Eindhoven’s Keiron raises €20.7 million to tackle one of electronics manufacturing’s most expensive problems

Keiron Printing Technologies (Keiron), an Eindhoven-based DeepTech company specialising in Laser-Induced Forward Transfer (LiFT) precision solder paste printing, has closed a €20.7 million Series A round. 

The round was co-led by Invest-NL, DeepTechXL and Waves Capital, alongside existing and new investors, Ramphastos Investments, ATUM Ventures, Cottonwood Technology Fund and TNO Ventures. 

“Solder paste printing has been the industry’s most expensive open secret for decades – a failure driver on a market worth well over €600 billion a year that everyone lived with because no one could fix it. This round lets us do exactly what the market has been asking for: put the HF2 on more lines, faster, without giving up an ounce of the precision that sets LiFT precision printing apart. Keiron isn’t patching a problem the industry has lived with for decades. We’re removing it, for good,” said Paul Rooimans, CEO and founder of Keiron Printing Technologies. 

Founded in 2019 as a spin-off from TNO Holst Centre, Keiron aims to enable autonomous, self-optimising electronics manufacturing with minimal human intervention and maximum quality, speed, and flexibility. 

The company serves the Surface Mount Technology (SMT) industry with its Laser-Induced Forward Transfer (LiFT) industrialised inline platform, which, according to Keiron, is the world’s first fully digital, contactless solder-paste printing solution. 

The company claims to be striving to end one of electronics manufacturing’s most expensive, unsolved problems. According to Keiron, solder paste printing is the single biggest point of failure in a global electronics assembly market worth more than €600 billion a year, and until now, no one has been able to fix it at the root.

It further notes that it is responsible for over 70% of PCBA defects and has quietly capped the reliability, speed, and yield of every electronics manufacturer on the planet.

Keiron claims to be the only company that has solved it: not by tweaking the old stencil-and-jet-printing playbook, but by replacing it entirely with a single digital, non-contact process.

The company states that its HF2 LiFT Printer eliminates the problem outright, replacing the stencil printer, jet printer, and SPI inspection system with one digital, non-contact platform. 

It reports that first-pass yield jumps from an industry-typical ~60% to above 95%, production lead time is cut in half with zero stencils, production uptime doubles, and programming becomes 10 times faster. 

This enables higher throughput, lower working capital, improved cash flow, and stronger EBITDA for electronics production in a high-mix, low-to-medium-volume environment, says the company. 

“Nowhere is the payoff bigger than in next-generation AI hardware: components with up to 10,000 interconnects push conventional solder paste printing past its breaking point, leaving yields extremely low to date – exactly the gap Keiron’s fully digital LiFT process was built to close, carrying the legacy PCBA industry into Industry 4.0,” the company mentioned in the press release. 

Keiron’s LiFT precision solder paste printing technology originated at TNO Holst Centre, a strategic collaboration between TNO and imec, and is still being developed with TNO as Keiron’s primary strategic research partner.

Hessel Mittelmeijer, Investment Manager and Sustainability Officer at DeepTechXL, said, “AI, defence growth, and increasing manufacturing complexity are accelerating the need for digital transformation in EMS. Keiron solves one of the industry’s biggest production challenges with a scalable, digital approach to solder paste printing. That’s why we led the seed round and continue to back the company as it scales.”

The company plans to use this capital to drive aggressive growth by increasing production, expanding commercial and support operations across Europe, North America, and APAC, and accelerating R&D on Keiron’s next-generation LiFT precision solder paste printing platforms.

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