QuantumDiamonds Aims to Accelerate Chip Manufacturing With EU Support
There is a persistent gap in Europe's relationship with the global semiconductor industry: the continent consumes around 20% of the world's chips while producing only 10% of them, and nearly all of the equipment used to make those chips comes from companies in the Netherlands, the United States, and Japan. QuantumDiamonds, a four-year-old spinout from the Technical University of Munich, is trying to close a small but strategically critical part of that gap, not by building chips themselves, but by building the inspection equipment that determines whether chips work. In July 2026, the company announced a combined €91 million raise, including €76 million in non-dilutive EU-backed funding and €15 million in venture capital led by World Fund, as it prepares to open the first European production facility for quantum-based semiconductor metrology tools in Munich.
The scale of what QuantumDiamonds is attempting to build is best understood by the company it is most frequently compared to: ASML. The Dutch company holds a near-monopoly on the manufacturing of extreme ultraviolet lithography machines, the equipment without which advanced chips simply cannot be made. ASML's position has made the Netherlands a major player in global technology geopolitics, with export controls on its machines becoming one of the most significant tools in the US-China technology competition. QuantumDiamonds is not trying to build the next EUV machine. It is trying to build the tool that sits alongside those machines and tells chipmakers whether what came out of them is actually functional.
What QuantumDiamonds Actually Does
The company's technology is rooted in a specific property of synthetic diamonds. When a nitrogen atom is introduced next to a vacancy, an empty space where a carbon atom would normally sit, in a diamond lattice, you get what physicists call a nitrogen-vacancy center. These atomic-scale structures are extraordinarily sensitive to magnetic and electric fields at the nanoscale. QuantumDiamonds uses them as sensors that can detect how electricity flows through a chip, mapping the current paths with a resolution that conventional optical inspection tools cannot approach.
What this enables, practically, is a form of non-destructive three-dimensional imaging that can locate defects, shorts, broken connections, and yield-killing anomalies inside finished chips without cutting them open or damaging them. The company's first commercial system, called QDm.1, does exactly this: it produces 3D current maps of chips at the nanoscale, pinpointing the precise location and depth of defects that would otherwise only reveal themselves through a chip failure later in the manufacturing process.
The business case for this capability is easier to explain than the physics behind it. Traditional defect detection in semiconductor manufacturing relies on sampling, taking one chip out of every million and running it through time-consuming tests that might take weeks. If a problem appears, you have already manufactured a million potentially defective units. QuantumDiamonds compresses that defect detection timeline from weeks to two minutes per inspection, and does so without stopping the production line. CEO Kevin Berghoff told TechCrunch that this means its hardware is typically paid back entirely within a couple of months of installation. At the scale Taiwan-based foundries and Korean memory makers operate, being able to catch yield problems faster rather than discovering them a week into a production run represents savings in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
"QD can become Europe's next ASML: a first-of-a-kind technology, built and scaled here, in a $104 billion equipment market that the entire AI economy depends on."
- Daria Saharova, Managing Partner, World Fund
The Funding Structure: €76 Million Non-Dilutive Plus €15 Million Equity
The €91 million total announced in July 2026 combines two distinct funding mechanisms that arrived alongside each other. The larger component, €76 million, is non-dilutive grant funding. It was approved by the European Commission on June 23, 2026 under EU state aid rules, backed by Germany's federal economy ministry and the state of Bavaria. This funding is specifically for the construction and equipping of QuantumDiamonds' new production facility in Munich under the project name IPF-ATEST. It is a direct grant rather than a loan or equity investment, meaning QuantumDiamonds does not give up any ownership stake in exchange and does not have to repay it under standard conditions.
This €76 million sits within a broader €152 million total investment plan, equivalent to approximately $178 million, that QuantumDiamonds had already announced for the Munich facility. The EU and German state funding covers roughly half of that total investment, with the remainder coming from private sources including the newly closed equity round. The approval marks QuantumDiamonds as the only startup to receive manufacturing funding under the European Chips Act, placing it alongside industrial leaders including GlobalFoundries and Carl Zeiss as beneficiaries of the legislation. The Commission's approval represents the fourteenth semiconductor project it has supported under the Chips Act framework, with cumulative approved aid now totaling approximately €14.2 billion across different member states and technology categories.
The €15 million equity round, led by World Fund, attracted participation from Bayern Kapital alongside existing investors including IQ Capital, Earlybird, First Momentum, UnternehmerTUM, Creator Fund, Onsight Ventures, and angel investors. Berghoff told TechCrunch that raising the equity round was a fairly quick process, partly because QuantumDiamonds was able to demonstrate customer pull with concrete commercial deployments. The company declined to disclose its current valuation.
What the Munich Facility Will Build
The new Munich facility will be the first dedicated production site in Europe for quantum diamond-based semiconductor metrology and inspection systems. QuantumDiamonds expects to open the first operational section of the production facility later in 2026. First tool deliveries to customers are planned for Q1 2028, with full-scale production capacity of 40 systems per year expected to be reached by 2030. At that output rate, the facility could sustain the inspection needs of up to three large semiconductor manufacturing facilities, referred to in the industry as gigafabs, with the timing aligning with the planned ramp-up schedules of Intel's Magdeburg facility, TSMC's Dresden joint venture, and STMicroelectronics' Crolles expansion in France.
