The race to produce more chips is on, and Europe is in on it. ASML, the Dutch company that has a near-monopoly on the manufacturing of machines used in chipmaking, may soon no longer remain an isolated success story.
Like its American counterpart European chip law It aims to boost the semiconductor industry — thanks in part to government subsidies. He is one of the beneficiaries Quantum diamonda German startup implementing a new method for scanning chips.
It was granted with the approval of the European Commission €76 million of non-dilutive financing Provided by the German Federal Ministry of Economy and the State of Bavaria. The startup will use it to set up a new semiconductor testing equipment production facility in Munich as part of An investment plan worth $178 million It has already been announced.
QuantumDiamonds, a spin-out of the Technical University of Munich (TUM), has raised a €15 million equity round led by VC World Fund, TechCrunch has learned exclusively. The company declined to disclose its valuation but said its round was also backed by Bayern Capital and existing investors including Creator Fund, Earlybird, First Momentum, IQ Capital, Onsight Ventures and UnternehmerTUM.
CEO Kevin Berghoff told TechCrunch that raising the round was a fairly quick process, with QuantumDiamonds able to prove customer traction. “We work with almost everyone in the chip ecosystem,” he said. With the huge demand for all types of chips, there is a corresponding demand for solutions to speed up the manufacturing process and improve production.
By compressing a defect detection process that normally takes weeks into a two-minute inspection that doesn’t stop production lines, QuantumDiamonds claims it can help the likes of Taiwan-based Foundries and Korea-based memory makers save hundreds of millions of dollars.
This means its devices are usually paid for in full within two months, Berghoff said. It also leaves room to cover the subscription fees the startup charges for on-site support and for its software, which interprets the data and typically gives customers a strong signal about what they should process in their manufacturing process.
Behind the scenes, this happens to be one of the first actual use cases for quantum technology — unlike chips, quantum sensing actually works in its ability to generate magnetic fields that detect defects with high precision, and that’s all customers care about. “They don’t care much about it being quantitative,” Berghoff said with a laugh.
They also supposedly don’t care about diamonds, but if you’re wondering, they’re synthetic. What QuantumDiamonds does is take advantage of its smallest properties to monitor how electricity flows through the chips. Compared to current inspection processes, which look at the top layer of a chip using a microscope, this has the advantage of detecting defects through all layers, without destroying the chip in the process.
This capability could be especially important as chips become increasingly multilayer. Startups like Semron are developing 3D chips, and the industry seems to agree that this is the right way to go for AI data centers, Berghoff said. “The thing is, transistors can’t get smaller, so in order to get the same power and the same computation, you have to start adding more and more layers.”
Bigger competitors, including “100 billion U.S.-based inspection companies with large market caps,” will likely adapt at some point, but QuantumDiamonds has a first-mover advantage, Berghoff said. “No American or Asian company has shipped these tools.” The startup is already out of the lab, and is on its way to moving out of its customers’ labs and into their factories — semiconductor manufacturing plants.
“What we have now is a tool for a laboratory environment, where you can do sample-based testing, maybe one in a million slides,” Berghoff said. “What we are aiming for now is to do high-throughput testing as well, which means you can do 100% quality control in the factory itself.”
These machines are expensive, Berghoff said, though that depends on how you compare. “We are in the millions of lab instruments. A high-throughput system could cost $10 to $15 million; but it will not be anywhere near the ASML machines that [cost] Maybe $400 million. “So it is expensive, but for them, we are very cheap.”
The comparison can work in other ways. “[QuantumDiamonds] “It could become the next ASML in Europe,” Daria Saharova, managing partner of the Global Fund, wrote in a statement. This is optimism for you in venture capital, but it can also happen differently. “ASML also wants to do more. [when it comes to] “Inspection, so it’s a typical company that might buy us at some point,” Berghoff said bluntly — though ASML recently said it wasn’t. Very keen on mergers and acquisitions.
For now, QuantumDiamonds may be closer to another Global Fund company: IQM, the Finnish quantum company that recently went public. Both companies come from the fertile ground of deep tech in Europe, and aim to leverage European support and funding to go global.
QuantumDiamonds is still early in its journey, but 2026 has been a year of international expansion for the startup, which has opened a regional hub in Taiwan and completed its first commercial deployments in both Taiwan and the US, installing a system at Eurofins EAG Laboratories in Sunnyvale, California.
However, its new funding will also generate jobs in Munich, where most of its 70-person team is based. This is also where Berghoff and his co-founder and CTO, Fleming Brockmeyer, plan to double their engineering team over the next 12 months, tapping into affordable talent in both the quantum and semiconductor space. “We have what we need here to ship overseas,” Berghoff said.
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