This Dutch Startup Just Raised $22.5M to Fix Electronics Manufacturing's Biggest Headache

Jan de Vries · 2026-07-31

### A Quiet Revolution in Electronics Manufacturing Every electronic device you own—your phone, your laptop, your car's dashboard—went through a process called surface mount technology (SMT). It's how tiny components get attached to circuit boards. And for decades, one step in that process has been a silent nightmare for manufacturers: solder paste printing. This is the step where solder paste (the glue that holds components to the board) gets applied before components are placed. It sounds simple, but it's actually the single biggest point of failure in a global electronics assembly market worth over $650 billion a year. In fact, it's responsible for more than 70% of all PCBA defects. The problem? Traditional methods rely on physical stencils or jets that wear down, clog, and misalign. They're slow, imprecise, and require constant babysitting. It's been the industry's most expensive open secret, and everyone just lived with it because no one could fix it. Until now. ### The Dutch Company That Says 'Enough' Enter Keiron Printing Technologies, a DeepTech company based in Eindhoven, Netherlands. They've developed something they call Laser-Induced Forward Transfer (LiFT)—a fully digital, contactless way to print solder paste. No stencils, no jets, no physical contact. Just a laser that precisely transfers paste exactly where it needs to go. And the market is taking notice. Keiron just closed a $22.5 million (€20.7 million) Series A round, co-led by Invest-NL, DeepTechXL, and Waves Capital, with participation from Ramphastos Investments, ATUM Ventures, Cottonwood Technology Fund, and TNO Ventures. "Solder paste printing has been the industry's most expensive open secret for decades," said Paul Rooimans, CEO and founder of Keiron. "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." ### Why This Actually Matters Let's break down why this is a big deal. The numbers Keiron is reporting are almost hard to believe: - **First-pass yield jumps** from the industry-typical ~60% to above 95% - **Production lead time is cut in half** (zero stencils to create or clean) - **Production uptime doubles** because there's no physical tool to wear out - **Programming is 10 times faster** since it's all digital For manufacturers, this translates into higher throughput, lower working capital, improved cash flow, and stronger EBITDA. In plain English: they can produce more, waste less, and make more money. The company was founded in 2019 as a spin-off from TNO Holst Centre, a strategic collaboration between TNO and imec. They're still developing the technology with TNO as their primary strategic research partner. ### The AI Hardware Connection Here's where things get really interesting. The next generation of AI hardware is pushing conventional manufacturing to its breaking point. Components now have up to 10,000 interconnects—that's 10,000 tiny points that need perfect solder connections. Traditional printing simply can't keep up, and yields drop to extremely low levels. "Nowhere is the payoff bigger than in next-generation AI hardware," the company noted in its press release. "Keiron's fully digital LiFT process was built to close exactly that gap, carrying the legacy PCBA industry into Industry 4.0." Hessel Mittelmeijer, Investment Manager and Sustainability Officer at DeepTechXL, put it this way: "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 The fresh capital will fuel aggressive growth. The company plans to increase production capacity, expand commercial and support operations across Europe, North America, and APAC, and accelerate R&D on their next-generation LiFT platform. For a company that's been quietly working on this since 2019, this funding round is a massive vote of confidence. And for the electronics manufacturing industry, it might just be the fix they've been waiting for—finally, someone's not patching the problem. They're removing it, for good.