This Dutch Startup Raised $24M to Fix a $700B Manufacturing Problem

Jan de Vries · 2026-07-31

There's a quiet crisis happening inside virtually every smartphone, laptop, and electric vehicle on the planet. It's not a shortage of chips or a supply chain bottleneck. It's something far more mundane, yet incredibly costly: solder paste printing. For decades, electronics manufacturers have struggled with a single step in their production process that fails more than any other. It's the reason your new device occasionally has a glitch, why some circuit boards end up in the trash, and why factories lose millions of dollars every year. Now, a Dutch startup says it has finally cracked the code. Keiron Printing Technologies, a spin-off from the renowned TNO Holst Centre in Eindhoven, has raised $24.2 million in a Series A round to scale a technology that could completely transform how electronics are made. 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. ### The Expensive Secret Nobody Talks About Here's the thing: the global electronics assembly market is worth north of $700 billion a year. And the single biggest point of failure in that entire ecosystem? Solder paste printing. It's responsible for over 70% of all PCBA (printed circuit board assembly) defects. That's not a small number. It means that for every three circuit boards that fail, at least two of them failed because of this one step. The industry has lived with this for decades, quietly absorbing the cost of scrap, rework, and lost production time. It's been an open secret that everyone knew about but no one could fix. "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." ### A Completely Different Approach The traditional playbook for solder paste printing involves stencils and jet printers. These methods are messy, imprecise, and require constant inspection and rework. Keiron's approach is fundamentally different. They've developed a technology called Laser-Induced Forward Transfer (LiFT), which is a fully digital, contactless printing process. Instead of physically pushing paste through a stencil, a laser precisely transfers tiny droplets of solder paste onto the board. No contact, no stencil, no mess. It's the difference between trying to paint a miniature model with a roller brush versus using a precision airbrush. The company's HF2 LiFT Printer replaces not just the stencil printer, but also the jet printer and the SPI (solder paste inspection) system. One machine does the work of three, and it does it better. First-pass yield jumps from an industry-typical 60% to above 95%. Production lead time is cut in half. Uptime doubles. And programming becomes 10 times faster. ### Why This Matters for AI Hardware The timing couldn't be more critical. Next-generation AI hardware is pushing conventional manufacturing to its breaking point. Components now have up to 10,000 interconnects, which is far beyond what traditional solder paste printing can handle reliably. Yields on these complex boards are extremely low, creating a bottleneck for AI development. "AI, defense growth, and increasing manufacturing complexity are accelerating the need for digital transformation in EMS," said Hessel Mittelmeijer, Investment Manager at DeepTechXL. "Keiron solves one of the industry's biggest production challenges with a scalable, digital approach." ### What's Next for Keiron? The $24.2 million in fresh capital will be used to increase production capacity, expand commercial operations across Europe, North America, and APAC, and accelerate R&D on the next-generation LiFT platform. The company was founded in 2019 and has been developing this technology in close partnership with TNO, which remains its primary strategic research partner. For electronics manufacturers drowning in rework costs and quality issues, this could be the breakthrough they've been waiting for. Keiron isn't just patching an old problem. They're removing it entirely. And that's a big deal for anyone who uses electronics, which is pretty much all of us.