Veldhoven-based Morphotonics, the Dutch pioneer of large-area Roll-to-Plate nanoimprint lithography, announced on September 22, 2026, that it has closed a €40 million Series B extension to scale production capacity for AR-glasses waveguides and to enter co-packaged optics for AI data centers.
Investor Line-Up: Invest-NL Leads, 3M And EIB Return
The round is led by Invest-NL as a major new investor, with continued participation from 3M Ventures, Innovation Industries and BOM. The European Innovation Council (EIC) Fund, Dutch family office Ernij Next and the European Investment Bank (EIB) also joined. The extension follows an earlier tranche that opened in 2024 as demand from AI-glasses OEMs including partners of the Meta Ray-Ban Display program surged.
Cypris Platform: From AR Glasses To Photonic Chips
Morphotonics' Cypris platform presses nano- and micro-scale patterns into a liquid resin under UV cure, letting display makers produce AR waveguides at panel scale and lower unit cost. CEO Hugo da Silva said the same machines are now being adapted for co-packaged optics — the photonic integrated circuits that shuttle light between GPUs and switches inside AI data centers, where copper links are hitting a bandwidth wall.
Scaling To 70 Staff, 6 Million Waveguides A Year
Between the last round and today, Morphotonics has more than doubled headcount from about 30 to 60 employees, with a target of 70-75 staff. A next-generation Cypris machine launching in early 2027 is engineered to produce more than six million waveguides per year, roughly matching the AR-glasses volumes that analysts expect to ship in 2027-2028.
Why This Round Matters For AI Infrastructure
The deal lands as robotics-and-AI hardware venture investment continues to run at record levels. It also plugs directly into the same photonics bottleneck that Nvidia's NVLink Fusion is racing to solve on the compute side.
Reporting based on coverage from TechCrunch, Tech.eu and Yahoo Finance.