Morphotonics co-founder and CTO Jan Matthijs ter Meulen, CEO Hugo da Silva, and co-founder Bram Titulaer (from left). Morphotonics, a Brainport-based manufacturer of large-area nanoimprint lithography equipment, has raised over €40 million in a Series B funding round. The Veldhoven company plans to use the money to boost production of machines that make waveguides for AI glasses and augmented reality headsets. Previous investors 3M Ventures, Innovation Industries, and BOM increased their commitments, while state-backed Invest-NL joined as a major new investor.
The European Innovation Council Fund, Ernij Next from the Netherlands, and the European Investment Bank also participated. Moreover, the round extends the Series B that Morphotonics opened in 2024 with a first close above $10m, led at the time by BOM and Innovation Industries alongside 3M. The transparent optical components that transmit a digital image into the wearer’s field of view are known as waveguides and are found in most smart glasses with a display. It is still slow and costly to produce them in the quantities needed by the consumer electronics market using traditional methods.
Morphotonics offers machines for carrying out that step: a mould is used to imprint micro- and nanoscale patterns into a liquid resin; the resin is then cured with UV light; and the apparatus reproduces those structures accurately across large panels, enabling manufacturers to produce more parts per run at a lower cost. The Cypris platform is intended for producing a large number of waveguides. The company states that its revenue tripled from 2024 to 2025 and that it set up numerous high-volume manufacturing systems for customers worldwide during that period. “Everyone is talking about AI glasses right now. AI is moving off the screen and into the real world, into glasses, spatial systems, and a new generation of intelligent devices,” said Hugo da Silva, CEO of Morphotonics. “But these and similar devices will not reach mass adoption unless the optical components inside them can be manufactured at consumer-electronics scale.” Market forecasts point in the same direction.
Counterpoint Research expects consumer wearables to generate more than $1tn in revenue between 2026 and 2032, with smart eyewear alone reaching $44bn a year by 2032. The money will increase Cypris’s capacity, fund product development, expand engineering, sales, and support teams, and strengthen supplier relationships and after-sales service. Morphotonics works with device and component makers in China, Taiwan, the US, and Europe, and customers can trial its process through a lab-to-fab partner network before buying equipment. “Morphotonics is addressing a clear industrial challenge: how to manufacture increasingly complex optical components at the scale and cost required by consumer markets. The company has made significant progress in a short time, and this investment will support its move from technology development into broader industrial deployment,” said Johan Stins, Sr. Investment Manager at Invest NL.
Beyond glasses, Morphotonics says its technology could also make sensor and display parts, as well as photonic components for future data centers, including co-packaged optics. That puts it alongside the Dutch photonics companies investors have been backing around Eindhoven.
