OPEN LETTER: Nearfield Instruments Raises 380 Million for AI Chip Metrology

Fidelity Leads an Impressive Funding Round

The funding round was led by Fidelity Management & Research Company, a new investor in the company, alongside Temasek, Walden Catalyst Ventures, Innovation Industries, M&G Investments, and Invest-NL, the Dutch public investment fund, according to the company’s official press release.

The Qatar Investment Authority, Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, also joined this funding round as a new investor, alongside long-standing investors TNO Ventures and ING, confirming the international appeal of this deal—even though it was led from Rotterdam rather than Silicon Valley.

The presence of a former Samsung executive sends a strong signal

Among the investors, the participation of Walden Catalyst Ventures—a venture capital fund co-founded by Young Sohn, former chief strategy officer at Samsung Electronics—has particularly caught the attention of the Asian trade press, according to the Seoul Economic Daily, which sees it as a strong signal of Nearfield’s technological credibility within the global semiconductor industry.

This funding round, described by the company itself as oversubscribed, illustrates that investment demand far exceeds the available supply—a classic indicator of the high level of confidence that this venture now inspires among the most discerning international institutional investors.

Seeing a Gulf sovereign wealth fund and a former Samsung executive investing side by side in a Dutch deep-tech company is the most tangible proof that the geography of technological innovation has long since ceased to be limited to Silicon Valley alone.

Metrology: The Invisible Link in the AI Revolution

This fundraising comes amid unprecedented global demand for metrology and inspection tools in the manufacturing of AI-compatible semiconductors, according to the company’s own press release, which refers to “unprecedented global demand.”

As chips designed to train and run artificial intelligence models become denser and more complex, the margin for error in their manufacturing shrinks accordingly, making Nearfield’s atomic-precision measurement tools increasingly indispensable to the world’s leading manufacturers of advanced chips.

The CEO describes an industry in the midst of transformation

Hamed Sadeghian, co-founder and CEO of Nearfield Instruments, told Reuters that the funds would be used to expand manufacturing and customer support operations amid a boom in the production of AI-dedicated chips, though he did not disclose the names of his current clients.

Sadeghian did, however, confirm that Nearfield’s tools are already being used by advanced chip manufacturers—further evidence of the Dutch company’s growing integration into the most strategic production chains of the global semiconductor industry.

The CEO’s caution regarding the identity of his clients seems to me to be indicative of a sector where industrial discretion remains the absolute norm: in the race for AI chips, no one wants to reveal prematurely who is working with whom, given the considerable competitive stakes.

From 150 million to 380 million in less than two years

This Series D funding round comes less than two years after the closing, in July 2024, of a $146 million Series C round (135 million euros at the time), led by Walden Catalyst and Temasek, with participation from M&G Investment, Innovation Industries, Invest-NL, and ING, according to DatacenterDynamics.

This rapid progression—from a Series C round to a Series D round nearly three times larger in such a short time—reflects an acceleration in the company’s growth trajectory, driven by the surge in global demand for chip manufacturing infrastructure related to artificial intelligence.

A Valuation That Has More Than Doubled

The company’s valuation has thus risen within two years to a level that now places it among the most highly valued European deep-tech companies in its category, in a sector where few European players manage to achieve such international financial recognition in the face of competition from the United States and Asia.

This upward trajectory also illustrates the capacity of the Dutch deep-tech ecosystem—already known for being home to the global giant ASML—to foster the emergence of new tech champions in adjacent market segments that are equally strategic for the future of the semiconductor industry.

This rapid rise in valuation in such a short time impresses me, but it also prompts me to exercise caution: deep-tech funding cycles can rise as quickly as they fall if global demand for AI chips were to slow in the coming years.

A direct legacy of the ASML ecosystem

Nearfield Instruments is part of a Dutch semiconductor ecosystem that is already globally recognized thanks to ASML, the Dutch manufacturer of lithography machines without which no advanced chips could be produced anywhere in the world today.

