This €24.4M Round Targets Electronics Manufacturing's Costliest Problem

Jan de Vries · 2026-07-31

### The Hidden Cost of Electronics Manufacturing If you've ever wondered why electronics are as expensive as they are, a big part of the answer lies in a step most people have never heard of: solder paste printing. It's the process of applying solder to circuit boards before components are placed, and it's been quietly causing headaches for decades. Keiron Printing Technologies, a DeepTech company based in Eindhoven, just raised $24.4 million (€20.7 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. That's a solid group of backers who clearly see the potential here. ### Why Solder Paste Printing Matters So Much Here's the thing: the global electronics assembly market is worth over $700 billion a year, and solder paste printing is its single biggest point of failure. According to Keiron, it's responsible for over 70% of PCBA defects. That's a staggering number when you think about the scale of electronics production worldwide. For decades, manufacturers have just lived with this problem because no one could fix it at the root. They've tweaked stencil printing and jet printing, but the fundamental issues remained. It's been the industry's most expensive open secret, quietly capping the reliability, speed, and yield of every electronics manufacturer on the planet. ### A Completely Different Approach Keiron isn't trying to improve the old methods. They're replacing them entirely with something called Laser-Induced Forward Transfer (LiFT). The company's HF2 LiFT Printer is a fully digital, contactless solder-paste printing solution that eliminates the stencil printer, jet printer, and SPI inspection system altogether. One platform does it all. The results are impressive. Keiron reports that first-pass yield jumps from an industry-typical 60% to above 95%. Production lead time is cut in half because there are zero stencils to create and change. Production uptime doubles, and programming becomes 10 times faster. For manufacturers in high-mix, low-to-medium-volume environments, that translates to higher throughput, lower working capital, improved cash flow, and stronger EBITDA. ### Why This Matters for AI Hardware Here's where it gets really interesting. Next-generation AI hardware has components with up to 10,000 interconnects, which pushes conventional solder paste printing past its breaking point. Yields have been extremely low, and that's exactly the gap Keiron's digital LiFT process was designed to close. The company sees itself as carrying the legacy PCBA industry into Industry 4.0. Paul Rooimans, CEO and founder of Keiron, put it this way: "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." ### The Technology's Roots and Future Plans The technology originated at TNO Holst Centre, a collaboration between TNO and imec, and TNO remains Keiron's primary strategic research partner. The company was founded in 2019 as a spin-off from that center, with a vision of enabling autonomous, self-optimizing electronics manufacturing with minimal human intervention. Hessel Mittelmeijer, Investment Manager and Sustainability Officer at DeepTechXL, explained why they continue to back the company: "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." ### What's Next for Keiron With this fresh capital, Keiron plans to pursue aggressive growth. That means increasing production capacity, expanding commercial and support operations across Europe, North America, and APAC, and accelerating R&D on their next-generation LiFT platform. The company's goal is to get the HF2 onto more production lines, faster, without sacrificing any of the precision that sets them apart. For anyone in electronics manufacturing, this is worth watching. If Keiron delivers on its promises, the days of solder paste printing being the industry's weak link could be numbered. And that would be good news for everyone who buys electronics, which is pretty much all of us.