QuantumDiamonds to set global standard for next-generation chip inspection
06/10/2026
QuantumDiamonds GmbH (QD), one of Europe’s fastest-growing semiconductor equipment companies, has announced the closing of a €91 million (approximately £78.2 million) funding round to scale production of its quantum-based semiconductor inspection technology. The financing combines a €15 million (approximately £12.9 million) equity round led by World Fund with €76 million (approximately £65.3 million) in non-dilutive funding approved at the European Union (EU) level under the European Chips Act.
“This is a major step in bringing quantum sensing into fabs worldwide,” said Kevin Berghoff, CEO and Co-Founder of QuantumDiamonds. “The response from leading chipmakers has been clear: they see our technology as essential for solving yield challenges that today’s systems cannot address. With deployments now live in the USA and Taiwan and serial production ramping up in Munich, Europe is not just participating in the next chip era, it is helping define it.”
The non-dilutive funding is jointly provided by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy and the Free State of Bavaria. The €15 million equity round led by World Fund drew significant participation from Bayern Kapital, alongside QD’s existing investors, IQ Capital, Earlybird, First Momentum, UnternehmerTUM, Creator Fund and Onsight Ventures and angel investors.
QD is in line to become the sole start-up awarded manufacturing funding under the European Chips Act, created to strengthen Europe’s semiconductor supply chain. In doing so, the firm joins established industrial players such as GlobalFoundries and Carl Zeiss.
Co-founded in 2022 by Kevin Berghoff and Dr Fleming Bruckmaier (Chief Technology Officer) as a spin-out of the Technical University of Munich, the company will use the funding to deliver laboratory systems to leading chipmakers and advance wafer-level capabilities for high-throughput fab inspection. QD, which currently employs 70 people, plans to more than double its engineering team over the next 12 months.
Traditional semiconductor inspection tools slow development and production because they struggle to see buried defects in complex 3D chip architectures, which lowers production yields and raises costs for businesses and consumers. The stakes are high: industry analysis shows that a single percentage point improvement in yield can be worth millions of dollars a week for a high-volume device.
QD’s technology addresses this central challenge in advanced chip manufacturing by leveraging atomic-scale defects in synthetic diamonds to detect magnetic fields with extreme precision: effectively a microscope that can see electricity flowing through chips. Its first commercial system, the QDm.1, enables non-destructive 3D current imaging at the nanoscale, pinpointing the precise location and depth of chip defects.
“We had been trying to debug this chip for six weeks. You found the defect in under a minute,” said a Tier 1 USA chip designer working with the QD technology.
QD has built momentum across regions in quick succession. In March 2026, the company expanded into Asia, establishing a regional hub in Taiwan and appointing industry veteran Peter Lemmens, formerly General Manager Taiwan at IMS Nanofabrication and Imec, as Managing Director Asia. The following month, QD installed its first USA system at Eurofins EAG Laboratories in Sunnyvale, California, and completed its first Asia deployment at Integrated Service Technology (iST) in Hsinchu, Taiwan, at the heart of the world’s most advanced semiconductor cluster.
Later this year, QD expects to open the first operational section of its new €152 million (approximately £130.7 million) production facility in Munich. The site will manufacture QD’s current and successor systems, giving Europe a commercial and technological lead in a cutting-edge inspection capability.
“Compute has become strategic infrastructure,” said Daria Saharova, Managing Partner at World Fund. “Europe uses around 20% of the world’s semiconductors while producing only 10%, and that gap is exactly where our strategic power leaks away. QD can become Europe’s next ASML: a first-of-a-kind technology, built and scaled here, in a $104 billion (approximately £89.4 million) equipment market that the entire artificial intelligence (AI) economy depends on. Backing companies such as QD is how Europe stops buying its technological future from others and starts building the leverage to shape its own.”
Mason Sinclair, Partner at IQ Capital, said: “Since our initial seed investment in late 2023, the pace of technical progress at QD has been exceptional. They have executed rapidly, assembled a world-class technical team and built strong partnerships across the chip ecosystem. The technology is strongly resonating and we are proud to continue backing their journey.”
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