Swiss nanotechnology startup Chiral secures €10 million to scale post-silicon chip manufacturing

Chiral, a Swiss nanotechnology company pioneering next-generation semiconductor and quantum technologies with nanomaterials, today announced the successful closing of a €10 million ($12 million) Seed financing round.

The round was led by Crane Venture Partners, with participation from Quantonation, HCVC, and Founderful, as well as public funding from Innosuisse.

“Nanomaterials have shown outstanding performance in research for years, but without scalable and controllable manufacturing, their impact remains limited,” said Seoho Jung, CEO at Chiral. “Chiral has the necessary capabilities that can turn material-level breakthroughs into industrial reality.”

Chiral’s Seed round aligns with a broader pattern of European funding activity in advanced semiconductor, photonics and next-generation computing hardware during 2025 and 2026.

In January 2026, UK-based Optalysys raised €26.4 million to accelerate the commercialisation of its photonic computing chips. Earlier coverage also highlighted EU-backed DeepTech players such as Ipronics, which secured €2.4 million in 2025 to advance programmable photonic systems, and Germany’s SpiNNcloud, which received around €10 million in blended funding to develop energy-efficient computing infrastructure.

Taken together, these announcements point to more than €35 million deployed across European semiconductor-adjacent DeepTech companies in 2025–2026, combining venture capital and public funding to address manufacturing, performance and energy-efficiency constraints beyond conventional silicon.

Seoho adds: “Our customers will soon announce results that demonstrate how Chiral’s technology has advanced their device performance. In parallel, we are moving from development into deployment, with our first commercial systems being installed at customer sites this year.”

Founded in 2023, Chiral is a DeepTech company developing tools and processes for the scalable integration of nanomaterials into next-generation semiconductor devices. Founded as an ETH Zurich and Empa spin-off, Chiral combines scientific rigour with engineering execution to make breakthrough materials manufacturable for advanced electronics.

Today’s funding supports Chiral’s mission to make post-silicon computing chips based on nanomaterials manufacturable at wafer scale and to unlock the next generation of chips beyond the limits of conventional silicon.

As the semiconductor industry approaches the physical and economic limits of silicon scaling described by Moore’s Law, nanomaterials such as carbon nanotube and two-dimensional materials are widely seen as a viable path to sustain performance and energy efficiency gains.

In fact, the technology roadmaps of numerous industry leaders like TSMC highlight the adoption of nanomaterials. While their potential has been demonstrated repeatedly in academic research, Chiral believes that industrial adoption has remained limited due to a critical manufacturing bottleneck: the lack of scalable, precise, and contamination-free integration processes.

Chiral was founded to solve this manufacturing challenge with the industry’s first robotic nanomaterial integration system. The system is built around automation, high-precision engineering, and AI for the robotic integration of nanomaterials into silicon wafers. Unlike conventional methods, this approach reportedly enables precise, selective, and contamination-free placement of nanomaterials–a clear path from single-device experiments to wafer-scale integration.

“The next foundational shift in computing won’t come from materials alone, it will come from making those materials work for real systems and real customers. Chiral brings that level of engineering discipline to nanomaterials, and that’s why we believe they have an important role to play in what comes after silicon,” said Krishna Visvanathan, Co-founder and Partner at Crane Venture Partners.

Since its incorporation and pre-Seed financing round two years ago, Chiral has advanced its automation and process control capabilities, developed its first commercial equipment system, and helped customers in industry and research significantly accelerate their development.

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