The construction and operation of the facility is expected to create approximately 120 temporary construction jobs and 80 permanent engineering and manufacturing positions once the plant is fully operational. The Bavarian state government is co-funding a training program at the nearby Technical University of Munich to build a pipeline of quantum technicians, combining diamond-growth chemistry with mechatronics and artificial intelligence. Bavaria's economics minister described the facility as a seed for a quantum-metrology cluster rather than a one-off project.
QuantumDiamonds is already considering a second cleanroom module at the Munich site for quantum-computing sensor arrays, which could potentially double the site's footprint by 2035. That potential expansion reflects an ambition that extends beyond semiconductor inspection into the broader quantum sensing market, though the immediate manufacturing focus is squarely on the chip inspection tools that represent the company's current commercial product.
Where QuantumDiamonds Stands Commercially Right Now
Despite being founded only in 2022, QuantumDiamonds has moved unusually quickly from laboratory research to commercial deployment for a deep tech company. As of mid-2026, it is already engaged with nine of the world's ten largest semiconductor manufacturers. That customer engagement is still primarily at the proof-of-concept and lab deployment stage rather than full fab integration, but the breadth of the relationship across the top tier of the chip industry gives the company a remarkably comprehensive view of where the pain points in advanced chip inspection actually lie.
In March 2026, the company expanded into Asia by opening a regional hub in Taiwan and naming industry veteran Peter Lemmens, who previously served as General Manager Taiwan at IMS Nanofabrication and imec, as Managing Director Asia. In April 2026, it installed its first US system at Eurofins EAG Laboratories in Sunnyvale, California, and completed its first Asian deployment at Integrated Service Technology, known as iST, in Hsinchu, Taiwan, at the center of the world's most concentrated semiconductor manufacturing cluster. These deployments represent the company's transition from European-only to genuinely global commercial presence within a remarkably compressed timeframe.
Berghoff summed up the customer landscape with a phrase that reflects genuine commercial traction rather than pitch deck language: we work with almost everyone in the chip ecosystem. The specificity of the claim, nine of ten largest chipmakers, is the kind of verifiable assertion that an investor base can check rather than the vague relationships-in-progress language that early-stage companies typically offer when pressed on customer status.
From Lab Tools to Fab-Ready High-Throughput Inspection
The current commercial offering, QDm.1, is a lab instrument designed for sample-based testing. In a typical semiconductor manufacturing workflow, sample-based testing means taking one chip out of a much larger batch and running it through detailed inspection rather than inspecting every unit coming off the line. This is already valuable: the ability to identify what is going wrong in a production process from a small sample, quickly and without destroying the sample, saves considerable time compared to the weeks-long traditional defect detection process.
Where QuantumDiamonds is headed, and what the Munich facility is being built to enable, is high-throughput fab-level inspection: the ability to inspect every chip coming off a manufacturing line rather than sampling a fraction of them. Berghoff described this transition clearly in his TechCrunch interview: what we now aim for is also high-throughput testing, meaning you can do 100% quality control in the fab itself. The high-throughput system is significantly more expensive than the lab tool, with pricing expected in the range of $10 to $15 million per unit compared to single-digit millions for the current lab systems, but it addresses a fundamentally different and larger market than sample-based inspection alone.
Berghoff's characterization of the price point relative to industry alternatives is instructive about how the company positions itself: it is expensive, but for them, we are quite cheap. The comparison is to ASML's EUV lithography machines, which cost around $400 million each. A $10 to $15 million inspection tool that enables 100% quality control in a fab that is running EUV machines at $400 million each, and that pays itself back within months of installation through yield savings, occupies a very defensible economic position in the customer's capital expenditure budget.
Why This Is One of Quantum Technology's First Real Industry Applications
Much of the excitement around quantum technology over the past decade has focused on quantum computing, with the industry repeatedly promising commercially relevant quantum advantage on timelines that have consistently slipped. Quantum sensing, the application QuantumDiamonds is pursuing, has attracted less attention but has a fundamentally different relationship with practical deployment: it works now, with current technology, without requiring the error correction advances that fault-tolerant quantum computing still demands.
Berghoff acknowledged this distinction with characteristic directness. He noted that chip manufacturers do not particularly care that the technology is quantum. They care that it generates magnetic fields that detect defects with high precision. The quantum nature of the sensing mechanism is the enabler of that precision, but from the customer's perspective, it is a detail about how the tool works rather than a reason to buy it. The reason to buy it is the two-minute inspection versus weeks, the non-destructive testing that preserves the sample, and the 3D resolution at the nanoscale that no conventional optical tool achieves.
The diamonds involved are synthetic rather than natural. QuantumDiamonds grows them specifically with the nitrogen-vacancy centers positioned to serve as sensors, using a manufacturing process that produces diamonds optimized for sensing rather than for jewelry or industrial cutting. The chemistry is complex, but the output is a sensor material with properties that no natural diamond or alternative sensor technology can replicate at the precision levels the company needs for sub-nanometer semiconductor inspection.
