ASML spin-out Invisix raises €20 million Seed round to help chipmakers build what they “can’t yet see”

Invisix, an Eindhoven-based semiconductor metrology company developing next-generation measurement tools for advanced chip manufacturing, has raised an oversubscribed €20 million Seed round. 

The round was supported by Hitachi Ventures, Transition Ventures, imec.xpand, Doosan Investment Co., and a tier-1 semiconductor manufacturer.

Christina Porter, PhD, co-founder and CEO of Invisix, said, “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. We are entering the market with technology that has been incubated inside ASML for more than a decade — a level of technical de-risking that is unusual for a seed-stage hardware company and gives our customers a faster path to deployment.”

Invisix, a spin-out from Dutch semiconductor equipment manufacturer ASML, was founded in 2025 by ASML alumni and PhD physicists, Christina Porter (CEO) and Sietse van der Post (CTO), to commercialise a decade of soft x-ray metrology R&D. It has been incubated within ASML since 2015. The company develops soft x-ray measurement systems for advanced logic and memory manufacturing. 

Its technology uses short-wavelength, broadband soft x-ray scatterometry to reconstruct the detailed 3D structure of next-generation semiconductor devices at high throughput. Invisix is headquartered in Eindhoven and is powered by technology licensed from ASML.

The DeepTech startup claims to help chipmakers build what they can’t yet see. According to Invisix, building a modern chip is like constructing a nanoscale skyscraper: before adding the next layer, manufacturers need to know whether the previous one was printed correctly. It states that, as advanced logic and memory devices become ever smaller and more complex, optical tools can no longer resolve the internal structures that matter most.

“These devices form the backbone of high-performance computing and underpin the promise of AI. Without the ability to measure them, manufacturers are forced into slower, costlier, often destructive alternatives. In a market where even marginal yield improvements can unlock billions in revenue and dominance is won by bringing new nodes into production ahead of competitors, that gap is critical,” the company mentioned in the press release. 

Invisix claims to solve this with a soft x-ray metrology system designed to help chipmakers measure the most challenging layers at scale. It points out that it offers a non-destructive, high-throughput solution, which involves Invisix’s system seeing beyond existing measurement tools by using High Harmonic Generation (HHG), a process rooted in discoveries recognised by the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics. 

The startup further explained that HHG uses a short-pulsed drive laser to excite noble-gas atoms into a high-energy state. In this state, the atoms emit short-wavelength light, known as soft x-rays, at many colours, generating a richer 3D signal than typical single-wavelength lasers. 

The startup highlights that its system combines HHG with proprietary reconstruction algorithms and machine learning to reconstruct the detailed 3D internal structure of devices. It crucially achieves this in a non-destructive way, and the whole system’s architecture has been designed to scale to the throughput needed for high-volume manufacturing. 

It applies to metrology the same resolution logic that transformed semiconductor lithography. As chip features shrink, measurement wavelengths must shrink too. The company uses soft x-rays to see inside the buried nanoscale structures that optical tools can no longer resolve.

The company has licensed a significant technology package based on soft x-ray research conducted at ASML. The founders are joined by many veterans of the ASML soft x-ray programme, as well as senior industry hires, including COO Roald Dogge, formerly COO of NTS, a major Dutch semiconductor contract manufacturer. 

Invisix’s research history also includes a long-term collaboration with Professor Anne L’Huillier of Lund University, who received the Nobel Prize for her pioneering work on the physics of HHG.

In 2023, the Invisix team publicly demonstrated its technology, disclosing results in partnership with Intel and imec. They successfully measured key features in next-generation gate-all-around transistor architectures, one of the most challenging targets for existing metrology. 

Clara Ricard, Partner at Transition Ventures, said, “It’s exciting to see world-class talent come out of ASML and build companies of their own. Invisix is one of Europe’s most promising semiconductor companies: they unlock a major bottleneck for manufacturing advanced chips that power AI training and inference. The technology is de-risked, the market is moving fast, and we’re thrilled to back them as they scale.”

Transition Ventures is a London-based early-stage investment firm. Last month, the firm announced the closing of its €128 million ($150 million) Fund II, taking its AUM to over €257 million ($300 million).

With this funding, the company plans to grow the Invisix team, accelerate development of its first shippable system, and support customer demonstrations at a new clean room in Eindhoven.

The company also recently relocated its 300mm-wafer-capable soft x-ray testbench to a new clean room in Eindhoven, where customer demonstrations will continue alongside the development of its first shippable product for deployment in customer fabs.

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