The wire — 2 August 2026

One round from Friday 31 July cleared verification this morning. Keiron (Eindhoven, €20.7 million, Series A; Invest-NL, DeepTechXL, and Waves Capital co-leading, alongside Ramphastos Investments, ATUM Ventures, Cottonwood Technology Fund, and TNO Ventures) was announced on Friday, with EU-Startups and The Next Web both publishing late in the day after Saturday morning's routine had already closed. Sunday produced nothing. Research sweeps for 2 August found no qualifying early-stage rounds in France or across Europe.

Keiron was founded in 2019 by Paul Rooimans as a spinout from TNO Holst Centre, the collaboration between Dutch research organisation TNO and Belgian semiconductor institute imec. The company replaces conventional stencil-based solder paste printing with Laser-Induced Forward Transfer (LiFT) — a fully digital, non-contact process that deposits solder paste without a physical stencil. The claim: the HF2 printer eliminates the step the company says causes more than 70% of PCBA defects in electronics assembly, with first-pass yield moving from the industry-typical ~60% to above 95%, production lead time halved, and programming ten times faster. The technology has an explicit AI hardware angle: next-generation chip packages with up to 10,000 interconnects break conventional stencil printing past its physical limits; a parameterised digital process handles that density without a new stencil per design. DeepTechXL, which led the prior seed round, returns as a co-lead; Invest-NL (Dutch development finance) and Waves Capital join as new co-leads. ATUM Ventures, based in Singapore, brings the only non-European name into the syndicate. The Series A funds production scaling and commercial expansion across Europe, North America, and APAC. All performance claims are the company's own.

Keiron (Eindhoven, €20.7M, Series A; Invest-NL, DeepTechXL, Waves Capital co-leads).