The race to produce more chips is on and Europe is on. ASML, the Dutch company that has a near-monopoly on manufacturing the machines used to make chips, may soon no longer be an isolated success story.
Like his American counterpart, the European Chips Act aims to boost the semiconductor industry — thanks in part to government subsidies. One of the beneficiaries is Quantum Diamondsa German startup applying a new approach to chip inspection.
With the approval of the European Commission, it has been granted 76 million euros in non-dilutive financing provided by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and the State of Bavaria. The startup will use it to build a new facility to produce semiconductor test equipment in Munich as part of a $178 million investment plan had already announced.
From the Technical University of Munich (TUM), QuantumDiamonds also raised a €15 million equity round led by VC firm World Fund, according to TechCrunch exclusively. The company declined to disclose its valuation, but said its round was also backed by Bayern Kapital and existing investors including Creator Fund, Earlybird, First Momentum, IQ Capital, Onsight Ventures and UnternehmerTUM.
CEO Kevin Berghoff told TechCrunch that raising the round was a fairly quick process as QuantumDiamonds was able to demonstrate customer traction. “We work with almost everyone in the chip ecosystem,” he said. With huge demand for all kinds of chips, there is an equally huge demand for solutions to speed up the manufacturing process and improve production.
By compressing a defect detection process that normally takes weeks into a two-minute inspection that doesn’t stop production lines, QuantumDiamonds claims it can help Taiwan-based foundries and Korea’s Memory Makers save hundreds of millions of dollars.
That means his hardware is usually paid back in full within a few months, Berghoff said. It also leaves room to cover the subscription the startup charges for on-site support and for its software, which interprets the data and usually gives customers a strong indication of what to expect in their build process.
Behind the scenes, this happens to be one of the first real use cases of quantum technology — unlike chips, quantum sensing is already operational in its ability to create magnetic fields that detect defects with high precision, and that’s all customers care about. “They couldn’t care less that it’s quantum,” Berghoff said with a laugh.
Apparently, they don’t care about diamonds either – but in case you’re wondering, these are synthetic. What QuantumDiamonds do is take advantage of their smallest properties to observe how electricity flows through the chips. Compared to current inspections, which look at the top layer of a chip with a microscope, this has the advantage of detecting defects in all layers, without destroying the chip in the process.
This capability could be especially important as chips are increasingly multi-layered. Startups like Semron have developed 3D chips, and the industry seems to agree that this is the way to go for AI data centers, Berghoff said. “The thing is, transistors can’t get smaller, so to get the same power and the same computation, you start adding more and more layers.”
Major competitors, including “100 billion market cap inspection companies” will likely adjust at some point, but QuantumDiamonds has a first-mover advantage, Berghoff said. “There is no American or Asian company that has shipped these tools.” The startup is already out of the lab and on its way to moving from its customers’ labs to semiconductor manufacturing plants.
“What we have now is a tool for a lab environment, where you’re doing sample-based testing and you’re testing maybe one in a million chips,” Berghoff said. “What we’re aiming for now is to also do high-throughput testing, which means you can do 100% quality control in the fab itself.”
These machines are expensive, though it depends on how you compare, Berghoff said. “We’re in the single-digit millions for lab tools. And the high performance system could be as much as $10 to $15 million, but it would be nowhere near ASML machines that [cost] maybe $400 million. So it’s expensive, but for them we’re pretty cheap.”
The comparison could work in other ways. “[QuantumDiamonds] can become Europe’s next ASML,” Global Fund managing director Daria Sakharova wrote in a statement. That’s VC nonsense for you, but it could also play out differently. “ASML also wants to do more [when it comes to] inspection, so it’s a typical company that might buy us at some point,” Berghoff said candidly — though ASML recently said it’s not very keen on mergers and acquisitions.
For now, QuantumDiamonds may be more like another World Fund holding company: IQM, the recently floated Finnish quantum spinout. Both companies hail from the deep-tech breeding ground of Europe and aim to leverage European support and funding to go global.
QuantumDiamonds is still in the early stages of its journey, but 2026 was a year of international expansion for the startup, which opened a regional hub in Taiwan and completed its first commercial facilities in both Taiwan and the US, where it installed a system at Eurofins EAG labs in Sunnyvale, California.
However, its new funding will also create jobs in Munich, where most of the 70-strong team is based. It’s also where Berghoff and co-founder and CTO Fleming Bruckmaier plan to double their engineering team over the next 12 months, tapping affordable talent in both quantum and semiconductor expertise. “We have everything we need here to ship overseas,” Berghoff said.
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