Morphotonics Banks Over 40 Million Euros To Fix The Optics Bottleneck Behind AI Glasses
Hugo da Silva and Jan Matthijs ter Meulen
Image credit: Morphotonics
Morphotonics, a Dutch deep tech company that builds manufacturing equipment for AI glasses and augmented reality displays, has closed an extended Series B round of more than 40 million euros to scale production of its nanoimprint lithography machines and expand into a new market in data center optics.
The round brought back existing backers 3M Ventures, Innovation Industries, and BOM, the Brabant Development Agency, all of whom increased their commitments. Invest‑NL joined as a major new investor, alongside the European Innovation Council Fund, Dutch family office Ernij Next, and the European Investment Bank. The raise extends a Series B that Morphotonics first opened in 2024, which closed above 10 million dollars at the time under the same core group of investors.
Based in Veldhoven, the same Dutch city that hosts chipmaking giant ASML, Morphotonics has spent 12 years developing nanoimprint lithography technology largely outside the spotlight. The process works by pressing a mould containing nano and microscale patterns into a liquid resin coating, then hardening the pattern with ultraviolet light. Unlike conventional photolithography, which relies on light to etch patterns, nanoimprinting physically replicates a stamp's structure directly onto a surface, allowing manufacturers to reproduce fine patterns with high precision across large panels in a single pass.
That capability has become increasingly relevant to a specific and stubborn manufacturing problem. Waveguides, the thin transparent optical components that direct a digital image into a wearer's field of vision, sit at the core of most AI glasses and augmented reality headsets on the market today, including devices from Meta, Even Reality, and Magic Leap. Producing them at consumer electronics volumes has remained slow, expensive, and difficult to adapt across different optical designs, a bottleneck that Morphotonics chief executive Hugo da Silva said stands between AI glasses and genuine mass adoption.
Over the past year the company has focused on developing its Cypris platform, a system purpose built for high volume waveguide production. According to Morphotonics, the platform is designed to support annual production capacity in the range of millions of waveguides per customer line, a scale intended to help device makers meaningfully cut per unit costs as demand accelerates. The company has said a customer running one of its existing machines completed a two day production cycle yielding thousands of waveguides at a yield rate above 90 percent, a benchmark it is working to sustain as volumes climb further.
The company's traction data points to accelerating demand well beyond a single flagship customer. Morphotonics says its revenue tripled from 2024 to 2025 as it installed high volume manufacturing systems for customers worldwide, and its headcount has grown from around 30 to roughly 60 employees over the same period, with plans to stabilize around 70 to 75 staff as it scales. Its manufacturing footprint and customer relationships are concentrated heavily across Asia, with teams in China, Taiwan, South Korea, and the United States supporting a global display supply chain.
With the new capital, Morphotonics is pushing beyond its original AR glasses focus into a second market: optical components for data centers, where photonic integrated circuits are increasingly used to move data faster than traditional copper interconnects allow as AI workloads strain existing infrastructure. The company intends to use the funding to scale manufacturing capacity, grow its commercial and engineering teams, and deepen relationships with display makers who license its equipment as part of their own production lines rather than buying finished components directly.
Chantal Schrijver, head of the European Investment Bank Group's Netherlands office, framed the investment as part of a broader push for European competitiveness in advanced manufacturing, arguing that the continent needs to hold onto capabilities like nanoimprint lithography as global demand for AI hardware accelerates.
Industry analysts tracking the smart glasses category expect the addressable market to keep expanding quickly, with global shipments of display equipped AI glasses projected to approach the low teens in millions of units by the end of the decade. For Morphotonics, the wager is that owning the manufacturing bottleneck feeding that growth, rather than competing directly with the device makers themselves, gives it a durable position as the category scales from early adopters to mainstream consumer hardware.
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