Last Updated: 1 June 2026
Invisix, a semiconductor metrology company based in the Netherlands, has raised €20 million in seed funding to develop soft x-ray measurement tools for advanced chip manufacturing. The company was founded by Christina Porter and Sietse van der Post, both PhD physicists and former ASML employees, who set out to address a problem that has been growing quietly for years: as chips get more complex, the tools used to inspect them during production are struggling to keep up.
Chips today are built in three dimensions, with hundreds of microscopic layers stacked on top of each other. Before adding the next layer, manufacturers need to confirm that the previous one came out right. Conventional optical tools use light to make those checks, but the wavelengths of visible light are too long to see inside the fine internal structures of the most advanced devices. When those checks fail, so does yield. Manufacturers are forced into slower, more expensive, and sometimes destructive alternatives. The semiconductor metrology and inspection market was valued at $10.3 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 7.1% through 2035, driven by the increasing complexity of advanced semiconductor nodes, according to Global Market Insights.
The seed round was oversubscribed and includes Hitachi Ventures, Transition Ventures, imec.xpand, Doosan Investment Co., and an undisclosed tier-1 semiconductor manufacturer.
Think of a modern chip as a nanoscale skyscraper built one floor at a time, where every floor must be inspected before construction continues. The problem is that the inspection tools available today use ordinary light, and ordinary light cannot resolve structures this small.
Gate-all-around transistors, one of the most important building blocks in next-generation chips, are a good example. These are extremely compact 3D structures where tiny measurement errors can determine whether a chip works or goes to waste. When manufacturers cannot verify these structures accurately, production slows, costs rise, and chip yields fall.
The chips where this problem is most acute are not consumer gadgets. They are the processors used in AI training and data center infrastructure, areas where the industry is under intense pressure to produce more, faster.
"As semiconductor architectures grow more three-dimensional, metrology increasingly limits semiconductor yield and ramp speed, with each new node generation intensifying the challenge. Invisix tackles this with a technology platform backed by a decade of ASML development, proven results with leading industry partners, and a system architecture designed for high-volume manufacturing. We're excited to support the team as they bring this capability to the market."
Wolfgang Seibold, Partner & Chief Investment Officer at Hitachi Ventures
The funding will be used to hire more staff, speed up development of the company's first product ready for customer deployment, and run demonstrations at a new cleanroom facility in Eindhoven. That facility is already active and equipped with a 300mm-wafer-capable soft x-ray testbench.
Product development and customer demonstrations are happening at the same time. The target is a system that can operate inside a working chip fab at the throughput required for high-volume production, not a research instrument.
"It's exciting to see world-class talent come out of ASML and build companies of their own. Invisix is one of Europe's most promising semiconductor companies: they unlock a major bottleneck for manufacturing advanced chips that power AI training and inference. The technology is de-risked, the market is moving fast, and we're thrilled to back them as they scale."
Clara Ricard, Partner at Transition Ventures
Founded in 2025 and headquartered in Eindhoven, Invisix builds soft x-ray scatterometry systems. Scatterometry is a measurement technique that shines light at a surface and analyses how the light bounces back to infer the shape and structure of what is underneath. Invisix uses soft x-rays instead of visible light because their shorter wavelengths can reach inside structures that optical tools cannot see.
The underlying physics comes from a phenomenon called High Harmonic Generation, or HHG. A short-pulsed laser is aimed at noble gas atoms, which briefly reach a high-energy state and then emit bursts of soft x-ray light across a range of wavelengths. That broad, multi-wavelength signal carries far more structural information than a conventional single-wavelength measurement. Invisix combines this with proprietary reconstruction algorithms and machine learning to build a detailed 3D picture of the device being measured. The process does not damage or destroy the chip.
The company licensed a substantial body of soft x-ray technology developed at ASML, where the founders and several team members spent years working on the program before spinning out. COO Roald Dogge previously served as COO of NTS, a major Dutch semiconductor contract manufacturer. The scientific foundation of the technology also draws on long-standing research with Professor Anne L'Huillier of Lund University, whose work on the physics behind HHG was recognised by the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics.
In 2023, the team published results from a demonstration carried out with Intel and imec, in which they successfully measured key structural features in gate-all-around transistor architectures.
"Semiconductor manufacturers can't build what they can't see. As chips become more 3D, the industry needs a new generation of metrology tools that can look inside these incredibly complex miniature skyscrapers without destroying them. We are entering the market with technology that has been incubated inside ASML for more than a decade — a level of technical de-risking that is unusual for a seed-stage hardware company and gives our customers a faster path to deployment."
Christina Porter, PhD, co-founder and CEO of Invisix
Hitachi Ventures is the corporate venture capital arm of Hitachi, with over $1 billion in assets under management. The firm focuses on foundational technologies spanning AI infrastructure, industrial automation, and the intersection of hardware, software, and physics. Transition Ventures is a London-based firm that invests from inception to Series A in companies working on physical-world technology, with a portfolio spanning Europe and the United States. Also participating in the round were imec.xpand, the venture arm of semiconductor research institute imec, Doosan Investment Co., and an undisclosed tier-1 semiconductor manufacturer.
