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Everyone wants to talk about the model inside the glasses. The harder problem sits right in front of your eye. A waveguide is a thin piece of glass or plastic that steers light along a set path, so an image appears in front of the wearer. Designing one is difficult. Making millions of them cheaply is much harder. That second problem is where Morphotonics lives.
The Veldhoven company has closed a Series B of more than €40 million to scale up its machines for AI glasses and AR headsets. The process works like a printing press: a mould presses micro- and nanoscale patterns into liquid resin, UV light cures it, and the machine repeats those structures accurately across large panels. Nobody will find a neural network in the product. Morphotonics sells the factory, not the glasses.
That sounds like a weakness. It may be the strongest position in the market. Morphotonics doesn't design optics for any specific device, which makes it closer to an equipment supplier than a component maker. Its technology is used for waveguides in smart glasses such as the Meta Ray-Ban Display and Magic Leap. Whoever wins the glasses war still needs lenses.
Its European peers bet differently. Swave Photonics wants to replace waveguides entirely with holographic displays, while Finland's Dispelix designs its own waveguides. Morphotonics stays neutral and sells to everyone.
The family history fits. The founders spun out of Philips' optical-disc division, the group that helped invent and manufacture the CD. Copying tiny structures at massive volume is almost the family trade. The company also says it benefits from ASML's supply chain and uses many of the same vendors. In Brainport, even the small lithography player grows in the giant's shadow.
"...unless the optical components inside them can be manufactured at consumer-electronics scale."
Hugo da Silva, CEO of Morphotonics, on AI glasses reaching mass adoption
Look at the cap table and the story shifts. The European Investment Bank contributed a €20 million convertible loan, supported by the European Commission's InvestEU programme. That is half the round, and it is debt, not equity.
Private money is present. But public and semi-public capital carries much of the weight. Is that deliberate industrial policy, or a gap in private late-stage risk capital? This round alone can't answer that. It does show who is willing to underwrite Dutch hardware at this stage. By Dealroom's count, the deal sits in the top 1% of 217 comparable Dutch nanotech rounds. Big for its niche. Modest next to a single AI software round.
Now the numbers that matter. About 90% of revenue comes from hardware sales, with 10 to 15 systems deployed worldwide. The company aims for 50 deployments within two to three years. It says revenue tripled from 2024 to 2025. Headcount doubled from roughly 30 to 60 since CEO Hugo Da Silva joined in September 2024.
The next machine, now being built, should produce more than 6 million waveguides a year and ship early next year. IDC expects shipments of smart glasses with displays to reach 12.2 million by 2030. Put those numbers side by side. A handful of next-generation machines could cover a large share of that market. So where do the other deployments come from?
Geography adds another layer. Manufacturing is heavily concentrated in Asia, with teams in China, Taiwan, South Korea and the U.S. A Dutch company, funded largely by European public money, serving factories mostly in Asia. That is not a flaw. It is a dependency worth watching.
The answer to the capacity question may lie in data centers. Morphotonics is pushing into co-packaged optics, where photonic integrated circuits move data between servers and network equipment using light. No machines have shipped in that area yet, though the company says customers have validated its technology. It also applies its stamping to privacy screens for cars.
This is the real hedge. Glasses provide the headline. Data centers could provide the volume.
"...support its move from technology development into broader industrial deployment."
Johan Stins, Senior Investment Manager, Invest-NL
Morphotonics now occupies a role Dutch industry knows well: the indispensable supplier behind someone else's consumer product. ASML built an empire that way, at a completely different scale. The AI hype gave Morphotonics its headline this week. Whether it delivers fifty customers is a manufacturing question. Those get answered on factory floors in Asia, not in funding announcements.
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