This geographic and industrial proximity to ASML, as well as to the TNO research institute from which Nearfield originated, illustrates the strength of a Dutch ecosystem capable of fostering world-class technology companies in highly specialized industrial niches with high barriers to entry.

An Encouraging Sign for European Technological Sovereignty

At a time when European leaders are increasingly emphasizing the need to strengthen the continent’s technological sovereignty in the face of competition from China and the United States, this funding round serves as a concrete, quantifiable, and verifiable example of what this ambition can achieve when backed by decades of investment in basic research.

This success, however, should not obscure the structural fragility of the European deep-tech ecosystem, which remains largely dependent on foreign capital—as aptly illustrated by the majority participation of American, Singaporean, and Qatari investors in this funding round, despite it being described as a Dutch record.

I welcome this Dutch success, but I refuse to succumb to naive optimism: as long as the bulk of the capital financing our technology leaders comes from American, Singaporean, or Qatari funds, talk of true European technological sovereignty will remain, in part, an exercise in political rhetoric.

A Market Dominated by Established Giants

Despite this record-breaking fundraising, Nearfield Instruments continues to operate in a semiconductor metrology market largely dominated by much more established industry giants, foremost among them the American company KLA Corporation, whose dominant position will not be easily challenged despite the influx of fresh capital now available to the Dutch company.

This competitive reality requires Nearfield to demonstrate—beyond its ability to raise funds—its operational capacity to deliver its equipment on a large scale and within timeframes compatible with the production requirements of the world’s largest manufacturers of advanced semiconductors.

The Risk of Excessive Dependence on a Cyclical Sector

The semiconductor industry has historically been cyclical, alternating between phases of massive investment and periods of more pronounced slowdowns—a risk factor that many industry analysts regularly highlight when assessing the long-term sustainability of companies heavily exposed to demand linked to artificial intelligence.

If current demand for artificial intelligence chips were to stabilize or slow down in the coming years, Nearfield will need to demonstrate its ability to diversify its customer base beyond just the segments most directly linked to this currently booming demand.

This caution regarding the sector’s cyclical nature is not unwarranted pessimism on my part: it is a necessary reminder that even the most promising companies of the moment must prove their resilience over several economic cycles before they can be considered true, sustainable industry leaders.

An Invisible but Indispensable Infrastructure

This operation highlights a truth that is all too often overlooked in the public debate on artificial intelligence: behind every spectacular advance in large language models lies a chain of complex hardware infrastructure, of which semiconductor metrology is one of the most critical—yet least publicized—links.

Without measurement tools as precise as those developed by Nearfield Instruments, no manufacturer of advanced chips could guarantee the reliability of its production processes at the industrial scale required to meet current global demand for artificial intelligence.

A sector poised to continue attracting capital

Several industry observers, cited by specialized publications such as Photonics Spectra, believe that demand for this type of metrology and inspection solution is only expected to intensify in the coming years, as chip architectures continue to grow in complexity and density.

This trend points to further significant fundraising rounds in this niche sector over the coming months, both in Europe and elsewhere in the world, as institutional investors recognize semiconductor metrology as a strategic segment that remains relatively underinvested relative to its actual industrial importance.

This trend toward investing heavily in the invisible infrastructure of artificial intelligence rather than solely in visible applications strikes me as a sign of the sector’s healthy maturation: investors are finally beginning to understand that the AI revolution is also—and perhaps above all—taking place on the shop floor rather than in the laboratory.

A Still-Exclusive but Growing Club

Nearfield Instruments has joined a still-small but growing group of European deep-tech companies that have achieved “unicorn” status while remaining true to their European industrial roots—a phenomenon that remains statistically much rarer on the continent than in the United States or Asia.

This group includes, in particular, Dutch and German companies active in sectors as diverse as industrial robotics, quantum technologies, and additive manufacturing—all fields in which Europe retains significant scientific strengths but still too often struggles to transform its advances into world-class industrial leaders.

