The Eindhoven-based startup Invisix raised an oversubscribed €20 million Seed round on June 1, 2026, to scale its soft X-ray metrology systems for high-volume semiconductor manufacturing. Led by Hitachi Ventures and Transition Ventures, the funding enables the ASML spin-out to address a critical “blind spot” in the production of sub-2-nanometre chips, where traditional light-based inspection tools fail to see through dense 3D transistor structures.
The round included participation from imec.xpand, Doosan Investment Co., and an unnamed tier-1 semiconductor manufacturer. This capital injection follows a decade of research and development at ASML, where the technology was incubated before being licensed to Invisix. The company, led by Co-founder and CEO Dr. Christina Porter and CTO Dr. Sietse van der Post, focuses on providing real-time quality control for the advanced gate-all-around (GAA) architectures that power modern artificial intelligence training and inference.
As the industry moves toward increasingly complex 3D integration, the hardware required to verify production quality must keep pace. Industry professionals closely monitor these developments, much like how industrial and engineering stocks rally when technical breakthroughs promise higher manufacturing yields in global supply chains. Invisix aims to bypass the current trade-off between speed and accuracy in chip inspection.
Overcoming wavelength limits in chip inspection
For decades, semiconductor foundries relied on optical metrology—using lasers to bounce light off silicon wafers—to find defects. However, as transistor features shrink below 2 nanometres, they become smaller than the wavelength of visible light. This physical limitation prevents traditional tools from penetrating the deep, vertical structures of GAA transistors, leaving engineers unable to see hidden structural flaws without destroying the sample.
Currently, the only alternative is Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM), which requires technicians to cut a microscopic cross-section out of a multimillion-dollar wafer. This destructive process takes hours and renders the wafer useless for sale. It effectively prevents real-time monitoring on high-speed production lines, forcing foundries to hope for high yields rather than ensuring them through every step of the process.
Invisix replaces these lasers with soft X-rays, which operate at wavelengths between 0.1 nm and 10 nm. Because these waves are significantly smaller than the chip features they measure, they easily pierce through silicon layers. This allows the system to build a 3D digital twin of the chip’s internal structure without damaging the hardware, providing a non-destructive path to high-volume quality control.
Applying Nobel-winning physics to industrial scaling
The engineering core of the Invisix system utilizes High Harmonic Generation (HHG), a process directly linked to the research honored by the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics. By firing an ultra-fast drive laser into noble gas atoms, the system excites them until they emit high-frequency, broadband soft X-ray light. This creates a spectrum of “colours” that provides a much richer data set than a single-wavelength laser ever could.
To turn this raw light scatter into useful engineering data, Invisix uses proprietary reconstruction algorithms and machine learning. These models process the acoustic and wave-scatter data to create a layer-by-layer map of the wafer. This level of precision is vital for sectors where infrastructure trust and security compliance depend on the flawlessness of the underlying hardware.
The startup’s pedigree provides a rare level of technical certainty for a seed-stage firm. Having been incubated within ASML since 2015, the technology has already been validated through collaborative tests with Intel and imec. These demonstrations proved that soft X-ray scatterometry could successfully identify defects deep within experimental 2nm and 1.4nm silicon wafers, targets that are currently invisible to standard factory tools.
Expansion of the Eindhoven cleanroom operations
With the €20 million influx, Invisix is expanding its footprint in Eindhoven, a central hub for the global semiconductor supply chain. The company recently moved its 300mm-wafer-capable test bench into a new cleanroom facility. This site will serve as the primary testing ground for global foundry clients who need to run high-throughput demonstrations on their own experimental logic and memory wafers.
The primary goal is the development of the company’s first shippable, production-ready commercial system. While standard metrology players like KLA and Nova dominate the optical market, Invisix claims no other soft X-ray tool is currently available for commercial high-volume manufacturing. This unique position attracted investors like Transition Ventures, which recently closed its €128 million Fund II to back advanced industrial technology.
“Semiconductor manufacturers can’t build what they can’t see,” Dr. Christina Porter stated during the announcement. She emphasized that the ASML incubation period reduces the risk for customers, offering a faster deployment path at a time when chipmakers are racing to stabilize 2nm yields. Reports suggest that manufacturers like Samsung may look to such technology to improve margins on high-bandwidth memory (HBM) used in AI servers.
Global implications for the semiconductor supply chain
For the broader engineering community, the success of Invisix signals a shift toward physics-based solutions for scaling hardware. As the world demands more powerful AI chips, the bottleneck is no longer just design, but the ability to manufacture those designs reliably at scale. Improved metrology directly correlates to lower costs and higher availability of the processors required for global digital transformation.
While the immediate focus is on European and East Asian foundries, the ripple effects touch any region investing in digital reliability. Whether it is ensuring infrastructure reliability for digital payments or securing telecommunications hardware, the precision of the chip-making process is the foundation upon which all modern industrial output is built. As Invisix moves from a test bench to a commercial product, the “blind spot” of the sub-2nm era may finally be closing.