The European Chips Act Context and What It Signals
QuantumDiamonds' funding sits within a broader European policy commitment whose ambition is to increase Europe's share of global semiconductor production from 10% to 20% by 2030. The European Chips Act, passed in 2023 and supplemented by a Chips Act 2.0 proposal adopted by the Commission on June 3, 2026, allocates state aid across multiple layers of the semiconductor value chain: not just fab construction, which has attracted the largest individual allocations, but also research infrastructure, equipment manufacturing, and tooling. QuantumDiamonds' approval as a recipient represents the tooling layer receiving meaningful support, which matters because equipment capability is ultimately what constrains the yield and precision of the chips a fab can produce.
The cumulative aid approved under the Chips Act framework, now totaling approximately €14.2 billion across member states, reflects a European commitment to semiconductor investment that rivals the US CHIPS and Science Act in stated ambition, though the structural differences between the European Commission's state aid approval process and the US Department of Commerce's direct subsidy mechanism create different timelines and conditions for how the money flows. QuantumDiamonds' project, the IPF-ATEST facility, is the fifth project pre-selected from Germany's call for innovative semiconductor investment projects to receive Commission approval, following earlier approvals for other elements of Germany's semiconductor investment push.
The specific language the Commission used in evaluating QuantumDiamonds' project, noting that it has the potential to create the next ASML, is notable because it reflects a European institutional recognition that the value of the semiconductor equipment market, estimated at $104 billion, goes well beyond the chips themselves. The country or bloc that controls the tools used to make the most advanced chips has structural influence over who can produce those chips and at what cost. Europe's watch of how its dominance in the EUV machine market, concentrated in a single company in a single country, became a geopolitical lever in the US-China tech competition has clearly shaped the strategic thinking about why supporting the next generation of European equipment companies matters.
The ASML Comparison: Aspiration or Realistic Trajectory?
The comparison to ASML that World Fund's Daria Saharova made, and that the European Commission itself referenced in its evaluation, deserves honest assessment rather than uncritical repetition. ASML's position was built over four decades, required sustained industrial policy support from the Dutch government, and involved the creation of a technology, extreme ultraviolet lithography, that is genuinely irreplaceable in the current semiconductor manufacturing stack. The company that develops a technology with no practical substitute and then scales that technology to global production volumes occupies a monopoly position that is very difficult to replicate by design.
QuantumDiamonds is at a much earlier stage: a team of 70 people, a first commercial product in lab deployment, and a facility still under construction. The path from that starting point to something resembling ASML's market position involves solving difficult scale manufacturing challenges, convincing risk-averse chipmakers to move a novel technology from their labs into their production lines, and maintaining a technical lead in quantum sensing against competitors who will emerge once the market opportunity becomes more visible. None of those challenges is straightforwardly solvable. The comparison is best read as an aspiration that identifies the size of the opportunity rather than a description of the company's current standing.
What makes the aspiration at least plausible is Berghoff's assertion that there is no US or Asian company that has shipped these tools. If that claim holds, QuantumDiamonds is operating in a technology category where it currently has no direct competition at the commercial deployment stage. Building and maintaining that first-mover position while the Munich facility ramps to volume production, and while the company scales its engineering team to 140 people over the next 12 months, is the operational challenge the next two years will test.
What to Watch as the Company Scales
The milestones that will test QuantumDiamonds' trajectory over the next 18 months are clear. The opening of the first operational section of the Munich production facility, expected later in 2026, is the first manufacturing scale test. Whether the company can translate a lab-grown and lab-deployed production process into a repeatable manufacturing operation that delivers consistent tool quality at the volumes needed to fulfill orders from nine of the top ten chipmakers is the central near-term question.
The transition from lab deployments to fab deployments, from sample-based inspection to inline high-throughput inspection on production lines, is the more consequential milestone for the company's commercial model. Getting a tool into a chipmaker's lab is a different and considerably easier proposition than getting the same technology validated, integrated, and running on an actual production line where a failure in the inspection system creates a downstream yield problem rather than merely a failed inspection. The semiconductor equipment industry's validation cycle for new tools in production environments can take years, and QuantumDiamonds' Q1 2028 target for first tool deliveries implies that the first fab integrations will not be fully validated until well into the 2028 to 2030 timeframe.
The customer concentration across the top ten chipmakers, combined with the first commercial deployments in Taiwan and California, has given QuantumDiamonds something that most deep tech startups at comparable stages do not have: a genuine, experienced customer base providing feedback from real semiconductor manufacturing environments. That customer data, flowing back into the product development cycle as the Munich facility ramps up, is the most valuable input the company has for building the high-throughput fab tool that will define whether the ASML comparison eventually becomes more than an aspiration.
Related Topics: #QuantumDiamonds #EuropeanChipsAct #Semiconductors #QuantumSensing #DeepTech #EuropeStartups #ChipManufacturing #TechnicalUniversityMunich #Technology #Startups