A Lesson for European Public Policy

The journey of Nearfield Instruments—from its founding as a public research spin-off in 2016 to its current valuation of $1.6 billion—illustrates the crucial importance of funding public basic research as an indispensable foundation for the emergence, years later, of private industrial champions capable of competing on a global scale.

This trajectory deserves careful study by European policymakers who are seeking—with mixed success so far—to replicate elsewhere on the continent the conditions that enabled the emergence of these few Dutch success stories in the highly strategic semiconductor sector.

If European governments truly want more companies like Nearfield Instruments, they should take direct inspiration from this Dutch model: patiently funding public basic research, rather than making a series of high-profile announcements about technological sovereignty without committing the necessary budgetary resources over the long term.

Global Production Expansion Announced

According to Nearfield Instruments’ official press release, the funds raised will be used, among other things, to accelerate the company’s innovation roadmap, establish global centers of excellence for applications, significantly expand production capacity, and strengthen its international customer support organization.

The company also plans to deepen its research and development collaboration with the world’s leading semiconductor manufacturers—a strategic direction that underscores its commitment to establishing a lasting presence in the most critical supply chains of the advanced chip industry.

A timeline for implementation yet to be specified

The company has not provided a specific timeline for the concrete implementation of these various development initiatives—a common practice for this type of financial announcement, but one that nevertheless leaves several questions unanswered regarding the actual pace of execution of this international expansion strategy.

The coming months will reveal whether Nearfield can effectively transform this exceptional financial windfall into tangible market share gains in the face of international competition, which will certainly not stand idly by as this new Dutch player in the sector gains momentum.

I will be watching closely to see how Nearfield actually transforms this money into measurable business results: a record-breaking fundraising round is, after all, only worth as much as what it actually enables the company to build in the years following its announcement.

A global giant that also started out as a modest venture

It is impossible to tell the story of Nearfield Instruments without mentioning ASML, the Dutch manufacturer of lithography machines that today dominates—with no serious competition—the production of the most advanced equipment used to etch the world’s most sophisticated microchips.

ASML wasn’t born a giant: it took the company decades to build its current technological monopoly, drawing on a Dutch ecosystem of public research and patient funding very similar to the one that today supports Nearfield Instruments in its own segment of semiconductor metrology.

An industrial lineage acknowledged by the players themselves

In fact, Nearfield Instruments’ executives make no secret of the fact that they draw direct inspiration from ASML’s growth model—a connection that is by no means insignificant in a country where the success of this lithography equipment manufacturer has become a true national benchmark in terms of industrial technology policy.

This historical connection lends additional credibility to the bet made by investors who have just injected $380 million into the company: betting on Nearfield also means betting on the Netherlands’ proven ability to transform niche scientific expertise into a dominant global industrial position.

I find this comparison with ASML both inspiring and risky to make: it offers legitimate hope, but it can also become a lazy shortcut if we forget that every company must still prove, through its own industrial results, that it deserves such a historical parallel.

A strategic dependence that few governments had anticipated

The COVID-19 pandemic, followed by trade tensions between the United States and China, have starkly revealed in recent years just how much the entire global economy depends on an extremely limited number of suppliers for the most critical equipment used in the manufacture of advanced semiconductors.

In this context, a company like Nearfield Instruments—which offers a credible alternative in the specific segment of atomic force microscopy metrology—takes on strategic importance that far exceeds its current relatively modest size in terms of workforce and revenue.

Diversifying the Supply Base to Reduce Systemic Risks

Several Western governments, including those of the Netherlands and the European Union, have explicitly made the diversification of semiconductor supply chains an industrial policy priority, notably through instruments such as the European Chips Act, which aims to strengthen the continent’s technological sovereignty.

