Morphotonics, a Veldhoven-based maker of large-area nanoimprint lithography equipment, has raised more than €40 million in a Series B round. The money goes to expanding production of machines that manufacture waveguides — the transparent optical components that project a digital image into the wearer's field of view and sit inside most smart glasses with a display. The round matters because the consumer electronics market cannot yet get these parts in the volumes it needs at a workable cost.
Who backed the round and on what terms
Existing investors 3M Ventures, Innovation Industries and BOM increased their commitments, while state-backed Invest-NL came in as a major new investor. The European Innovation Council Fund, Ernij Next from the Netherlands and the European Investment Bank also took part. The round extends the Series B that Morphotonics opened in 2024 with a first close above $10 million, led at the time by BOM and Innovation Industries alongside 3M. The company says revenue tripled from 2024 to 2025, a period in which it installed numerous high-volume manufacturing systems for customers worldwide.
The equipment works through nanoimprint lithography: a mould presses micro- and nanoscale patterns into a liquid resin, UV light cures the resin, and the apparatus reproduces those structures accurately across large panels. That approach lets manufacturers produce more parts per run at a lower cost than traditional methods, which remain slow and expensive at the quantities the consumer electronics market requires. The Cypris platform is the product aimed specifically at producing a large number of waveguides. Customers can trial the process through a lab-to-fab partner network before committing to buying equipment, and Morphotonics works with device and component makers in China, Taiwan, the US and Europe.
The funding lands as AI glasses move from concept demos toward consumer products, and the supply chain for their optical parts becomes the constraint. Hugo da Silva, CEO of Morphotonics, said AI is moving off the screen into the real world — into glasses, spatial systems and a new generation of intelligent devices — and that these devices will not reach mass adoption unless the optical components inside them can be manufactured at consumer-electronics scale. Market forecasts point the same way: Counterpoint Research expects consumer wearables to generate more than $1 trillion in revenue between 2026 and 2032, with smart eyewear alone reaching $44 billion a year by 2032. Morphotonics sits alongside the Dutch photonics companies investors have been backing around Eindhoven.
What this means for companies building AI hardware
For device makers, the practical consequence is a second source of production capacity for waveguides, a component that has been a bottleneck in smart glasses programmes. A startup or a small hardware team can test the process through the lab-to-fab partner network without buying a machine first, which lowers the cost of validating an optical design. A large manufacturer, by contrast, is more likely to negotiate a high-volume system outright and care about parts per run, supplier relationships and after-sales service — the areas the new money is explicitly meant to strengthen, along with product development and the engineering, sales and support teams.
What the round does not settle is whether nanoimprint equipment becomes the default route for waveguide production. The technology competes with established manufacturing methods, and the source gives no figures on Morphotonics' market share, on the price of a Cypris system, or on how many units it has shipped. A buyer weighing the platform should ask about demonstrated yield on large panels, the cost per part at volume, how patterns are transferred from mould to resin over long production runs, and what support exists outside the lab-to-fab trial. The revenue tripling is a company statement, not an audited figure, and the €40 million is a funding total rather than a measure of demand.
The marker to watch is whether Morphotonics converts the money into installed high-volume systems at named customers over the next year, and whether smart eyewear revenue approaches the $44 billion a year Counterpoint projects for 2032. If capacity announcements follow and device makers place repeat orders, waveguide supply stops being the constraint on AI glasses reaching consumer scale — and the optical component supply chain becomes a normal industrial market rather than a bottleneck.
