60% to above 95% - Production lead time is cut in half, with zero stencils needed - Production uptime doubles - Programming becomes 10 times faster ### Why This Matters for AI Hardware You might be wondering why this matters right now. The answer is AI. Next-generation AI hardware has components with up to 10,000 interconnects. That pushes conventional solder paste printing past its breaking point, leaving yields extremely low. Keiron's digital LiFT process was built specifically to close that gap. Hessel Mittelmeijer, Investment Manager at DeepTechXL, sees the bigger picture: "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 company, which spun out of TNO Holst Centre in 2019, plans to use this capital to scale up production, expand operations across Europe, North America, and APAC, and accelerate R&D on their next-generation LiFT platform. It's a bold move that could finally drag the legacy PCBA industry into Industry 4.0. For manufacturers, this means higher throughput, lower working capital, improved cash flow, and stronger EBITDA. And for the rest of us, it means the electronics we rely on could become more reliable, cheaper, and faster to produce. That's a win for everyone.