Nearfield Instruments’ financial success aligns directly with this approach to reducing systemic risks: the more credible players there are capable of supplying cutting-edge metrology equipment, the less vulnerable the global chip industry becomes to the failure or strategic decisions of a single dominant supplier.

This geopolitical dimension of industrial diversification seems to me to be underestimated in media coverage of this funding round: people focus on the figures and the valuation, but all too often forget that the resilience of global supply chains depends directly on this type of patient and methodical investment.

TNO, the public research institute that gave rise to the company

It is important to note that Nearfield Instruments was not born in a California garage, but as a direct spin-off of TNO, the Dutch state-funded applied scientific research organization, which incubated the company’s foundational technology prior to its formal establishment in 2016.

This model of technology transfer—in which basic public research gradually gives rise to a private company capable of raising hundreds of millions of dollars—illustrates a patient industrial policy that few European countries have managed to replicate with such sustained success over time.

Invest-NL, the public financial arm that remains a shareholder

The continued presence of Invest-NL, the Dutch public investment fund, among the investors in this Series D funding round demonstrates that the Dutch government did not simply launch this company and then lose interest, but continues to provide financial support for its growth at every critical stage of its development.

This continuity of public commitment—rarely highlighted in press releases focused on record amounts and spectacular valuations—deserves to be emphasized as one of the most important structural factors behind Nearfield Instruments’ current success.

I find it regrettable that the Dutch government’s role has received so little attention in international media coverage of this funding round: while prestigious private investors are celebrated, the patient public framework that made the very existence of this company possible from the outset is all too often overlooked.

A Concrete Example of What AI Funding Actually Supports

If you’ve been following AI news from afar, this funding round deserves your attention because it concretely illustrates where a significant portion of the global capital mobilized around this technological revolution is going: not only to startups developing chatbots, but also—and above all—to the hardware infrastructure that makes these innovations physically possible.

Understanding this invisible dimension of the AI economy helps us better grasp why certain countries and regions—such as the Netherlands, with its ecosystem centered around ASML and Nearfield—occupy a strategic position that is disproportionate to their size in today’s global technological geopolitics.

A reminder that innovation is not limited to Silicon Valley

Finally, this story serves as a reminder—backed by concrete and verifiable figures—that disruptive technological innovation is not geographically limited to California alone, but can also emerge from a Dutch public research institute, provided that the right conditions for funding and industrial support are in place over the long term.

It is precisely this type of success—patient and methodical—that deserves to be highlighted more, given the public debate’s often excessive fascination with only the most high-profile American success stories in the global technology sector.

I conclude this letter in the hope that it has convinced you of one simple thing: the next major European technological breakthrough may not come from a spectacular consumer application, but from an unassuming laboratory somewhere in Rotterdam, busy measuring atoms with a precision that few of us can even imagine.

Celebrating Without Naivety

This $380 million fundraising round deserves to be celebrated as a Dutch—and, more broadly, European—success in a strategic sector where the continent has long seemed doomed to a secondary role in the face of American and Asian semiconductor giants.

This celebration, however, must be accompanied by constant vigilance regarding the actual capital structure financing these successes, the company’s operational capacity to transform this money into sustainable industrial results, and the cyclical nature inherent in a sector that has already experienced sudden market reversals in the past.

A story to watch in the coming months

I will continue to closely monitor developments in this area, convinced that the story of Nearfield Instruments—still largely unknown to the general public—deserves far more attention than it has received so far in the mainstream media discourse on artificial intelligence and its many industrial ramifications.

It remains to be seen, in the coming quarters, whether this Dutch company will be able to live up to its stated ambitions and establish itself sustainably as one of the world’s leading players in this strategic yet little-known segment of advanced semiconductor metrology.

By signing this open letter, I want above all to convey a simple conviction: technological sovereignty is not built solely through speeches at international summits, but rather in laboratories like Nearfield’s—patiently, atom by atom, year after year.

Signed, Maxime Marquette, columnist