Munich-based semiconductor equipment firm QuantumDiamonds (QD) announced the closing of a €91 million funding round to scale production of its quantum-based semiconductor inspection technology.
The financing combines a €15 million equity round led by World Fund with €76 million in non-dilutive funding approved at the EU level under the European Chips Act.
“This is a major step in bringing quantum sensing into fabs worldwide,” said Kevin Berghoff, CEO and co-founder of QuantumDiamonds.
“The response from leading chipmakers has been clear: they see our technology as essential for solving yield challenges that today’s systems can’t address. With deployments now live in the U.S. and Taiwan and serial production ramping up in Munich, Europe isn’t just participating in the next chip era, it’s helping define it.”
The non-dilutive funding is jointly provided by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy and the Free State of Bavaria.
The €15 million equity round led by World Fund drew significant participation from Bayern Kapital, alongside QD’s existing investors IQ Capital, Earlybird, First Momentum, UnternehmerTUM, Creator Fund, Onsight Ventures, and angel investors.
QuantumDiamonds said it is in line to become the sole startup awarded manufacturing funding under the European Chips Act, created to strengthen Europe’s semiconductor supply chain.
QuantumDiamonds was co-founded in 2022 by Berghoff and Dr. Fleming Bruckmaier (CTO) as a spin-out of the Technical University of Munich.
The company will use the funding to deliver lab systems to leading chipmakers and advance wafer-level capabilities for high-throughput fab inspection. QD, which currently employs 70 people, plans to more than double its engineering team over the next 12 months.
“Traditional semiconductor inspection tools slow development and production because they struggle to see buried defects in complex 3D chip architectures, which lowers production yields and raises costs for businesses and consumers,” said QuantumDiamonds.
“The stakes are high: industry analysis shows that a single percentage point improvement in yield can be worth millions of dollars a week for a high-volume device.
“QD’s technology addresses this central challenge in advanced chip manufacturing by leveraging atomic-scale defects in synthetic diamonds to detect magnetic fields with extreme precision: effectively a microscope that can see electricity flowing through chips.
“Its first commercial system, the QDm.1, enables non-destructive 3D current imaging at the nanoscale, pinpointing the precise location and depth of chip defects.”
Daria Saharova, Managing Partner at World Fund, said: “Compute has become strategic infrastructure. Europe uses around 20% of the world’s semiconductors while producing only 10%, and that gap is exactly where our strategic power leaks away.
“QD can become Europe’s next ASML: a first-of-a-kind technology, built and scaled here, in a $104 billion equipment market that the entire AI economy depends on. Backing companies like QD is how Europe stops buying its technological future from others and starts building the leverage to shape its own.”
Mason Sinclair, Partner at IQ Capital, said: “Since our initial seed investment in late 2023, the pace of technical progress at QD has been exceptional. They’ve executed rapidly, assembled a world-class technical team, and built strong partnerships across the chip ecosystem. The technology is strongly resonating, and we’re proud to continue backing their journey.”