Invisix: the €20M ASML spin-out aiming to solve the 3D-chip inspection problem

A modern AI chip is no longer a flat sheet of silicon. It is a city of tiny skyscrapers, stacked at the nanometre scale. Determining whether those towers are properly aligned is a growing challenge: conventional light simply cannot penetrate them. Chipmakers have therefore sometimes literally sawn wafers open to find out what was going wrong inside. Slow, costly and irreversible.

That is the gap Invisix is stepping into. The Eindhoven-based company, spun out of ASML in 2025, closed an oversubscribed seed round of €20 million on 1 June 2026. Dealroom describes that figure as unusually large for a first round. Yet the "seed" label says little here. This company is not starting from zero.

"Semiconductor manufacturers can't build what they can't see. As chips become more 3D, the industry needs a new generation of metrology tools that can look inside these incredibly complex miniature skyscrapers without destroying them."

Christina Porter, co-founder and CEO of Invisix

Ten years incubating in Veldhoven

Invisix measures using soft X-ray radiation. The technique is called high harmonic generation: a laser firing ultrashort pulses strikes noble gas atoms, which in turn emit X-ray light with wavelengths between 0.1 and 10 nanometres. Algorithms and machine learning translate the scattered signal into a three-dimensional image of the structures inside the chip, without damaging the wafer. According to Techzine, the system measures more than four times as many parameters simultaneously as conventional optical methods.

The underlying physics earned Anne L'Huillier of Lund University a share of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics. Invisix collaborates with her.

The competitive moat, however, does not rest on that Nobel Prize alone. It lies in what happened afterwards. The soft X-ray programme ran inside ASML for over ten years. Invisix licences a substantial technology package from that work and brought along the people who built it. In 2023, the team already presented measurements on gate-all-around transistors, together with Intel and imec. That is the architecture the industry is transitioning to at around the 2-nanometre node. Porter herself describes that history as a degree of technical de-risking that is unusual for a hardware company at the seed stage.

Why ASML is not commercialising this itself is not addressed in the sources. A plausible reading: metrology and inspection equipment is a different discipline from lithography, with different customers and different competitors. But that remains an interpretation.

The physicists and the factory operator

Porter holds a PhD from the University of Colorado Boulder and led ASML's research into soft X-ray metrology. Co-founder and CTO Sietse van der Post is likewise a PhD physicist and ASML alumnus.

The most telling name, however, appears in third position. COO Roald Dogge previously served as COO of NTS, a large Dutch contract manufacturer for the semiconductor industry. That appointment signals where the real risk lies. Getting a metrology setup to work in a laboratory is one thing. Delivering a machine that runs around the clock on a customer's production floor is an entirely different discipline. Invisix recently relocated its 300mm wafer test bench to a new cleanroom in Eindhoven and is now working on its first deliverable system.

Who is at the table, and who is not

• Hitachi Ventures Corporate venture fund of Hitachi

• Transition Ventures Venture capital fund based in London

• imec.xpand Fund affiliated with Belgian research institute imec

• Doosan Investment Co. Investment arm of Doosan

• Tier-1 chipmaker Name not disclosed

Who led the round is not entirely clear. The press release names no lead investor; Dealroom points to Transition Ventures and Hitachi Ventures, while IO+ names Hitachi Ventures, imec.xpand and imec.

Two things stand out. First: one of the investors is a major chipmaker, and therefore a potential customer. IO+ reports that Samsung has expressed interest for its future 2-nanometre chips, though it has not been confirmed that Samsung is the anonymous investor. Having a customer at the shareholder table gives a seed-stage company something money cannot buy: access to a production line to prove the technology works.

Second: there is not a single Dutch fund in the list. The technology is Dutch, the team is based in Eindhoven, but the risk capital comes from Japan, London, Belgium and South Korea.

Twenty million against ten billion

Invisix is entering a market with established giants. KLA, the largest player in process control, recorded $10.9 billion in revenue from that segment alone in fiscal year 2025. Invisix has €20 million and no deliverable product yet.

That disproportion need not be fatal. Invisix is targeting a niche that existing optical tools do not serve well: the buried 3D structures of the latest chip generations. Hitachi Ventures investor Wolfgang Seibold sees this as the bottleneck for the entire sector:

"As semiconductor architectures grow more three-dimensional, metrology increasingly limits semiconductor yield and ramp speed, with each new node generation intensifying the challenge."

Wolfgang Seibold, Partner & Chief Investment Officer at Hitachi Ventures

But a fab does not quickly adopt a new type of machine. Every tool on the line must prove itself on speed, reliability and integration. High harmonic generation has proved itself in the laboratory; in a high-volume production environment it has not yet done so, as far as is publicly known.

The core question for Invisix is therefore not whether the physics holds. That has a Nobel Prize and ten years at ASML behind it. The question is whether the first deliverable system convinces a real fab before the money runs out. And for the Netherlands, a second question arises: if the next funding round again comes primarily from abroad, how much of this company will actually remain Dutch?

References

1. The Next Web (2026). ASML spinout Invisix raises €20M to see inside the chips optics can't. https://thenextweb.com/news/invisix-20m-seed-soft-xray-metrology

2. EU-Startups (2026). ASML spin-out Invisix raises €20 million Seed round to help chipmakers build what they "can't yet see". https://www.eu-startups.com/2026/06/asml-spin-out-invisix-raises-e20-million-seed-round-to-help-chipmakers-build-what-they-cant-yet-see/

3. Dealroom (2026). ASML spinout Invisix raises €20M seed for chip quality control. https://app.dealroom.co/news/note/asml-spinout-invisix-raises-20m-seed-for-chip-quality-control

4. optics.org (2026). ASML spin-out Invisix raises €20M for next-gen chip metrology. https://optics.org/news/asml-spin-out-invisix-raises-€20m-for-chip-metrology

5. Techzine (2026). ASML spinout Invisix raises €20 million to inspect chips using X-ray technology. https://www.techzine.eu/news/infrastructure/141724/asml-spinout-invisix-raises-e20-million-to-inspect-chips-using-x-ray-technology/

6. Invisix (2026). Invisix raises €20M seed round to bring soft x-ray metrology to AI-era chip manufacturing. https://invisix.com/blog/invisix-raises-e20m-seed-round-to-bring-soft-x-ray-metrology-to-ai-era-chip-manufacturing/

7. IO+ (2026). ASML spin-off raises €20 million for chip inspection. https://ioplus.nl/en/posts/asml-spin-off-raises-20-million-for-chip-inspection

8. Metrology News (2026). Invisix raises €20M seed round to advance soft x-ray semiconductor metrology. https://metrology.news/invisix-raises-e20m-seed-round-to-advance-soft-x-ray-semiconductor-metrology/

9. KLA Corporation (2025). KLA Corporation reports fiscal 2025 fourth quarter and full year results. https://ir.kla.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/500/kla-corporation-reports-fiscal-2025-fourth-quarter-and-full