Pomegra
Dutch nanoimprint firm closes Series B to meet surging demand for AR waveguides and data center photonics, with revenue tripling year-on-year.
- Veldhoven-based Morphotonics raised more than €40M in Series B financing announced September 2026, including a €20M EIB convertible loan.
- Returning backers 3M Ventures, Innovation Industries, and BOM led the round; Invest-NL and the European Innovation Council Fund joined as new investors.
- Revenue tripled from 2024 to 2025 as the company shipped high-volume manufacturing systems to customers worldwide.
Lead
Morphotonics, the Veldhoven-based nanoimprint lithography firm, closed a Series B round of more than €40 million in September 2026 to scale production of optical waveguides for AI glasses and begin a push into data center photonics. The financing includes equity from a consortium of existing and new investors plus a €20 million convertible loan from the European Investment Bank, making it one of the larger deeptech raises in the Dutch Brainport region this year.
What Does Morphotonics Actually Make?
The company's core product is a manufacturing platform, not a finished component. Its Cypris system - a fully automated, modular production tool - presses micro- and nanoscale patterns into a liquid resin layer using a precision mould, then hardens the structure with UV light. The output is a batch of optical waveguides: thin, transparent slabs that project digital images directly into a wearer's line of sight in augmented reality and AI-enabled glasses.
The technology is a variant of nanoimprint lithography (NIL), a process that trades the extreme-ultraviolet light sources used by conventional chipmakers for a physical stamping approach. That trade-off makes NIL unsuitable for leading-edge semiconductor nodes but well-suited for producing large-area optical structures at relatively high throughput. Morphotonics traces its lineage to the Philips Optical Media and Technology group that commercialized the CD, DVD, and Blu-ray formats - precision surface replication at scale is not a new problem for this team.
Why Is Waveguide Manufacturing a Bottleneck Now?
Consumer demand for thin, lightweight AI-enabled glasses has accelerated sharply as major hardware makers compete on form factor. The optical waveguide is the hardest component to manufacture at volume. Conventional grinding and polishing methods that work for laboratory quantities hit yield and cost walls quickly at scale. Morphotonics claims its platform bypasses those constraints, and its commercial traction supports the case: revenue tripled between 2024 and 2025, the company said, with multiple high-volume manufacturing systems deployed to customers across several geographies. No individual customer names were disclosed.
The data center angle is newer. High-speed optical interconnects inside AI training clusters increasingly rely on components - grating couplers, diffractive optical elements - that require the same micro-structured surface geometries Morphotonics produces for waveguides. The company sees that as a direct extension of its existing process rather than a pivot.
Investors and Structure
Returning investors 3M Ventures, Innovation Industries, and BOM - the Brabant regional development agency - all increased their stakes. Invest-NL, the Dutch state-backed growth capital fund, joined as a significant new equity holder alongside the European Innovation Council Fund and Ernij Next. The EIB's €20 million convertible loan sits alongside the equity and extends the company's runway further than the headline figure alone suggests.
Valuation was not disclosed. The earlier first close of the Series B, announced in a prior filing at above $10 million, implied the total round was assembled over an extended period, which is common for capital-intensive deeptech companies needing to validate manufacturing metrics before drawing larger commitments.
Morphotonics employs roughly 50 to 60 people and has opened a China office to support Asian customers, a region where most AR hardware assembly is concentrated.
How Will the Capital Be Deployed?
The company said it will increase production capacity for the Cypris platform, grow its engineering and commercial teams, and build out after-sales infrastructure for customers operating its equipment. It also plans to deepen its contract manufacturing network and supplier relationships - two areas that tend to constrain equipment companies more than raw headcount once they cross the pilot-to-production threshold.
Outlook
Morphotonics sits at an intersection that has attracted substantial capital globally - the manufacturing layer beneath the AR device boom and the data center optics buildout. Its differentiation is process-level rather than product-level, which creates durable defensibility if customers integrate deeply with its tooling but requires convincing volume buyers to qualify a relatively new platform against established optical fabrication methods. The tripling of revenue in one year is a meaningful signal. Sustaining that rate as the company scales manufacturing capacity will be the test the next round of investors will scrutinize.
