QuantumDiamonds

QuantumDiamonds, a spin-out from the Technical University of Munich founded in 2022, has closed a €91 million round to bring its chip inspection technology to production. Of this, only €15 million is venture capital led by the World Fund, while €76 million comes from public funds approved under the European Chips Act. With this round, the company is set to become the first startup to receive production funding from the community instrument, a channel previously reserved for industrial giants like GlobalFoundries and Carl Zeiss.

The €76 million in non-dilutive funding is jointly provided by the German Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and the Bavarian state, with the green light from Brussels received on June 23. The €15 million equity round, in addition to World Fund, involved Bayern Kapital and the company's historical investors, from IQ Capital to Earlybird.

A Microscope That Sees Current

The technology addresses a known issue in advanced manufacturing: as transistors are stacked in increasingly dense three-dimensional architectures, defects become difficult to detect, and a single buried failure can compromise an entire batch. Optical and X-ray tools struggle to see beyond the surface layers of the component.

QuantumDiamonds' approach leverages atomic-scale defects in synthetic diamonds to measure magnetic fields with extreme precision, effectively transforming diamond into a microscope capable of observing the current flowing inside a chip. The first commercial system, the QDm.1, produces three-dimensional images of those currents on a nanometric scale and without damaging the piece, identifying the exact position and depth of a defect embedded in a stacked package.

"We were trying to locate the defect in this chip for six weeks. You found it in less than a minute," reported a leading U.S. chip designer collaborating with the company.

Why Yield Is Worth Billions

The stakes are about production yield. On a high-volume product, gaining even a single percentage point in yield can be worth millions of dollars per week, which explains why capital is focusing on this segment. The chip inspection market is expected to reach $10.9 billion by 2026 and, according to estimates by Global Market Insights, double by around 2035. The company claims to already be working with nine of the top ten global producers.

However, QuantumDiamonds is not alone in the diamond sensor niche. The closest Swiss rival technologically, Qnami, was acquired in June by Quantum Design, a move that absorbed its technology into a broader instrumentation group. The dominant players remain much larger: KLA controls about 17.5% of the inspection market, with Applied Materials and Onto Innovation close behind. However, all rely on light and electron beams, the same methods that struggle with buried defects.

The European Bet

The pitch to investors heavily emphasizes technological sovereignty. "Europe uses about 20% of the world's semiconductors but only produces 10%, and it is precisely in that gap that our strategic power is dissipated," stated Daria Saharova, managing partner of World Fund, going so far as to describe the company as "the next European ASML." It’s an ambitious comparison for a company that has only one product in its catalog.

The transition from lab to factory is still to be completed. QuantumDiamonds installed its first U.S. system in a lab in Sunnyvale, California, in April, and the first Asian specimen in Hsinchu, Taiwan, in the heart of the global chip hub. The new capital will fund a €152 million plant in the eastern part of Munich, with the first section expected to open by the end of the year. The company employs 70 people and plans to more than double its engineering team within twelve months.